DARK
F AI N T LI G H T
A dark room.
Shaped like a cube.The ground is about two hundred meters square.
The ceiling isn't visible.
No clear entry.
No exit.
No windows.
Cut in a faint light, we can make out the silhouette of the Character from the Book.
Some details stand out in him, a fresh femininity (once a man - but today a hybrid mix of a woman, part animal, and machine - when we speak of her, we call her "she." When we think of her, we think of a Don Quixote).
We think at first that she is naked.
But with another glance, we notice that she is wearing an armor of some kind. Delicate cybernetic skin.
She is alone.
- opening from CYBORGAME by Gildas Milin -
For the last year or so I've been working on software whose main intent is to be able to stitch the data from multiple Kinect cameras together so that I can track people over a large area. My other requirements were that this be compiled, native software (for portability, speed and stability) and be Mac based. I am using this software as the basis for my PhD work on interactive scenography and architecture.
I've been working in the context of a theatre school, which has a periodic visiting artist program. (Our first (7/23: correction: second. First was Pablo Ventura) visiting artist, Mark Coniglio, is, as I write this, in the US working on a Kinect based piece called SWARM. Having seen the early work and as an admirer of his work Loop Diver, it's going to be great).
Our latest artist in residence is the French director and playwright Gildas Milin, who is working on a piece called CYBORGAME or 33 BATTLES or THE FICTIONAL CHARACTER (a Hybrid Female Mutant Don Quixote).
The play follows the story of the "fictional character" played by Julie, who wakes up in an isolation cell confused and disoriented, imprisoned by "the military" and a second character (The Colonel) who is in turns a guide, tormentor, alter-ego and captor. The Colonel is played by Vassar, lead singer of the French pop/rockabilly band Sons of Nusku, (all of the music in the show is from their album which is available on Spotify if you want a listen).
Gildas' style is intense and process oriented: he has a particular system for the cast and crew to be involved in every step of the production, from install to teardown to performance to group meals and foursquare games. A typical rehearsal day runs from 11 to 11. Musicians become actors, actors become theatre techs, software becomes performer and along the way elements compose and re-compose to form the scenography.
Shortly after I met Gildas he asked me to participate in the rehearsals by "just showing up and working, whatever you normally do."
At the time what I was "normally doing" was long hours of coding image and pointcloud processing routines, so I began attending the rehearsals and pointing my networked Kinects at the cast. I recorded more than 10 gigabytes of raw pointcloud data from various angles and worked on better compression for the networked data (I'm still having compression issues, incidentally - I'm using lz4 which is ok but could be better if you have any ideas).
Simultaneously, I began work with my colleague Selena Savic on a project to create "disembodied text" (essentially a large scale teleprompter) in order to layer the actual text of the play into the performance space.
Selena did a tremendous amount of work on materials selection: identifying and testing the right combination of materials and their position on stage to give the desired effect without too much excess light or distortion. Selena also wrote a text-mining script to pull relevant strings out of the play script in realtime, while I worked in parallel on some custom software to allow us to play with the display of text.
Throughout this process Gildas would periodically look over my shoulder and mention an effect or a visual he particularly liked. We took a break, I worked on tightening the software and then we regrouped. Over the last two weeks we've been engaged in an intense full-scale rehearsal. What we have now are multiple projections on a scrim cube surrounding a rotating stage. During the performance I live-mix the feed from several Kinects, the recorded material I've collected and various color, light and text effects. There are four projectors and six screens.
The result of this is that my tracking and text display system has, somewhat accidentally, vectored off into a performance/VJ setup for generating live and recorded motion graphics for CYBORGAME. In short, my tracking system has become the atmosphere generator for the show, sketching the scenography live, in light, across the skin of the actors and the surfaces of the theatre.
What is remarkable to me is that, as initially conceived, this tool was never meant to be seen by an audience. Most of the initial "aesthetic" decisions were purely functional or accidental glitches. For example, rotating a cube with the openGL clear screen turned off makes for a lovely retro-spirograph effect. This is now built into the software.
Over the last couple of weeks I've been adding a lot of additional performance features (including Space Navigator and MIDI controller support) mostly to make my own life easier during mixing.
Finally, I'm looking into using my system alongside "real" performance software (like QLab) to make things even easier to manage, and I haven't forgotten my main target, which is still fast scalable tracking software.
I've been up to my eyeballs in technical issues, but there are a large number of interesting artistic/aesthetic questions around this work (some of which I hope to address during a month-long workshop residency in Zurich in November at ZhDK on Atmosphere and the Aesthetics of Tracking, and some I hope to address in the context of the Feral Research project) but for now it's an awful lot of fun just to be part of a functional project and to let my work breathe a bit.
The show is in pre-production now. We just finished an intense 2 week rehearsal. In September there will be another intense 5 days of culminating in a small public performance (do let me know if you're in Lausanne and interested).
And then?... We shall see.
