So we're now one week out from opening, and I dropped into the laboratory / performance space to have a look at the bump-in. Jack, Mick and designer Gillian Schwab were working away, and everything is coming together in a sort of terrifying order. Looking around at the extraordinary array of equipment, I thought it'd be a good idea to have a chat about how all this stuff works in practice - what are all the different parts of the Word Play machine and how do they fit together?1. Performers are filmedFirst of all, the audience are in one space (the CSIRO Discovery lecture theatre) and the performers are next door to NASA in the Yarralumla Forestry Labs, performing live on camera. The show uses about eight cameras - action-cams mounted on performers, security cameras that operate over a network, more traditional handicams. As well as that there's an array of prerecorded video and information slides.2. Video is mixed and streamed to the internetAll of these video sources are brought into a controller computer in the Yarralumla labs and director Marisa Martin (with the assistance of an operator) decides which camera is sent through to the live feed and when. There are a selection of visual overlays (maps, diagrams and so forth) which are added to the vision at certain points. Throughout the show, Marisa is live video-mixing (literally calling the shots) based on what's been rehearsed, with some room for improvisation.
3. Video footage is received and audio overlaidIn the biobox of the Discovery lecture theatre where the audience, Jack and Mick receiving the feed from the Yarralumla space over the internet. (This is a nice touch as it means that the show can technically be linked in to from anywhere in the world.) At this point, Mick is mixing the sound effects and his original score into the feed. Jack is in charge of synching up the instructions for the audience, which appear on a second projector screen in the theatre, as well as appearing on the audience's phone app. These intructions inform the audience how and when to interact with the performance.4. Audience interact via phonesThe audience send SMSes using their phones OR they use the purpose-built app (which you can download upon arrival at the show) to enter different kinds of input: text questions, votes and sometimes a joystick controller.5. Audience input transmitted to DirectorMarisa receives the audience input on a separate controller computer which collates the votes automatically. She can choose from the different submitted questions and select which to pass on to the actors and when.6. Director communicates with performersMarisa calls through the instructions to the actors, who are each fitted with a radio receiver and earpiece.7. Performers respondThe actors have rehearsed a wide variety of scenarios responding to different audience decisions. Sometimes, though, the audience will give them something totally unexpected and they'll be improvising something new.
For anyone who skipped to the end of all that, the short summary is: There's a lot going on in this show. Now come along and check it out.
Showing of New Work by Boho Interactive
We are very excited to invite you to a work in progress showing by Boho Interactive, on Saturday 27th October at 12:00pm, at the CSIRO Discovery Centre Theatre in Acton.
Following several months of intensive research and script development, including visiting the Australian Animal Health Laboratories in Geelong, we are presenting a development showing of our project based on concepts from epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic development.Conceptually Transmissible Aphasia: Current understandings of pathogenesis and modern methods of control is a performance in the style of a scientific lecture with videoconferencing, that looks at the emergence of a novel disease agent. At this showing we will present a small suite of ideas that we are hoping to get your input on. This showing is the culmination of research and development work that has been undertaken with the support of an ACT Arts Fund Project grant for 2012, CSIRO and Centenary of Canberra.Following the showing there will be a Q&A session, where we would very much appreciate your feedback to assist in the ongoing development of the work. Refreshments will be provided and we will be happy to have a chat with you in person at the end of the Q&A.
In coming months, we will be heading back into script development to prepare for the presentation of the work in its full iteration as part of the Centenary of Canberra program in May 2013, once again generously supported by the ACT Government and CSIRO. You can see our program listing here. RSVPs are appreciated, to info@bohointeractive.com or through the Facebook event. We hope you are able to attend and help us shape the future of this work.
About the project
About the projectAs a result of widespread use of antibiotics below effective levels, every type of harmful bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to treatment. Antibiotics that were once reserved as drugs of last resort are now being routinely used, and bacteria are now showing resistance to these medicines. Meanwhile, dormant animal reservoirs of novel diseases such as Hendra, SARS and Ebola are increasingly brought into contact with people through evolving networks of human behaviour - agriculture, travel and urbanisation.
We use systems of antibiotic resistance and pathogen emergence as a jumping off point to apply to other resistances – our inherent ability to resist external social and cultural influences. We consider the potential ramifications of epidemic failure of critical thinking and an unstoppable spread of harmful ideas and broken logic. For instance, were a disease to emerge that was transmitted person-to-person via text messaging, email, telephone or video, what steps of biocontainment could be taken to identify the pathogen, halt its spread and develop a cure?The format of the showing draws on conventions of scientific lecture. This repurposing of an existing presentation style for narrative theatre offers the potential for a hyper-real experience wherein a seemingly mundane and credible presentation is contrasted with a surreal and highly speculative scenario.The showing employs elements of theatre, film and video gaming. The performance will be viewed by audiences in the CSIRO Discovery Centre lecture theatre, with one character in the theatre and one in a second venue, elsewhere within the CSIRO Black Mountain facility. For part of the showing, this second performer is visible on a large screen in the theatre via high bandwidth videoconference. The audience interact in real time with the other stage using mediated communications channels. The audience as individuals and as a group solves a series of puzzles within the narrative to resolve an immediate crisis.
With the advent of accessible, high quality live video transfer, new methods of performance interaction have become possible. Given the pace of the National Broadband Network rollout, these techniques are likely to be ubiquitous within the next three years. The use of lecture theatre spaces opens up a vast new resource of readily available, high capacity, low cost venues which are otherwise underutilised for creative works.Videoconference is essentially scale-free, offering the potential to tour nationally or internationally with minimal cost, with the performance set, cast and crew remaining in place in Canberra and performers travelling with nominal technical equipment to venues with appropriate broadband capacity. Future implications of this or similar work include the presentation of the work to multiple theatres simultaneously, vastly increasing our potential reach, and it would be a trivial step to simulcast performances to desktop computers anywhere in the world.The development of this showing is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding. The upcoming major performance season in 2013 is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding.This is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government.
Model Performance
We are very excited to announce the second major Boho project for 2012-13. Alongside our lecture theatre performance exploring concepts of Epidemiology and Network Theory, we will also be developing a new live game performance based on concepts of Climate and Social Modelling.Over the last few years, Boho's research into Game Theory, Network Theory and Complex Systems science has led us to a variety of strange and fascinating fields of research. Sometimes these branches of study are dead ends for us - they are highly abstract schools of thought with little application to our work, or they are extremely narrow sub-sub-disciplines which require extensive technical knowledge to comprehend, or they simply do not interest and excite us as artists and theatre-makers. One branch of contemporary science in particular, though, we have encountered time and time again since we first began research for A Prisoner's Dilemma in 2006: the field of scientific modelling.
Image from Applespiel's Sexy Urban Design Team.
What is a model?A model is a mental or formal representation of a system which is used to anticipate its future behaviour. When we store information from the past and use it to predict the behaviour of the future, we are modelling.Modelling is a universal activity. All living creatures store information from the past and from it extract regularities. These regularities are a model of the environment which that creature uses to anticipate the future.'Whether it is a tree responding to shortening day length by dropping its leaves and preparing its metabolism for winter – in advance of winter – or a naked Pleistocene ape storing food in advance of winter for the same reasons, both are using models.'As Joshua Epstein points out, 'Anyone who ventures a projection, or imagines how a social dynamic - an epidemic, war, or migration - would unfold is running some model... when you close your eyes and imagine an epidemic spreading, or any other social dynamic, you are running some model or other. It is just an implicit model that you haven't written down.'Because we all use models to help imagine the future, the question is not 'Should we use models?' but 'How do different models compare with each other?' The difference, therefore, is between the internal implicit models which we create instinctively, and the explicit models that scientists use.University College London Research ResidencyWhile researching each of our three major shows, we found ourselves reading about and drawing on various kinds of scientific models. In Food for the Great Hungers we even featured several models: a primitive agent-based model made from oil and water to demonstrate how cities can devolve into isolated communities over time, and a live representation of Per Bak's famous sandpile model of self-organised criticality. Following True Logic of the Future, we decided to pursue the idea of modelling in performance further.The 'sandpile' model of self-organised criticality featured in Food for the Great Hungers.Thanks to support through the N.E.D. Foundation, David undertook a research residency at the Environment Institute of University College London. Over September - November 2011, David worked with Dr Yvonne Rydin and other EOI research scientists to explore the theory and practice of systems modelling. The aim of this research was to identify and highlight ways in which theatre artists might utilise techniques from systems modelling to construct interactive performances based on models, as well as ways in which interactive theatre might feed into and inform the creation of scientific modelsThe result of David's research was a report entitled Performance Pieces on Climate Models. As well as providing a brief introduction to the science of modelling and several key kinds of model, the report sketches out some possible guidelines for utilising these models in a performance context. If you are interested, the report is available for download as a PDF from the UCL Environment Institute website.Modelling PerformanceOver 2012-13, Boho will use this research to develop a new performance based on modelling, in particular on the science of participatory co-modelling. Participatory co-models are frequently constructed at the ecosystem scale, to inform management of forests, river systems, fisheries and national parks. This performance will focus on a smaller-scale, though no less complex, system: an urban community at the scale of a city block.
The material for this representation of the city as a complex system will draw on the UCL Environment Institute's Building Health Into Cities report. This multi-disciplinary report offers a detailed conception of the urban community as an highly-connected network of diverse components which interact to produce a community which is safe, pleasant, noisy, polluted, tightly-knit, fractured or dangerous for its inhabitants.The performance will offer participants the opportunity to manage this system and experience first-hand how the complex interplay of elements throughout complex systems such as urban communities results in unpredictable behaviour at the system leve, and what strategies and tactics might be most effective at dealing with this uncertainty.Artists and TimelineWhile Jack and Michael continue work on Boho's Epidemiology-based lecture performance, David will take the lead on the Modelling show, working with Boho founding member and the editor of CSIRO's Maths-By-Email, David Shaw. Other collaborators will include members of Sydney collective Applespiel (Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy and Rachel Roberts) and members of UK company Coney.The next stage of development for the project will take place from September - November 2012. Thanks to a bursary offered by the UCL Environment Institute and an Australia Council Inter-Arts grant, David Finnigan, David Shaw and the three Applespiel participants will travel to London with artists from UK company Coney to devise and workshop the new performance. Over three months a performance text will be written and workshopped and different styles of interactivity will be explored and tested, leading to a first-draft performance at the end of November. Boho aims to present the first full production of this work before the end of 2013.
Image from Applespiel's Sexy Urban Design Team.