Hello my name is Jakob Tholander and i'm to present the paper design in action
unpacking the artist's role in performance-led research and this was a collaboration between
Stockholm University and University of Tokyo and with contributors from Nagoya University
The aim of this work was to understand how telepresence
technology were made to work in an interactive theater performance.
We used the Chameleon Mask which uses a surrogate that acts on stage displaying
the face and voice of an actor and the actor acts remotely behind the scenes
We conduct conducted a two-day workshop in which we worked with design of an interactive
performance based on a puzzle platform computer game together with a professional theater group.
The participants were artists such as actors, a producer, scriptwriter,
director and a number of HCI designers and Technologists we video recorded the two days
using multiple cameras and did open coding and iterative analysis of talk and interaction
In the analysis of the workshop we identified four main challenges of the design team.
The first was how to make sense of the mask within the context of the game narrative.
The second was to understand what happens when someone
"enters the mask" and the consequence that it has for narration and dialogue.
Third, the team had challenges in understanding interaction with and through the mask:
who are you interacting with - the surrogate or the actor?
Fourth, we saw challenges in understanding what acting techniques to use with the mask
We present two examples of this.
The first cons concerned how one of the artists used his artistic
skills to understand the technology through the form of clown acting.
In this case, the artists explored how techniques from clown acting could be
used to identify opportunities for acting and dialogue using the Chameleon Mask.
So this provided an example of how the combination of artistic skills
and technology explorations were used to discover opportunities for the design of the performance.
Example two regarded use of acting skills to design "what works" with the mask.
In this case, the actor explored how to look through the digital mask,
how to move when wearing "someone else's face", and how to gesture on behalf of someone
else - thereby - designing the embodied elements of interaction such as gaze movement and gesture.
So what "work" was done to make the mask work?
The artists skills and expertise created a design-oriented understanding of the technology
in the context of the performance.
Intermixing of conceptual and technological aspects made the design an issue of making
sense of the artist's actions as design actions.
Through this, artists became leaders of design explorations, which, in turn,
contributed to a rethinking of the role of HCI in organizing design workshops - seeing artists
as leaders in performance-led research rather than primarily participants.
So in summary, the contribution of this work is an illustration of how artists
professional skills and expertise are essential for developing the critical
elements of narration of an interactive performance, and also work as design
skills for interviewing technology into performance led research processes.
Thank you