Vimeo / Tangible Media Group – via Iframely

“Physical Telepresence” is a project by the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. The project is an interface which tracks hands and 3d objects on one end of a video chat and recreates the shape using a grid of variable height physical columns. The goal is to allow two people in remote locations to interact physically, either by manipulating an object that uniquely exists on the other end, manipulating an object that is synced with a like-object on the other end, or by manipulating the shape display itself.

“Beyond: Two Souls” was a 2013 video game starring actress Ellen Page. What is unusual about Page’s role in the game is that she didn’t just contribute voice acting or motion capture for a fictional character design, but rather for a 3d model of herself. This allowed for a notably controversial situation when some players discovered that by hacking the game they could acquire a nude 3d model of the actress.

Vimeo / Moment Factory – via Iframely

“Foresta Lumina” was a commission for Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook, turning a 2 km trail through the woods into an illuminated immersive adventure, featuring characters inspired by the area’s myths and legends. The piece included perforated metal panels resembling ancient manuscripts, lighting units designed to look like fairies, video mapping on natural elements and more.

YouTube / Carrie McGath – via Iframely

A woman, in the form of a projected face attached to an empty outfit, yells accusatory remarks at viewers from underneath a mattress. The absurdity of the physical scene mixed with the angry tone of the woman create an unsettling mixture of humor and discomfort.

Vimeo / Moment Factory – via Iframely

For How To Destroy Angels’ 2013 tour, Roy Bennet, Rob Sheridan, and Moment Factory created a multi-layered curtain of surgical tubing to be used as a projection surface. Projections could take on different levels of depth as the projections hit multiple layers of the transparent surface, segments of which could independently rotate.

Emoticam is an application that runs in the background of a user’s computer at all times, monitoring what they type. Anytime it detects an emoticon, or some other expression of real-world emoting, it takes a photo of the user’s face and uploads it to the project website. Visitors can view all images, or choose to filter to one specific term.

Emoticam

For 31 days, Wafaa Bilal lived inside of a gallery space with an internet-connected paintball gun. At any time during the exhibition, visitors to the piece’s website could choose to move and fire the gun. They also had the option to converse with Wafaa or other visitors through a chat room. The project was designed to raise awareness of the nature of modern remote warfare and of the everyday realities of the Iraqi people. Over the course of a month, approximately 60,000 shots were fired.

Domestic Tension « Wafaa Bilal

“Year Zero” was a concept album by Nine Inch Nails about a dystopian version of America 15 years in the future (from the time of the album’s release). It’s a vision of eroded civil liberties, advanced climate change, abuse of military power, and more.

The album itself presented a mostly vague, poetic look into the fictional world; the primary way the story was told was through an alternate reality game that took place in the months leading up to, and for a little while after the album’s release. Clues ranging from a code on a USB drive found in a venue bathroom to a mural painted under a bridge in London led fans, who banded together to find and decipher them, to fragments of various websites existing within the story world. Information from these sites would then lead to other diegetic websites, phone numbers, and for some in the Los Angeles area, the time and location of a physical meeting.

42 Entertainment

“Remote Theatrical Immersion” was an experimental collaboration between MIT Media Lab and Punchdrunk to explore ways to make the experience of an audience member at a show like “Sleep No More” more uniquely affected by their actions. Although audience members attending a performance of “Sleep No More” are free to move through the space however they wish, there is relatively little direct interaction between audience and performers. However, in this experiment, two audience members would be set up to collaborate with each other throughout the performance without being able to physically interact – one exploring the space with a mask augmented to track their location, the other navigating a web-based computer game reinterpretation of the show. As each audience member explored, they would be able to encounter and communicate with either other via “portals”, such as a typewriter that would deliver keystrokes between them, or audio passed directly to the live player via bone conduction headset.

The experiment was a limited engagement for a limited public, but I’ve heard that Media Lab and Punchdrunk are exploring not incorporating these ideas into the standard “Sleep No More” performances, but rather developing a whole new piece around it.

Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending Sleep No More | Opera of the Future | MIT Media Lab