The Making of Faulty Optic's Dead Wedding: Inertia, Chaos and Adaptation

An examination of Faulty Optic's creative process during the devising and construction of their show Dead Wedding. Published by Palgrave Macmillan as Chapter 3 in 'Devising in Process' edited by Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, 201

Cadavre Exquis: motion-controlled interactive film

This interactive film, a variation on the surrealist game Cadavre Exquis, seeks the possibility of subverting the filmic discourse by exploring psychosomatic processes that may give the viewer different perceptions of cinematic time, by providing the possibility of intervening into the narrative in a disruptive way.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mechanical Miracles: Automata in Ancient Greek Religion

What role did technologies of automation play in the ancient Greek religious experience? In this dissertation, I investigate the use of self-animated machines, known as automata, in their religious contexts. As no thorough examination of the topic has been undertaken to date, the thesis brings together the ancient evidence for the use of large automata in festival processions, as well as smaller gadgets set up in temples. Having gathered together the primary sources attesting to the phenomenon, I insist on the importance of moving beyond viewing these self-animated machines as mere illustrations of ancient mechanics. Instead, I investigate the subtleties behind the interaction of the spheres of mechanical ingenuity and religious spectacle in the ancient Greek world. I look at the ancient evidence in order to understand both the symbolic and aesthetic value of the machines, and how they might have been conceptualised by spectators given a disposition to interpret animation according to a certain framework. The study investigates the place that automata occupied more broadly in the ancient imagination in order to understand the role of mechanical ingenuity when it combines with religious occasion and religious space. We will see, above all, the way in which technologies of animation were used in religious contexts to provoke a particular type of ‘thaumastic’ awe in the ancient Greek viewer. The project’s originality lies in the way in which it intersects with a number of scholarly discourses: It takes part in the reassessment of the use and sophistication of technology in the ancient world, contributes to discussions on human-divine relations and, in particular, it introduces the novel element of human artifice (technē) in shaping ancient Greek religious experience

Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration

This chapter attends to somaesthetic expressions occurring irrespective of knowledge of the movement, using Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab Spring as case studies. These celebrations and protests feature bodies creatively gravitating around urban structures and according to emotional, cultural concerns, all of this together defining city spaces for a time. Bodies also become venues for artistic refashioning, for example, through creative conversion of injuries into celebratory badges of dissent. Geared almost therapeutically towards life-improvement—albeit sometimes implicitly—these celebrations and protests also have meliorative aspects that mark the somaesthetic movement. Moreover, they have a shared, public character stressed by Shusterman, but arguably lost on many because of his interest in self-focused meditation and the popular appeal of such exercises among those interested in body practices

Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies. © 2014 Springer-Verlag London

Site-Responsive. Critical of the Interactive Environments in Exhibition Design

With reference to the conference topics, this paper analyzes the emotive, perceptive and social effects of technology in the space dimension, referring both to design practices and user experiences. The aim is to suggest new design scenarios able to contextualize the exhibition design in the contemporary scenario. For this purpose, examples of “interactive architecture”1 are analyzed in order to extrapolate exhibition practices and strategies that include the communicative and educational component in experiences where users use their bodies in space. This implies: acknowledging the emotional, communicative and adaptive possibilities of interactive environments; assuming that the design of the exhibition space is oriented to the integration of advanced technologies – tangible and intangible – so that it is necessary to understand the importance of data and their multiple nature, according to a heterogeneous users that interact with a performative environment, which can make their experience unique. This vital ability requires a level of phenomenological and design complexity that obliges designers to reflect on the meaning of our social nature and the mutable relationship with the world mediated by technolog

Annual Report 2020-2021

LETTER FROM THE DEAN As I write this letter during the beginning of the 2021–22 academic year, we have started to welcome the majority of our students to campus— many for the very first time, and some for the first time in a year and a half. It has been wonderful to be together, in-person, again. Four quarters of learning and working remotely was challenging, to be sure, but I have been consistently amazed by the resilience, innovation, and hard work of our students, faculty, and staff, even in the most difficult of circumstances. This annual report, covering the 2020–21 academic year—one that was entirely virtual—highlights many of those examples: from a second place national ranking by our Security Daemons team to hosting a blockbuster virtual screenwriting conference with top talent; from gaming grants helping us reach historically excluded youth to alumni successes across our three schools. Recently, I announced that, after 40 years at DePaul and 15 years as the Dean of CDM, I will be stepping down from the deanship at the end of the 2021–22 academic year. I began my tenure at DePaul in 1981 as an assistant professor, with the founding of the Department of Computer Science, joining seven faculty members who were leaving the mathematics department for this new venture. It has been amazing to watch our college grow during that time. We now have more than 40 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, over 22,000 college alumni, and a catalog of nationally ranked programs. And we plan to keep going. If there is anything I’ve learned at CDM, it’s that a lot can be accomplished in a year (as this report shows), and I’m committed to working hard and continuing the progress we’ve made together in 2021–22. David MillerDeanhttps://via.library.depaul.edu/cdmannual/1004/thumbnail.jp