'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

Lighting Design and Pre-Visualization Software

The Advanced Lighting Technology course I took offered me the opportunity to get hands on experience with the new and rapidly advancing technology of pre-visualization. I was able to learn more about these programs and how the connect with one another while designing the lights to a song in a virtual space created in a pre-visualization software while using a computer port of a software traditionally available on a different technological medi

Narrating the past: virtual environments and narrative

This paper explores how traditional narrative language used in film and theatre can be adapted to create interactivity and a greater sense of presence in the virtual heritage environment. It focuses on the fundamental principles of narrative required to create immersion and presence and investigates methods of embedding intangible social histories into these environments. These issues are explored in a case study of Greens Mill in the 1830’s, interweaving the story of the reform bill riots in Nottingham with the life of George Green, mathematician and proprietor of the Mill

Artistic value and spectators’ emotions in dance performances

Our experiences of art are framed by the context and the rules that apply to it. Not only the theatre where performing arts are enjoyed, but also art museums displaying paintings, sculptures, installations and other artistic objects, dictate the distance to the pieces and the type of sensory perception permitted to the visitors. How art is presented to us reflects traditional established settings that determine the conditions of our appreciation and that have become part of each art’s ontology. Moreover, what we are allowed to do in those public contexts, when confronted with art works, reflects the artistic value attached to them. But, in some cases, there seems to be a tension between the borders erected by categories of artistic value and the affective reactions by the perceivers. In this paper I will discuss contexts (original, transplanted and mediated) and perceptual conventions for dance art, and how these define spectators’ roles and impact on their emotional responses to dance performances. In particular, I will focus on negative reactions to dance art to argue that the use of moving human bodies presents specific affective challenges to audiences

Ludic Learning Lab: Serious Games for Nurses. Theatre Training Reimagined

Theatre improvisation supports the development of interpersonal skills, building verbal and physical imagination, whilst enabling compassionate interaction between people to enhance connections. Improvisation is emerging in health care as a pedagogical tool that can enhance human to human connections such as the interaction between a nurse and patient enabling experiential learning. This thesis argues that the ludic nature of improvisation exercises stimulates enhanced interaction skills (Toivanen, 2011). The ancient body-mind practices that improvisation draws on offer valuable skills to the learner, contributing to the andragogy of nurse practice and pre-registration education and training. Nurses require unique cognitive capabilities to multi-task, problem-solve and prioritise urgent needs in a fast-paced hospital environment. Human factors such as communication and situational awareness are essential to maintaining high-level patient care across a challenging environment (Eisenhardt, 2021). The World Health Organisation (WHO, 2019) and The Australian Commission for Quality and Safety in Health Care (Report The State of Patient Safety and Quality in Australian Hospitals, 2019; Fotis, 2010) found that deficiencies in human factor skills in hospital settings are affecting patient safety; fifty per cent of adverse events are preventable. Communicating for safety in training is a number one priority to reduce preventable adverse events. This thesis explores the principles and theories of theatrical improvisation through engaging with the work of Viola Spolin, Rudolph Laban, Augusto Boal, Jacob L Moreno, David Kolb and Howard Gardner. It comprises both a theoretical/critical component and a creative component which is a digital toolkit, the Improv-e-toolkit designed to be used in blended delivery, face-to-face and digital mode. The Improv-e-toolkit is a prototype that aims to unite important clinical nursing skills such as situational awareness, decision making and relationship management. I argue, drawing on the work of Hager (2004) that improvisation training develops team-based trust and effective communication to support positive nurse-patient connections which deliver favourable patient outcomes

E-COLLABORATION. THE NEW ECHONOMIC WORLD

In this paper we will present what e-collaboration means and how can this concept revolutionize the XXI-th century economy. Our analysis leads to a conclusion that the future of business will be based on technological backgrounds. Breaking time and space frontiers will be the key of success in a hard competitive business environment. In our opinion this goals will be achieved by the implementation of groupware. However, our study shows that this field still needs a lot of normalization as concept of e-collaboration still has no standard approaches and many theoreticians still confuse collaboration with the classical “three c” terms.economy

Enactive Sound Machines: Theatrical Strategies for Sonic Interaction Design

Embodied interaction with digital sound has been subject to much prior research, but a method of coupling simple and intuitive hand actions to the vast potential of digital soundmaking in a perceptually meaningful way remains elusive. At the same time, artistic practices centred on performative soundmaking with objects remain overlooked by researchers. This thesis explores the design and performance of theatre sound effects in Europe and the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to converge the embodied knowledge of soundmaking at the heart of this historical practice with present-day design and evaluation strategies from Sonic Interaction Design and Digital Musical Instrument design. An acoustic theatre wind machine is remade and explored as an interactive sounding object facilitating a continuous sonic interaction with a wind-like sound. Its main soundmaking components are digitally modelled in Max/MSP. A prototype digital wind machine is created by fitting the acoustic wind machine with a rotary encoder to activate the digital wind-like sound in performance. Both wind machines are then evaluated in an experiment with participants. The results show that the timbral qualities of the wind-like sounds are the most important factor in how they are rated for similarity, that the rotational speed of both wind machines is not clearly perceivable from their sounds, and that the enactive properties of the acoustic wind machine have not yet been fully captured in the digital prototype. The wind machine’s flywheel mechanism is also found to be influential in guiding participants in their performances. The findings confirm the acoustic wind machine’s ability to facilitate enactive learning, and a more complete picture of its soundmaking components emerges. The work presented in this thesis opens up the potential of mechanisms to couple simple hand actions to complex soundmaking, whether acoustic or digital, in an intuitive way

Sensibility, narcissism and affect: using immersive practices in design for embodied experience

‘Embodiment’ need not focus on isolated individuals or group interactions. This article articulates the potential for designs that prompt participants to bring relationships with other people to mind. These can be fleeting relationships between participants and unknown others, or remembered relationships with romantic partners, family members, or close friends who are not physically co-present or digitally represented. In either case, it is possible to generate affective responses that profoundly shape participants’ emotional and physical reactions to, and co-creation of, the designed interaction. This article presents existing practices of immersive theatre to frame our exploration of this phenomenon. It introduces three theories—mise-en-sensibilité, narcissistic spectatorship and affect—through which we illuminate both the internally felt and the externally designed experience, whether or not it is explicitly framed as theatrical performance. Through analysis of two immersive performances (one-on-one interactions that could easily be understood in terms of experience design) and two designs of our own, we argue that the affect generated by personal relationships in immersive experiences can both shape and drive participation, and we offer a three-point guideline by which one can design for the affective consequences of bringing relationships to mind

Self/scape: an exploration of belonging and wayfaring

Self/Scape is an autoethnographic sonic exploration of searching, belonging, and praying through sound as well as exploring the socio-cultural conditions and the lived experiences of a globalized Latino. Following the framework of Practice as Research (PaR), Miguel has been creating and theorizing about and through this piece during his two-year degree. This piece is the culmination of Miguel’s research at UCT in which a theatrical production is transformed into a curated space that is made to coexist with(in) a digital soundscape. That is to say that this piece has been created to be experienced through the use of headphones and QR codes. Each QR code will be specifically placed in relation to the content of the code which documents the journey of self-discovery through a multitude of spaces around the world from Los Angeles to Cape Town