The Electroacoustic and its Double: Duality and Dramaturgy in Live Performance

Live electroacoustic performance juxtaposes and superimposes two main elements: the real, present and physical, against the simulated and disembodied. In this sense, it is a liminal form which negotiates two different worlds on stage. In this dissertation I will address some central aspects of performance that have been reshaped and problematised by the use of the electroacoustic medium in a live context. I will investigate in particular three main dualities: the performer's body / electroacoustic sound; physical space / electroacoustic space; and performance / audience. I will also discuss a generalised duality common to all three: presence / absence. Rather than regarding these dualities as indicators of discontinuity, I will suggest that they can help develop a continuum of connections and relationships between performance elements. These connections can be designed as part of the composition process. By investigating these dualities, this research addresses the main elements of the live event. The central guiding principle here is that the live electroacoustic mode is a performance discipline, and therefore requires a dramaturgical approach that takes into consideration the elements of the live event: performer, audience and use of space. I will suggest that such an approach should guide the creative process, starting at the initial composition stages, through rehearsal and the actual performance

A conceptual affective design framework for the use of emotions in computer game design

The purpose of this strategy of inquiry is to understand how emotions influence gameplay and to review contemporary techniques to design for them in the aim of devising a model that brings current disparate parts of the game design process together. Emotions sit at the heart of a game player’s level of engagement. They are evoked across many of the components that facilitate gameplay including the interface, the player’s avatar, non-player characters and narrative. Understanding the role of emotion in creating truly immersive and believable environments is critical for game designers. After discussing a taxonomy of emotion, this paper will present a systematic literature review of designing for emotion in computer games. Following this, a conceptual framework for affective design is offered as a guide for the future of computer game design

The electroacoustic and its double : duality and dramaturgy in live performance

Live electroacoustic performance juxtaposes and superimposes two main elements: the real, present and physical, against the simulated and disembodied. In this sense, it is a liminal form which negotiates two different worlds on stage. In this dissertation I will address some central aspects of performance that have been reshaped and problematised by the use of the electroacoustic medium in a live context. I will investigate in particular three main dualities: the performer's body/electroacoustic sound; physical space/electroacoustic space; and performance/audience. I will also discuss a generalised duality common to all three: presence/absence. Rather than regarding these dualities as indicators of discontinuity, I will suggest that they can help develop a continuum of connections and relationships between performance elements. These connections can be designed as part of the composition process. By investigating these dualities, this research addresses the main elements of the live event. The central guiding principle here is that the live electroacoustic mode is a performance discipline, and therefore requires a dramaturgical approach that takes into consideration the elements of the live event: performer, audience and use of space. I will suggest that such an approach should guide the creative process, starting at the initial composition stages, through rehearsal and the actual performance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The instrument in space: The embodiment of music in the machine age

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The body exists in space and time. It moves through cultural spaces and temporal rhythms. In the combination of instantiated actions and environmental conditions a context is created, this through embodiment. In this thesis I will attempt to link definitions of embodiment with the process of creating and performing new sound theatre works that involve live interaction with media technology. I will also examine terms such as inscription or incorporation and their application to processes of learning and memory within a particular context of inter-disciplinary skills. Finally, in the light of this genre, I will approach the problematic of analytical procedures that change the very parameters of embodied knowledge. The term sound theatre could be defined as a shift of play between music, image and text, incorporating elements such as gesture, choreography, audio and visual technology into a compositional dialogue. However this approach demands a re-examination of the spatial and temporal aspects involved in such inter-activity and their consequent relation to the performer. Taking the starting-point of sound and movement within the body of the performer, my research involves investigations into medial extensions of embodiment that have developed through a discourse with machines. This project takes an essentially practical basis for its research in the form of collaborations with musicians and practitioners of media technology towards a creative product. The result is a series of written compositions, each of which examines a different aspect of sound theatre. The valuable exchange that takes place during such a situation of experimentation becomes equally as important as the final product, providing much of the material framework for issues such as terminology and analytical procedures that concern my investigation

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

The instrument in space : the embodiment of music in the machine age

The body exists in space and time. It moves through cultural spaces and temporal rhythms. In the combination of instantiated actions and environmental conditions a context is created, this through embodiment. In this thesis I will attempt to link definitions of embodiment with the process of creating and performing new sound theatre works that involve live interaction with media technology. I will also examine terms such as inscription or incorporation and their application to processes of learning and memory within a particular context of inter-disciplinary skills. Finally, in the light of this genre, I will approach the problematic of analytical procedures that change the very parameters of embodied knowledge. The term sound theatre could be defined as a shift of play between music, image and text, incorporating elements such as gesture, choreography, audio and visual technology into a compositional dialogue. However this approach demands a re-examination of the spatial and temporal aspects involved in such inter-activity and their consequent relation to the performer. Taking the starting-point of sound and movement within the body of the performer, my research involves investigations into medial extensions of embodiment that have developed through a discourse with machines. This project takes an essentially practical basis for its research in the form of collaborations with musicians and practitioners of media technology towards a creative product. The result is a series of written compositions, each of which examines a different aspect of sound theatre. The valuable exchange that takes place during such a situation of experimentation becomes equally as important as the final product, providing much of the material framework for issues such as terminology and analytical procedures that concern my investigation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Space In The Ambience: : Is Ambient Music Socially Relevant?

Today, nearly every space that can be filled with digital content is filled with digital content. Even contemplative personal reflective time can now be digitally mediated. This is a different world from the one where the idea of ambient music first emerged. In the 1970s and early 1980s, our ambient environment featured no augmented reality overlays, fewer opportunities for distracted attention (unless they were deliberately sought out), and a vastly reduced need for personal multitasking. Then, fewer situations required a high degree of context switching to address incoming information from sources other than those which we have immersed ourselves in out of choice, and ambient music - as an idea, was born within those environmental and cognitive conditions. Now, new definitions of embodied cognition have demonstrated that our ambient environment is crucial for understanding the world through non-mediated forms of information, yet the idea initially behind much historical ambient music was one of inhabiting a space in our perception through which the un-mediated could be addressed. By defining historical ambient music as an information overlay itself where a surrounding environment is displaced temporarily and overlaid with new information (as with an augmented reality), an alternative trajectory of development can be mapped out. Why do we now create specific environments for ambient music listening, rather than allowing ambient music itself the chance to occupy those situations? Has the embodiment brought about by increasing interaction in public ambient art, through technological processes, changed how we respond to artistic material embedded in our own day-to-day ambience? This chapter performs an experimental re-assembly of the situated components of ambient music, originally inherited from a pre-internet, pre-information society. It provides an assessment of the relevance of ambient as an idea in a contemporary media-driven world where space in the ambience is already at a premium

The Literariness of Media Art

“Language can be this incredibly forceful material—there’s something about it where if you can strip away its history, get to the materiality of it, it can rip into you like claws” (Hill in Vischer 1995, 11). This arresting image by media artist Gary Hill evokes the nearly physical force of language to hold recipients in its grip. That power seems to lie in the material of language itself, which, with a certain rawness, may captivate or touch, pounce on, or even harm its addressee. Hill’s choice of words is revealing: ‘rip into’ suggests not only a metaphorical emotional pull but also the literal physicality of linguistic attack. It is no coincidence that the statement comes from a media artist, since media artworks often use language to produce a strong sensorial stimulus. Media artworks not only manipulate language as a material in itself, but they also manipulate the viewer’s perceptual channels. The guises and effects of language as artistic material are the topic of this book, The Literariness of Media Art

Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media

This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopuss encounter with a digital camera and its chance cinematic inscription as part of a larger phenomenon of accidental animal videos. Because non-humans are the catalysts for their production, these videos offer welcome realist counterpoints to traditional wildlife imagery, and affirm cinemas ability to intercede non-anthropocentrically between humans and the world. Realism is essential to cinematic communication, and that realism is ultimately an achievement of non-human intervention. Chapter 3 investigates how an Internet hoax about a non-human ape playing with an iPad in a zoo led to the development of Apps for Apes, a real life enrichment project that pairs captive orangutans with iPads. It contextualizes and criticizes this projects discursive underpinnings but argues that the contingencies that transpire at the touchscreen interface shift our understanding of communication away from sharing minds and toward respecting immanence and accommodating difference. Finally, Chapter 4 examines a publicity stunt wherein a digital data-carrying homing pigeon races against the Internet to meet a computer. Rather than a competition, this is a continuation of a longstanding collaboration between the carrier pigeon and the infrastructure of modern communications. The carrier pigeon is not external but rather endemic to our understanding of communication as a material process that requires movement and coordination to make connections