Love Letters – Wearing Stories Told: A performance-technology provocation for interactive storytelling

This article focuses upon artistic modalities for the dissemination of personal and intimate memories to examine the relationship between technology, performance and audience. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from social science and performance studies, sound art and computer science, the discussion is contextualised by combining three different perspectives. In doing so, the article concentrates on the authors’ collaborative and ongoing performance project Love Letters. The piece invited the participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion; share other audiences’ letters and interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting names, memories, and streams of consciousness to the costume and onto the performer’s body. Love Letters was recently augmented with creative technologies and redeveloped as an interactive sound installation that’s both content and curation is user-generative. Through contextualising the performance project, this article investigates the different types of interfaces used in the performance (considering both their cultural and biological significance): body, skin and dress, which have been used to communicate written narrative. Viewing the project from a ubiquitous computing standpoint, we focus on the role of technology in such a setting. However, the primary importance is not the technology in itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. Through our case study we propose how pervasive technology can support reminiscing and facilitate a sustainability in performative settings such as storytelling practices, while not drawing attention away from the performative and storytelling aspects of the piece

Yūgen

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

Triptych for Solo Shakuhachi

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

A Buddhist Cosmology in Food

The Buddhist cosmology of the Pali texts comprises 31 realms reaching from beings in hell at the bottom of the scale to the gods of the formless realms with humans somewhere in the middle. In practice, however, the relationship between humans and non-humans in Southeast Asia finds its expression more often than not by way of food offerings or feasts, which are prepared in the still largely female domain of the kitchens. Food is offered to beings in all five (or sometimes six) forms of existence accepted by all Buddhist schools: full meals for the Buddha(s) at temples in the morning and on special occasions; a pūjā of fresh fruits and coconuts for a deity at the local shrine; a plate of food for a deceased relative after the funeral; food scraps collected from monks’ plates and taken out for the hungry ghosts (pretas); alms food for monks; funeral feasts for friends, relatives and neighbours; food given to the “seven mothers” (kiriammas) to avert misfortune and special food stalls on Buddhist festival days. The film explores the relationship in a series of mini documentaries grounded in ethnography. Filmed by Rita Langer; edited by Rita Langer and Azita Ghassemi. Original music by Kostas Andrikopoulos and Stathis Kampylis. This film is in HD