ENGAGING CHARACTERS
Kathryn Brew
Engaging
Characters is a set of interactive, nonlinear cyber-narratives centered around
the process of characterization. Viewers become active participants in constructing,
driving, and activating the characters. Many of the works use sensors, speech
recognition and synthesis, robotics, or the now ubiquitous computer mouse interface
to create interactivity and response. These works confront viewers with questions
of authorship, physicality, identity, and space. In traditional media, the position
of the viewer is usually physically passive or still, and the body is not really
considered. But with a responsive interface, the body becomes active and the
experience becomes embodied, something that is more intuitively and viscerally
felt. When a viewer physically navigates the story space through movement and
direct engagement, there is an accretion of information that builds knowledge
of the character.
Julia
Heyward’s Miracles in Reverse investigates ways for the viewer to enter
the cinematic plane in a merging of multi-media, performance, and music. There
are over seventy-five scenes in Miracles with multiple characters
and paths that one can follow. In Miracles, there is a correlation between the
human brain’s random accessing of fragmented and sometimes distorted memories
and the computer’s ability to mutate, duplicate, lose, and retrieve stored
information. The interactive player has to ‘play’ the program proactively
(like a game or musical instrument) to animate the characters and trigger the
narrative.
In
Sally, or The Bubble Burst, Toni Dove uses the technology of interactivity to
take stories apart, allowing the player to re-enter the narrative in associative
layers through physical experience. Dove considers her character,
Sally, to be an inhabitable narrative machine that requires the presence of a
viewer to animate it. The structure is loosely based on the model of conversation,
where the viewer engages with the character and gradually something is revealed.
A wireless head microphone allows for vocal commands to navigate video space,
for pitch and amplitude tracking to allow viewers to sing to Sally, and for speech
recognition and synthesis so that viewers can talk to this “smart”
character who will talk back. Constructions of gender, constructions of the human,
constructions of the robot and the machine collide with each other, creating
a tension between expectations of human versus machine representation.
In
RL (Real Life), Janine Cirincione and Michael Ferraro create a conflicted view
of a technologically driven world, combining a cinematic landscape with computer
code to generate the imagery in real-time. The installation presents windows
onto the characters’ lives and creates a kind of living animated theatre.
