In the Sashay installation a participant uses a set of emotionally evocative gestures to interact with a character--the Sleeper--by constructing an animated dream. As the dream evolves on a large screen, the sleeper passes among different states of insomnia, slumber, reverie and nightmare.
In building Sashay I have drawn together several technologies developed recently at MIT's Media Lab. The programming language, Isis, written by Stefan Agamanolis, is designed for handling structured video events at high speed. Electromagnetic field sensors, designed by Josh Smith and Joe Paradiso, capture the affective properties of gestures that are interpreted by the system.
This research explores new territory in the development of both interactive narrative and cinema in three principal ways. First, much of the emphasis on interactive storytelling has been placed on generating dynamic story architectures, e.g., branching plots, map-based story worlds, browsable databases of content. The complexity of these kinds of story engines often compromises depth of character development, depriving the user of a strong sense of immersion or identification.
Hence my focus in Sashay is on developing the Sleeper, a character with whom the participant interacts in an intimate way. She does this, not by direct manipulation, as a puppet-master would, but rather by adopting a role and altering the Sleeper's environment.
Development of character within a system has precedents in hyper-literature, artificial intelligence, and particularly in the spontaneously evolving fiction generated by role-players in MUDs and MOOs. Successful engagement of the participant with the character can only work if the character's behavior-set and environment incorporate the limitations of the system, while maintaining a context that is both believable and compelling to the participant.
Secondly, in Sashay, as in traditional cinema, we are voyeurs, taking in the grand spectacle and engaging emotionally by identifying with the larger-than-life characters. What distinguishes Sashay, however, is an additional mode of identification. Placing the participant very close to the screen, and requiring that she use gesture to invoke and respond to cinematic events, generates a physical involvement with the character as well as a peculiar form of emotional involvement--feelings of responsibility, impishness, power.
Lastly, in addition to engaging the participant as voyeur, and by forcing proximity, Sashay's constructivist environment requires that she also become actor. Cast into the role of Dream Composer the participant enjoys the associative process of constructing an animated, surrealist dream. Using gesture unfettered by the typical desktop constraints of small screen and keyboard/mouse/joystick/gun, she draws dream objects from the Sleeper's idiosyncratic vocabulary and animates them layer by layer, each with some specific emotional weight and intention. By engaging in this visual form of "recombinant poetics" (Seaman '97), the user's understanding merges with the author's to yield a narrative experience whose borders lie beyond the ken of either individual.
- Freedom Baird
Abstract for a talk given at the Consciousness
Reframed conference at CAIIA,
July 1997.