DocPerform 3: Artists & Presenters

DocPerform Banner by Alexander Bell 2019 Artists & Presenters confirmed for DocPerform 3, to be held on 16th May 2019, at City, University of London, are shown below in alphabetical order. The full Programme Schedule is now available, and Registration is open.
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Joseph Dunne-Howrie

Trans-Participation in the Infosphere
The real world, as we experience it today, is intimately connected with technological mediation. Drawing on theories of post-humanism, onlife, the infosphere, and audience participation, this paper addresses how the cultural, social and political beliefs of participants in immersive theatre can be trans-ed. The relationality inherent in the term trans- refers to the complex web of connections participants navigated and created in the performances Operation Black Antler by Blast Theory and Hydrocracker and One Day, Maybe by dreamthinkspeak. The dramaturgies in both pieces were experienced as a network of bodies, times, historical and national narratives. In this paper I will explore how trans- offers a strategy of performative political discourse where (sexual, gender, racial, etc.) identities become dramaturgically fluid and unfixed, and if such a mode of participation can effectuate a form of dialectic that is contingent on participating in acts of empathy rather than of conflict. A corollary to this process can be found in Luciano Floridi’s conceptualisation of contemporary technological environment, which he terms the infosphere (2014). The production and dissemination of media acts as the diffuse infrastructure of the infosphere and replicates our presence across platforms and communication networks. The compulsion to connect with realities and experiences outside of our everyday life allows us to stretch our real self and play identities as a means of establishing empathetic relations with histories, ideas and people; this is the core principle of trans-participation. I contend that audience participation in the context of the infosphere and onlife – where the digital and the real worlds become a seamless experience – complicate rhetorically crude conceptions of post-truth and fake news by allowing people to play identities drawn from media.

Biography
Joe’s research investigates the intersections between interactive technology, concepts of the digital and immersion, the performative event and audience participation. His specialisms include archives and documentation, performative writing, library and information science, digital culture, site-based practice, immersive, interactive and participatory theatre.

Joe is Lecturer in Library & Information Science at CityLIS, where he leads a course on Libraries and Publishing, and co-directs the DocPerform project with Lyn Robinson.

Joe also teaches performative writing at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, research methods in creative practice at the University of East London. He is a research associate at ZU-UK Theatre and Digital Arts company, where he is currently writing a post-immersive manifesto with the company directors. He has presented papers at many conferences and published articles and book reviews in Performance Research, Desearch, Stanislavski Studies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Proceedings from the Document Academy and Drama Research.

Twitter: @MemoryDetritus

Tom Ensom

Preserving Virtual Reality Artworks
Artists are increasingly employing virtual reality (VR) technologies in the creation of artworks which offer immersive and multi-sensory experiences. What we commonly refer to as VR can take many forms: from the relatively passive experience of video delivered in a 360 field of view, to fully interactive 3D environments utilising stereoscopic vision and ambisonic audio. These are the products of multi-faceted production processes for real-time rendering, involving a multitude of data formats and tools. Their display is contingent on a complex ecosystem of interdependent software, hardware and data, closely tied to the user’s experience in a physical space. As institutions start collecting VR artworks, conservators of time-based media are seeking to understand how they might ensure these artworks remain accessible in the long-term, despite inevitable technological change. In this presentation, we will discuss recent research at Tate which has sought to develop a high-level strategy for the preservation of virtual reality artworks, building on existing expertise in the care of complex technology-based installations and software-based artworks. We will introduce the core components of VR systems and consider the artifacts resulting from the development process. With these terms of reference in place, we will then consider how various preservation strategies might be usefully applied to ensure long-term access to such works, including emulation, migration and documentation. Applying such strategies raises difficult questions about how we might manage change through time, including consideration of what it is we actually want to preserve (e.g. technology vs experience), what might be lost, and what might remain in the form of documentation.

Biography
Tom is a Time-based Media Conservator at Tate, whose work focuses on the development and implementation of strategies for the preservation of software-based artworks. Tom has recently completed a PhD that sought to develop conservation documentation strategies for software-based artworks entering museum collections. Tom’s primary research interests relate to the preservation of complex digital things and the role of cultural memory institutions in their long-term care.

Twitter: @Tom_Ensom

Amelia Shivani Hassard

Frictional Forces
This is a research project about embodied interactions within Virtual Reality. It explores the kinetic element of VR design through creating a textured virtual space that is physically challenging to navigate.

Frictional Forces is a VR project built to test a hypothesis: physical effort is a positive contribution to the experience of presence within an interactive environment.

This hypothesis is built up from the following arguments:

– It is understood that part of user ’s experience of presence 1 is conditional upon a sense of embodiment. While in practice this is often executed through a visual representation of the body, an ecological view of human computer interaction calls for design with understanding of context, social dynamics and an understanding of the lived experience of body, rather than just focusing on attempting to reproduce audio/visual perceptual cues.

– VR researchers have described presence as multi-dimensional, notably looking at elements of design of virtual perceptual cues to that support the illusion that the user’s body is both spatially and plausibly interacting with the virtual environment.

– The spatial element of this illusion is generally generated by the one-to-one mapping between head movement and the updating of visual environment, and for room-scale VR, it is generated by the ability to navigate the virtual world while moving in actuality.

– The plausibility aspect of this illusion is a slightly more complicated idea. It generally requires some internal logic that is satisfied within this virtual world. The mechanics of the world are established early on within the experience, and supported by our expectations of the technology and the environmental affordances. This allows a plausibility to be established and maintained. For example: within a non-room scale VE, it may help to have your user sitting, or otherwise set their expectation to not move, and be disappointed by the lack of output movement within the VE.

– VR systems require a forward-mapping of interactive elements. A user’s bodily actions will be reflected in an appropriate manner onto the virtual environment.

– Mental and physical effort are linked to the phenomenology of agency and authorship and thereby integral to the experience of ‘doing something’.

– VR experiences that allow interactivity are designed with adapted heuristics for HCI.

– Agency is a well understood principle within HCI design – all interfaces require that there is a natural mapping between inputs and outputs, rapid, incremental and visible feedback to users’ actions. Effort, whether mental or physical is usually considered a negative element of an interactive system: the user should be assisted and their cognitive workload minimised.

These elements all lead us to consider the phenomenology of presence in a virtual reality project in which the user experiences physical effort through resistive forces to their physical body.

Biography
Shivani is a PhD student in Media and Arts Technology at QMUL, where she is researching effort within virtual reality as related to embodied presence. Her background is as a filmmaker, prior to which she studied physics. She is pre-production on her third VR project.

Clarice Hilton

Frictional Forces is a VR project built to test a hypothesis: physical effort is a positive contribution to the experience of presence within an interactive environment.

This hypothesis is built up from the following arguments:

– VR systems require a forward-mapping of interactive elements. A user’s bodily actions will be reflected in an appropriate manner onto the virtual environment.

– Mental and physical effort are linked to the phenomenology of agency and authorship and thereby integral to the experience of ‘doing something’.

– VR experiences that allow interactivity are designed with adapted heuristics for HCI.

These elements all lead us to consider the phenomenology of presence in a virtual reality project in which the user experiences physical effort through resistive forces to their physical body.

Biography
Clarice is a creative technologist specialising in immersive experiences. She has worked in the technical development team at Anagram on Make Noise (Venice Film Festival) and The Collider (IDFA, Tribeca). She is currently doing a funded Art and Technology Residency at SPACE exploring our sense of self in the age of surveillance capitalism. She was previously a researcher and VR developer at UCL working across the psychology and computer science department.

Twitter: @Clarice_Hilton

Nick Hunt

Traces
Traces is an ongoing practice-based research project into the process of archiving and rendering light works. The project considers seeing a performance as an embodied act, triangulating seeing, spectatorship and mis-en-scene. The role of light in this process is considered through the creation of a light installation within the presentation space, inviting participants to consider how light is used to construct a meaningful view, and how this view may be recorded.

Furthermore, Traces takes the form of a light performance that proposes situatedness as a determinant of what and how we see. How do we frame and structure vision, and how can this be recorded and processed through analogue experience as well as digital record? How can we mediate and document light?

Traces has been presented at DocPerform 2 through an illustrated talk and we would hope that at this year’s symposium we can present the full installation.

Biography
After a career as a professional lighting technician and designer, Nick started teaching at Rose Bruford College, where he is now Head of the School of Design, Management and Technical Arts. His research interests include: the performative potential of light; photography, light and performance; digital scenography and digital performance; the history of theatre lighting; and the roles and status of the various personnel involved in theatre-making.

Nick is a past co-convenor of the TaPRA Scenography working group in the UK, and is currently a convenor of the Scenography working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is also an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Hanna James

The ‘genie’ is out of the bottle. Who’s got a story to tell?
Playback Theatre is a hybridised performance that fusesstorytelling with improvisational theatre. This kind of storytelling recounts lived experiences and memories, and brings individual voices forward within a group context. A Playback Theatre event is hosted by a conductor whose role is to engage an audience so that they become open to telling their stories in this public arena. These stories can be of a momentary experience, a feeling response, a challenging conflict, or a deeply satisfying narrative, and are enacted by a team of actors and musicians. The performers seek to capture the heart of the story through spontaneous improvisation including dialogue, movement and music. This unscripted theatre becomes a living document that reflects upon the here and now experience of the group, the thematic links to the purpose of the gathering, and finally the universal connection to the wider community. We propose a Playback Theatre performance in DocPerform3 as a closing process to reflect upon and discuss what is being human in the ‘post-digital’ age. Stripping away any technological interventions, the audience become present to the raw quality of natural performance. The artists become an interface for human consciousness in a transitory community.

Biography
Hanna is a current MSc Library Science student at City, University of London. She is also a finance professional, currently working in UCL and previously in the library at the University of West London. Having involved in a number of theatre productions in both Hong Kong and London, Hanna’s research interest is the communication chain of performance in Playback Theatre.

Agnes Law

Biography
Born in Singapore and living in UK, Agnes is a registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist, Social Worker and Supervisor. Special interests including teaching conducting, group processes, body spontaneity and applications in social work settings. She is the Artistic Director of True Heart Theatre (UK); guest tutor with School of Playback Theatre UK; Chairperson of First Asian Playback Theatre Gathering (Singapore); Founder and director of Tapestry Playback Theatre (Singapore till 2005).

Deborah Lee

Documenting interactivity and post-digital performance: exploring the application of data models and standards for augmented reality performance
Performance documentation makes particular demands within the arena of standards and models of data. However, when performance documentation involves a post-digital world, a world where the notion of performance breaks down the barriers between performer and audience, traditional models will be stretched even further. This paper explores how data models and standards fit in with interactive performance and interactive artworks. It considers the bibliographic models of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and LRM (IFLA Library Reference Model) as well as the current version of the bibliographic guidelines of RDA (Resource Description and Access), and asks what conceptual issues arise when applying these to augmented reality.

There are three strands to this investigation. The first theme concerns an exploration of the position of the creator. Traditional bibliographic models and guidelines for documentation are built around the concept of an expert creator or group of creators, who can be assigned to the work which is being documented. When users are placed within the works – for instance, interactive novels, augmented reality performances – how can this be modelled within existing models and guidelines for documentation? So, this part of the research examines the idea of authority and creation within bibliographic models and cataloguing guidelines, and considers the impact of audience presence within a performance, or taken further, when the audience drives the performance or artwork. It takes as a starting point other performances, genres, and format types which question the creator-led approach, such as jazz (Schmidt, 2012) and video games (Jett et al., 2016), including those who argue (Jett et al., 2016) that new models are needed in these cases.

The second strand considers the medium and technology of augmented reality, and asks how it fits into modern cataloguing guidelines such as RDA. This brings into the fore the idea of terminology, and considers the RDA vocabularies and their appropriateness for performances featuring augmented reality, and augmented reality more generally.

The third part of the investigation uses the discussion in Lee (2018) as its starting part. In this paper, I looked at how FRBR and LRM deal with performance, and analysed a key model of performance and FRBR by Miller and Le Boeuf (2005). So, the next stage is to consider how these findings would function in an interactive world. How would the relationship between performance and recording function when the performance is interactive? What about modelling the concept of a performance when the audience member is “there” through augmented reality? Furthermore, how do the documents of the performance – such as the computer files containing this other world – fit within a FRBR/LRM/performance mashup? These and other questions are considered, using the discussion in Lee (2018) and the Miller and Le Boeuf (2005) paper as a backdrop for considering how interaction and augmented reality performance alter the integration of performance into FRBR, LRM and “FRBR-type” models.

So, this paper asks the question, is there even a place for primarily bibliographic models in a post-digital performance world?

References
Jett, J., Sacchi, S., Lee, J. H. & Clarke, R. I. (2016). A Conceptual Model for Video Games and Interactive Media. JASIST, 67(3), 505-517. doi: 10.1002/asi.23409.

Lee, D. (2018). Documenting performance and contemporary data models: positioning performance within FRBR and LRM. Proceedings from the Document Academy, 5(1), Article 2. https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol5/iss1/2

Miller, D. & Le Boeuf, P. (2005). “Such stuff as dreams are made on”: How does FRBR fit performing arts? Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 39(3- 4), 151–178. doi: 10.1300/J104v39n03_10

Schmidt, R. (2012). Composing in real time: Jazz performances as “works” in the FRBR model. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 50(5–7), 653–669. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2012.681601

Biography
Deborah is a researcher and educator in library and information science, as well as being a practicing librarian. Deborah is currently Joint Acting Head of the Book Library and Senior Cataloguer, Courtauld Institute of Art, and a Visiting Lecturer at CityLIS.

Twitter: @DebbieLeeCat

Rebecca McCutcheon

Affective Bodies in Dynamic Spaces: documenting site-specific theatre practice

Film 1 – Cary: the Mariam Cycles
This narrated film uses video’d footage of the empty Hannah Barry gallery in Peckham with stills photography from the performance, Cary: the Mariam Cycles which took place at the same gallery. The film intersplices the gallery’s empty space with photographic documents of the perform, using a personal narrative to describe the creative process of making the project in response to the space.

Film 2 – A Testimony and a Silence
This film documents preparation and performance of A Testimony and a Silence at Dilston Grove in Southwark Park. The oil provides documentation of the final project of Dr Rebecca McCutcheon’s AHRC-funded practice-based PhD, which explored site-specific practices in relation to marginalised female-authored texts. The film uses motion capture stills to document the process of the performers’ physical work in the space of Dilston Grove, showing the flow of bodies in response to one another and the space.

Til We Meet in England was a site-specific performance in the highly textured and atmospheric Safehouse in Peckham. These 2 trailers were created in advance of the performance exploring how 360 camera can document site and texture, providing a potentially resonant experience of location and performance.

Biography
Rebecca McCutcheon is a researcher and director of site-based theatre company Lost Text/Found Space, who make performances for adventurous audiences in a range of settings, from theatres to disused train stations to palaces to alleyways. Key concerns are site and performance as catalysts for connection across and between groups, and for attending to unheard stories through little performed texts.

Research: PhD by Practice at Royal Holloway, investigating critical approaches to site-based practice and performance, funded by the AHRC.

Directing: Lost Text/Found Space – McCutcheon is artistic director of Lost Text/Found Space, which develops site-based performance projects working with lost texts by women.

Til We Meet in England for Lost Text/Found Space at Safehouse, Peckham;
Mirabel by Chris Goode, Ovalhouse Theatre, London;
Bette & Joan by Foursight theatre, Assembly Rooms Edinburgh;
Vincent River by Philip Ridley Trafalgar Studios, Old Vic Productions;
Mariam: the Cary Cycles at Hannah Barry Gallery, Peckham;
As co-founder of ‘angels n the architecture’ Dido, Queen of Carthage, Kensington Palace & The House of St Barnabas, The Round Dance, the Roundhouse, Still Life at Aldwych Tube Station.

Website: RebeccaMcCutcheon.com

Jack McConchie

Biography
Jack has worked within the creation and care of technology-based artworks since 2004. In his current role as Time-based media conservator at Tate, he is jointly responsible for the acquisition, display and preservation strategy of film, video, audio and increasingly complex digital artworks.

Twitter: @datapotatoes

Veronica Needa

Biography
Veronica has been a theatre professional since 1981, when she worked for the Chung Ying Theatre Company in Hong Kong, her original home. She has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology, trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, an MA (PAR) in Drama and is an Accredited Playback Theatre Trainer. She is past president of the International Playback Theatre Network (1997-2003) and is founder/director of the School of Playback Theatre (United Kingdom).

Lyn Robinson

The Experience Parlour
In his 1989 book, The Library of the Future, Bruce A. Shuman included a chapter called ‘The Experience Parlour’, in which the library was reimagined as a place where people did not merely consult or borrow physical documents, but booked time in an experience booth. Although the technology envisaged for Shuman’s year 2009 scenario seems a little clunky, the concept of documents that offer the ultimate extrapolation to being ‘immersed in a good book’, i.e. the experience of a scripted unreal reality, is prescient. Twenty years later, such unreal worlds are entirely feasible, underpinned by technologies such as Virtual Reality, and new story writing techniques. This presentation considers the nature of such experiential documents, and the implications for collections in the 21st century.

Biography
Lyn is Head of Library & Information Science (CityLIS) at City, University of London. Lyn has a longstanding interest in documents, document theory and the processes of documentation, and she leads the DocPerform project with Joseph Dunne-Howrie.

Twitter: @lynrobinson

Sarah Rubidge

Documenting Performance: Sensuous Geographies
Sarah Rubidge in conversation with Lyn Robinson and Joseph Dunne-Howrie, talking about our project to recreate and archive Sarah’s choreographic installation ‘Sensuous Geographies’. An exploration of how immersive, participatory, performance related works could be understood, and thus documented.

Sensuous Geographies created in 2003 by Professor Sarah Rubidge in collaboration with Professor Alistair Macdonald.

Biography
Sarah is Professor Emerita in the Dance Department of the University of Chichester and a freelance artist. A practitioner-scholar, with a specialism in digital choreography and participatory immersive installations, she incorporates interventions from audiences as a means of generating the detail of the works in realtime.

Hansjörg Schmidt

Traces has been presented at DocPerform 2 through an illustrated talk and we would hope that at this year’s symposium we can present the full installation.

Biography
Hansjörg is a lighting designer, working regularly with a group of UK based artists and theatre companies. He is Academic Programme Manager at Rose Bruford College in London, where his research interests lie in the area of lighting, environment and narrative.

Recent lighting designs: On The High Road (clod ensemble), Workshop Negative (tangle), Men and Girls Dance (fevered sleep/touring), The Glass Menagerie (Nuffield), The Red Chair (clod ensemble / touring), Dusk (fevered sleep / Young Vic Theatre), Stink Foot (The Yard Theatre), Krapp’s Last Tape (Sheffield Crucible), Zero (clod ensemble / Sadlers Wells), Above Me The Wide Blue Sky (fevered sleep / Young Vic Theatre). Silver Swan (clod ensemble/Tate Modern). An Anatomy in Four Quarters (clod ensemble/Sadlers Wells Theatre). On Ageing (fevered sleep/Young Vic Theatre), Kursk (Sound & Fury/Young Vic), The Forest (fevered sleep), Under Glass and Red Ladies (Clod Ensemble). Also with David Harradine: Stilled, and Camera Obscura.

Other recent projects: Kew Kitchens, an architectural installation at Kew Palace. The Beautiful Octopus Club, for Heart ‘n Soul and the South Bank Centre. And shows for Jessica Ogden and Mika Fukkai at London Fashion Week.

Website: http://www.hansjorgschmidt.com

Mark Underwood

Exploring the extent to which sound design enhances temporal and somatic user experience in Mixed Reality environments.
A short seminar exploring the intrinsic need for intelligent sound design in Virtual and Mixed Reality environments in order that user experience may be as immersive as possible.

Using practical listening examples, we will explore the ways in which we experience – or think we experience our aural landscape. We will discuss and demonstrate some of the ways that sound design practice may enhance our experiences of virtual environments.

We will discuss the contribution of sound to our perception of space and time, beginning with a short historical exploration of audio illusions, moving on to notions of sound design for the moving image and finally, towards sound design for virtual environments.

Finally, we will explore the importance of providing coherent user presence in virtual environments, and the critical role that sound plays in creating this illusion.

Biography
Mark originally trained as a theatre sound designer, and live music engineer. He has worked internationally as such for many years. An interest in sound for moving image led him to undertake an MA in film sound post production at the National Film and Television School, where he enjoyed working on numerous documentary, animation and fiction projects. IN 2019 Mark was offered the opportunity to commence a program of Post Graduate Research at the University of Surrey, leading to a PhD.

Whilst Head of Sound at Rambert Dance Company in the 1990s Mark recorded and mixed live scores by composers including Steve Reich, Hans Peter Kuhn, Morton Subontnik and Gavin Briars. He developed a particular interest in the use of pre-recorded and edited environmental sound, co- composing the sound score for Siobhan Davies’ ‘Winnsoboro’ Cotton Mill Blues’, which went on to win an Olivier award for dance.

Mark has an ongoing fascination with the liminal area between score and soundtrack, and the perceived function of sound in relation to the moving image. Mark’s research explores notions of 3D audio fields, particularly with respect to enhancing audience experience in large auditoria, and virtual environments.

Harry Robert Wilson

Immersive media and the multi-modal document in PaR
Scholarly writing around practice as research methodologies have embraced the idea of the ‘multi-modal’ nature of PaR (Nelson 2013) and the necessity for the documentation of such projects to embrace ‘multi-viewpoints’ (Rye 2003) and ‘point towards what is absent’ (Piccini and Rye 2009, 42-43). For these authors, documenting performative research using a range of media can acknowledge the ephemerality of live performance whilst also supporting its dissemination (see Rye 2003; Nelson 2013). These practices admit that no one document can capture the experience of witnessing a performance and that it is therefore important to utilise a range of documents, across media, to communicate the findings of practical research.

In the advent of more accessible digital technologies – such as cheaper 360 cameras and VR headsets – it is possible to imagine ways that various immersive media might be adopted by artist-academics to provide alternative documentation formats that more closely resemble modes of watching in live performance.

Drawing on the idea of the ‘multi-modal document’ discussed in relation to performance-based PaR, this paper will offer a provocation for how virtual reality, 360 film and 3D scanning of physical spaces might enhance documentation of performance when combined with more traditional ways of documenting the work (such as photographic documents, reflective writing and audience research). By reflecting on projects that I have encountered in my time as Digital Thinker in Residence at the National Theatre of Scotland (such as ISO Design‘s 3D archive of Glasgow School of Art and Stageport’s Digital Visualisation of Scottish Theatre Venues) The paper will reflect on how immersive technologies might help to ‘re-activate’ aspects of a performance encounter and capture and transmit some of the “affective temperatures” of a work (Kelleher 2015) beyond that of traditional audio-visual documentation methods.

Biography
Harry is a researcher and performance maker based in Glasgow and currently Digital Thinker in Residence with the National Theatre of Scotland. Harry has a PhD in intermedia performance practice from the University of Glasgow. He has shared research at a range of conferences from Stockholm to Chicago and as a practitioner has shown work at venues and festivals across the UK including The Arches; the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; Forest Fringe, Edinburgh; DCA, Dundee; BAC, London; and internationally at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago and Kilowatt Festival, Sansepolcro.

Twitter:@theharry_wilson
Academia.edu:glasgow.academia.edu/HarryWilson

Sarah Wingate-Gray

The Itinerant Poetry Library (TIPL) is a non static, special collections public library of poetry. For free, for everyone, and for everywhere, or at least, everywhere we can get to. It’s part public library, part life-experiment and part live art performance. Operating without the confines of a building of its own, but within parameters of typical library systems, including free membership for all, circulation procedures, library regulation and the overseeing of the library’s collection by a librarian in situ, the project fundamentally explores, and encourages users to explore, our perceptions of what a library might be. We’ve now clocked up over 1,000 hours of public library service in 14 countries and in over 200+ different locations: come join before we travel on!

Twitter: @librarian

Piotr Woycicki

An AR Remediation/Documentation of Our Lady of Shadows
This paper will look at a practice-as-research collaboration between Lucy Gough, Karoline Gritzner and myself which explores the aesthetics of neo-medievalism through an intermedial dramaturgy and digital scenography. Currently the project has two forms, an intermedial theatrical version of Lucy Gough’s radio play Our Lady of Shadows, a radical adaptation of Tennyson’s famous poem, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and an augmented reality version of the radio play which also functions as its documentation. The play’s protagonist, Catherine, is a medieval nun trapped in a tower for life. Her only access to the outer world is the flickering image of a camera obscura. As she battles with her inner demons, memories past and megalomaniac dreams, she desperately attempts to paint a more habitable world, a virtual haven, a palace of imagination. The work combines dramatic text, physical performance, digital scenography, painting, animation and music in an intermedial exploration of the tenuous pact between reality and imagination.

In the first instance the paper will introduce the project, its theatrical manifestation and its purchase in a progressively digital and posthuman contemporary culture. Then it will look at the AR installation which is an attempt to transpose the dramaturgy of a radio play into the AR medium as well as documenting it at the same time. I will contend that it creates what I term as ‘intermedial dramaturgies of flux’, a fluid participatory dramaturgy that is both embedded within the experience of the material and digital dimension.

Biography
Piotr is a Lecturer in Theatre and New Media at the University of Aberystwyth. His research interests concern the intersections between political and aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Lyotard, Deleuze, and Rancière and contemporary intermedial performance practice. Other interests and published work extend into neuroaesthetic approaches to performance analysis and the historical relationship between paradigm shifts in scientific discourse and theatre practice. He has recently published a monograph Post-cinematic Theatre and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). He has also published in various academic journals including: Performance Research, Journal of Beckett Studies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Journal of Body, Space and Technology. He is an active member of the Intermediality Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and a member of the Performance and New Technologies Group at TaPRA. He has collaborated as composer and deviser with the UK based intermedial company Imitating the Dog and director Pete Brooks on a number of international projects.

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Thank you to the DocPerform Team

Fatema Alezemi
Kalliopi Anyfantaki
Alexander Bell
Sarah Crompton
Joseph Dunne-Howrie
Akina Maeda
Lyn Robinson
Sarah Rubidge
Wanting Wan
Cathi Woods

DocumentingPerformance

The Future of Documents Project. City, University of London