immersive

were forced into situations somewhere between Brazil and The Matrix, in which workspaces become the world. Also this evinced Paul Virilio’s notion of technological acceleration while confining to one spot (ZOOM!) undifferentiates the technologically enabled person without disabilities and the technologically au and the technologically augmented paraplegic (The Third interval).These existential effects led to my creation of a visualyl narratological immersive experience entitled Confinement Spaces, which consisted of 3D scans and renders of the UAE quotidian landscape, first of places immediately around me. But as I was able to expand my tr avels, more spaces were scanned in, creating a form of “narrative molecule” based on experience in the 1990’s with designer Roy Stringer’s Navihedron interface regime.In Confinement Spaces, six months of expanding explorations into iconic spaces of the United Arab Emirates as an allegory of confinement in space and the fracturing of reality as depicted by the glitches in the 3D scans.All of these elements (technological collapse of space and time, the freezing of existence into a timeless space, and all of these spaces collapsed in to a form of momentary narrative are consistent with my studies of spatial narratology and form as proposed by Joseph Frank. In this paper, I wish to discuss the spatiality of pandemic time, the similarities of Covid time to Joyce and Proust, and the modes in which Confinement spaces develop these ideas.

Theatre is a sometimes forgotten casualty of the current pandemic. Social distancing precludes the assembly necessary for participatory theatre. Theatre and theatrical improvisation rely on participants--performers and audiences alike--gathering in the same space, exploiting their physical proximity to tell stories. Because of the limited modalities of communication, virtual gatherings using video-conferencing platforms are, at best, an ersatz solution for audiences longing for connection in an ever more disconnected world. While some performance groups have embraced tele-conferencing and streaming for workshops, practice and performance, many theatre makers and performers are preferring to temporarily pause while waiting for the conditions of performance to resume [1]. We took the opposite view, believing that live theatre cannot wait for the pandemic to wane. 

We therefore built a computer tool for online performance. Our system, called the Virtual Director, enables actors to recreate a feeling of presence with stage partners while performing and storytelling remotely [2]. 

Our research combines cinematic and video communication technologies with the theatrical practice of improvisational and scripted theatre, and aims at recreating presence, virtually.Virtual Director relies on commodity software (TouchDesigner, web browsers), widely adopted video conferencing tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams) and streaming platforms (YouTube, Twitch)--digital platforms for streaming and video conferencing that we subverted for participatory online performances.

We deployed Virtual Director during community-based performances at the Online Paris Fringe festival. We noticed that the audience was curious about new interaction formats and performance modalities. We believe that our streamed performances redefined the nature of live performance, as we identified four levels of participation: performer, privileged audience member, general audience member, and onlooker who watches the recording of the show. First, our tool enabled visual collocation and presence among performers. Second, Virtual Director enabled visual collocation and audio interaction between selected audience members and the performers, or recreated visual presence if we placed them in a virtual “amphitheatre”. Third, audiences could interact indirectly via chat. Finally, onlookers followed the show via streaming. As a complement to previous analyses of the performers’ experience of presence in a tele-immersive virtual space [2], this paper examines the perception of the performance by audiences and their participation in collective storytelling; we situate our work in literature on improvisation and interactive performance. 

As we performed remotely with multilingual actors from different countries, we exploited live translation and speech recognition technology to enable actors to improvise in multiple languages while being understood by cast members and audiences. Building up on an existing multilingual improv stage show [3], we combined tele-immersion with translation to create a multilingual performance that transcends typical physical limitations of the stage. Our paper concludes with our ongoing work: once we assemble again in a post-pandemic world, we will keep the tele-immersion and translation tools to create mixed-presence connected international shows. 

[1] Berger, "The Forgotten Art of Assembly”, April 2020, retrieved January 2021, https://medium.com/@nicholasberger/the-forgotten-art-of-assembly-a94e16…] Branch et al, “Tele-Immersive Improv”, SIG CHI 2021.[3] Mirowski et al, “Rosetta Code: Improv in Any Language”, Computational Creativity 2020.

The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text. Cohesion of both work and text is hindered by the potentially out-dated, though still functioning, software code of earlier versions of the MUD. Further complications arise during the integration of a new literary text with the already established text of the MUD: style, grammar, language, and thematics, for example, must be uniform. A creative writer, whose intent is to produce a new literary text for a MUD, may be confronted by an already-established literature, into which his or her literary text must be incorporated. The limitations of the code base itself may likewise limit the creative scope for expression. A contributor is limited to only those interactive elements that are supported by the underlying coding architecture. Old versions of code must remain compatible with newer versions, and the opportunities for coherent revision of the entirety of creative output are limited by available developer expertise and the scope of the exercise. A MUD is structurally and creatively dynamic, yet all elements must cohere. We discuss the collaborative development of creative works within the context of software communities, and how systems such as auteur theory have difficulty in providing a theoretical framework for multi-author software projects that have creative outputs, even in those hierarchical projects where they would seem most appropriate. We outline how players in these environments encounter a rich and varied literary experience that is an amalgamation of multiple authors and styles of writing. We discuss relevant models for analysing and understanding this type of e-literature, and provide guidelines for how they can be altered to allow for a more effective application.