Scott Palmer

Dancing in the Streets: The sensuous manifold as a concept for designing experience

Abstract This article builds on the binary rhythms of transparency and reflectivity described by Bolter and Gromala (2003) as being central to the design of interfaces in digital artifacts. It starts from the concept of experience design and suggests that the experience of the interface might better be considered in terms of the ‘sensuous manifold’. The authors present the interactive kinetic light installation, Dancing in the Streets, as an example of how this sensuous manifold could be seen to work in practice. Many participants described this work as being ‘transparent’ and ‘magical’. The article analyses elements of the installation in relation to transparency/reflectivity to assess the reasons behind these descriptions, and to explore how the sensuous manifold experience was achieved for participants. The location of the installation is defined as a ‘non-place’ whose uncanniness contributed to the potential for ambiguity and liminality. The use of light as a medium for urban scenography was also a critical factor in the design of the interface. The images and their behaviour in relation to the participants created the final element of the artwork. The installation was successful in getting the people of York dancing in the streets. In doing so, it foregrounds the concept of the sensuous manifold as a useful concept for experience designers.

Embodied interfaces: dancing with digital sprites

Abstract This paper focuses on the research project, Projecting Performance, in which off-stage technical operators take on the role of performer through the live manipulation of digital ‘sprites’ in a theatrical environment. The sprites are projected onto gauzes in the stage space and operators control them with graphics tablets and pens to perform with on-stage dancers. Operators have frequently described experiences of dislocation or translocation during the experience of operating and this paper investigates the reasons for such reports. It presents the tripartite models of Zich and Castronova from the fields of theatre studies and human-computer interaction respectively, cross-referencing them to analyse the relationship between performer-operator and sprite. Merleau-Pontys phenomenological theories are then employed through the writings of Crowther and Fraleigh to explore the experience of the performer-operator. The paper proposes an understanding of the digital interface in Projecting Performance as embodied and experienced both visually and kinaesthetically by the performer-operator.

FEATURE Dancing in the streets

M. The Practice of Everyday Life. 135-136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark? This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it. People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the streets!

A ‘choréographie’ of light and space: Adolphe Appia and the first scenographic turn

While the significance and influence of Appias writings and his storyboard scenarios of Wagnerian operas are uncontested, their origin has been explained almost universally as instigated by a combination of his musical inspiration and the technological development of electric stage lighting. While light was clearly at the heart of this new scenography, it was not as a result of the new electrical, incandescent lamps of Edison and Swan that had begun to populate the theatres of Europe and North America from the early 1880s as most commentators would suggest, but rather due to an older, pre-existing lighting technology with which Appia was acquainted. In 1886, at the age of 24, Appia embarked on a four-year period during which he was primarily resident in Dresden. It was a formative time in his education, which despite being instrumental in the development of a new scenic art, has received surprisingly little critical attention. Appias writings and drawings for the staging of Wagnerian drama first conceived in this German city were to revolutionise thinking about stage space, scenery and, perhaps most importantly, the use of light as an expressive material in the theatre. This article therefore seeks to explain how a specific combination of circumstances converged, in a particular place and time, to provoke a paradigm shift in theatre practice – what we should consider to be the first scenographic turn of the modern theatre. It argues for a reappraisal of Appia as not simply an idealist or theatre theorist, but as a practitioner whose scenographic understanding was rooted in the craft of theatre production. It also suggests that we need to revisit perceived histories of theatre practice that have been established and subsequently re-enforced on the basis of linguistic translations that may lack a scenographic sensibility.