Program (quick overview)
10:00-10:45
Reconfiguring the Landscape - part 1
Natasha Barrett (project leader)
Moderator: Trond Lossius
Commentator: Tor Halmrast
11:00-11:45
Reconfiguring the Landscape - part 2
Natasha Barrett (project leader)
Moderator: Trond Lossius
Commentator: Tor Halmrast
13:00-13:45
Queens Game - part 1
Maureen Thomas (project leader)
Moderator: Jeremy Welsh
Commentator: Lily Díaz-Kommonen
Reconfiguring the Landscape (Natasha Barrett)
The Reconfiguring the Landscape project has entered its third year of activity. The project was due to conclude autumn 2022, but has received a pandemic extension to February 2023.
The project investigates how 3D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can evoke and provoke a new awareness of outdoor environments. In this presentation I will show work completed since the previous artistic research forum in October 2020. This includes a peer reviewed article in the EMS conference, a competition prize, research and implementation of a new outdoor sound intervention in Oslo, and reiteration of the ideas and method in a new work for the musikprotokoll festival (Graz). 2021 concluded with a group workshop and public showing hosted by IRCAM (Paris).
I will then briefly list six project modules that will take place in 2022: three are public art works applying research carried out so far during the project, and three involve new research and the development.
Subliminal Throwback: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1511512/1511513
Reconfiguring the Landsape at IRCAM: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1508796/1508797
Queens Game (Maureen Thomas)
Other members of the project team who will participate in the presentation:
- Dr Rafal Hanzl (Norwegian Film School and Extended Media)
- Bendik Stang (Snowcastle Games Oslo)
Project period: 2018-2021 (part time, 22 actual months total)
Audiovisual Interactive Storytelling: a HiStoryGame research production at the Norwegian Film School, Inland Norway University, supported by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and developed in collaboration with Snowcastle Games, Oslo,with generous assistance from the Museum & Visitor Centre, Akershus Fortress & Castle. (Original concept, story-architecture and first full-draft scripts devised and written with support from the Norwegian Film Institute’s interactive development fund.)
Queens Game explores the potential of the computer as dramatic audiovisual storytelling medium. It brings together practice-based film and interactive media storytelling research with 3D interactive games-development for entertainment, to devise and test engaging, dramatic ludo-narrativity on the frontiers of film, musical, period drama and interactive game. Featuring a real medieval princess and a girl from the realm of King Arthur, innovative interactive dramaturgy offers an immersive journey into the Middle Ages, evoking history through the lens of the medieval imagination.
Interactive narrativity in a games environment deals with space/time in a different way from classic dramatic storytelling: instead of acts of varying length and action of varying intensity, it unfolds in episodic scenes in a navigable environment, which takes more or less time to traverse at differing speeds. Combining the dynamics of absorbing gameplay with a satisfying narrative is challenging: but oral-composition and dramatic storytelling-modes common in the middle-ages are intrinsically spatially-organised and non-linear, lending themselves naturally to computer-handled narrativity, which is not confined by the linear page-structure of books or the framing of the fixed screen or stage. The clear, colourful, dramatic art-style of the manuscript paintings in which the Middle Ages represented themselves is also well suited to video-game art. Queens Game’s gameworld incorporates a computer model carefully-researched for the project of the medieval castle of Akershus (whose surviving physical self is now hardly visible under centuries of destruction and reconstruction). The 3D modelling and expressive animation in the Unreal Game Engine is in keeping with medieval aesthetics - experimenting with communicating culture through both visual and narrative modes.
VIS release #7 “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing” (Anna Lindal)
Anna Lindal, Editor of VIS issue 7, will present the new issue themed “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing”, and Klara Waara, Sergio Montero Bravo, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado and Tobias Liebetseder/Thomas Gill will participate with their published expositions. The issue, which features five expositions, deals in different ways with metamorphoses. How do we relate practices of transformation in art to our own time? Is the trope of metamorphosis still relevant or has it become obsolete in a post-internet era where time, information and art are seamlessly intertwined and where transformation is increasingly present in the everyday life? Alternatively, are contemporary artistic practices particularly well-suited to deal with this ever-present dynamism?
Expositions in VIS Issue 7:
- Arturo Delgado Pereira – We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town. (in English)
- Paola Torres Núñez del Prado – The Sonified Textiles within the Text(il)ura Performance: Cross-cultural Tangible Interfaces as Phenomenological Artifacts (in English)
- Sergio Montero Bravo – Territorial Art, Design & Architecture (in English)
- Klara Waara – Ta Form (in Swedish)
- Tobias Liebetseder – Fragments in Time (in English)
