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0ct0p0s


    Platform for
    Prefiguring
    Play


    DISTANT BODIES & ACCOMPLICES


    Remote Player, photoshop sketch (2019)

    This practice-based research aims to explore how forms of live performance can be used to extend and augment online gaming. Designing structures that enable meaningful interactions between player and avatar, it will entail the production of a series of game prototypes in which the player is controlling willful avatars (i.e. real persons engaging in a live-action role-playing game), embodied in the real world through a digital interface.

     Game play and navigation, photoshop sketch (2019)

    Remote Role Play, are hybrids of analog and digital performance. They let us investigate how presence, irreversibility and feedback of a real person can result in another level of responsibility sensed by the player.

    Joining the discourse around emerging forms of digital storytelling, mixed reality and immersive theater we wish to engage in a conversation on how the narrative tools common in game design (eg. Point-Of-View) and in performance (eg. presence of performer) can affect, inform and extend one another, thereby promoting a transdisciplinary approach. It will build upon previous research of enabling structures for collaborative narration and worldbuilding in film and performance, and extend it into the digital realm. Turning the screen into a portal, we hope to connect physically and mentally distant worlds; not in search for the universal, but to perform a simultaneity of perspectives.


     Avatars with headsets and Body worn Cameras (BWC), photoshop sketch of gameplay (2020)

    WORKSHOPS:


    PORTALS - Play with distance
    Lecture and Workshop on Remote Role Play at iWeek2021, LAB University of Applied Sciences, Online
    How can the surrounding environment be incorporated in worldbuilding? What are rules that enable meaningful dialogue? How to integrate movement into screen interactions? How can distant places share one physical game space?
    Carina Erdmann

    Where the unborn conspire
    Worlding workshop for more than one voice with School of Commons at Shedhalle Protozone 4 + online, 18.09.21  
    The workshop approaches worlding through voice, breath, relational dynamics, and role-play techniques. Participants play a character from the computer at home or become their body moving through the theater space. They act as accomplices that construct the metaphysics of another world after ‘The end of the World’
    Carina Erdmann & Lendl Barcelos

    Temporal Worlding
    Remote Reality Games as Spatio-Temporal Navigation and Narration, Hybrid w orkshop at DIGRA conference in Guadalajara and online ,1-5th July, 2024
    Participants are paired as one player that directs the other as avatar walking through the city via voice call. The game play is facilitated through a narrative that overlays the real world environment of the players with a speculative framing using temporal navigation systems and narrative structures from games.
    Carina Erdmann & Steph Holl-Trieu

    Distant Bodies & Different Worlds
    Worlding Workshop at RITCS School of Arts, Dept. of Animation, Brussels (upcoming in winter 2024)
    Participants develop a critical understanding of the relationship between people and their digital proxies and learn to generate and reflect on the narrative frameworks and game mechanics that enable different forms of agency in interaction through and with screens.
    Carina Erdmann, Karin Verelst, Sébastien Hendrickx, David Tann & Ash Eliza Smith

    GAME PROTOTYPES:


    LUCIID
    Hybrid game that combines methodologies from Role Play and Computer Game Design, Therapy and Performance Improvisation set in a state of connected Hypnagogia.

    Buried Accomplices
    Online LARP that lets you reflect on your present through the lens of historic imaginaries of the future as well as speculative future visions onto the past.
    Mark