DISTANT BODIES & ACCOMPLICES
ABYSM, Player: Sayuri Chetti, UI Design by Marijn Degenaar
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.
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?
Where the unborn conspire
Worlding workshop for more than one voice* with School of Commons at Shedhalle Protozone 4 + online.
*After the book ‘For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression’ by Adriana Cavarero, 2005.
GAME PROTOTYPES:
ABYSM Accomplices
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.
Research: Carina Erdmann
Supervision: Steven Malliet, Rosanne van Klaveren,
Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld & FedericoVladimir Strate Pezdirc,
Rebecca Rouse, Axel Stockburger
The PhD project is conducted in the framework of the Inter-Actions department at LUCA School of Arts C-Mine in the Research Cluster “Meaningful Play” and the School of Commons at the Zurich University of the Arts. It is supported with a scholarship for PhD’s in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven and a grant by IMPACT Festival, IMAPCT Théâtre de Liège.