Scene - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012

Inside the Museum of the History of Bologna the same work of art, the Sala Bologna, realized in 1575 at the Vatican Apostolic Palace and reproducing a bird’s-eye view of Bologna at the time, is offered to the public in three different ways: as a facsimile fresco set in the entrance hall and as two different digital outputs – a set for the 3D cartoon Apa the Etruscan and 2700 Years of Bologna History, currently shown in the immersive room especially designed by Cineca for the museum, and for an immersive and interactive navigation through a head-tracking 3D visor. This article focuses upon the experience of modelling a philologically accurate three-dimensional scenario (the Sala Bologna) for a short edutainment movie and other subsequent outputs. Apa the Etruscan, a joint production by Cineca and Genus Bononiae, is the first 3D stereoscopic Blender-made movie with high historical standards applied to an entire city with four different geo-referenced scenarios and seven historical periods: Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth century, eighteenth century and present day. The methodology developed for this inter-disciplinary realization used only open-source tools, except for the City Engine adopted in the procedural modelling. The aim of the movie is to take advantage of computer-based visualization methods to deliver information (culture) minimizing cognitive overload. The choice of open-source software made the production pipeline a case study, highlighting interesting features such as model reusability that, for the Sala Bologna as well as for other digital assets developed for the movie, has already fostered the implementation of new applications. The modelling of the Sala Bologna is proposed as a significant example of the twofold challenge dealt within the production pipeline: including philological constraints inside a traditional 3D movie pipeline production and test in a cross-media framework of models tagged with metadata for both communication and research activities.

Before the massed ranks of data projectors, LED screens, pixel mapping and video servers found their way into the theatre there was already the need for the spectacular moving image. In ancient times these effects were provided by shadow puppets and in the fifteenth century the magic lantern was developed; by the nineteenth century the sophistication of the latter was such that it could be used in theatrical performances. Thus the theatrical effects projector was born.

The most elaborate use of effects projectors was for The Ring Cycle (Bentham 1957) and for the 1957 production of The Flying Dutchman at the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre. This article explores how the effects projector was used in the original The Flying Dutchman, and charts how these effects can be recreated.

The production of digital animation by means of motion capture from live, real-time performance of actors, athletes or any human being has become more and more popular. On the one hand there are film productions and the digital game industry, which drive technology improvements and is consumed by hundreds of millions of people. On the other hand, there is the user mass, made mostly of potential users, which require more compact and cheaper solutions for their productions.

The process of animating characters by means of this technique introduces taxonomy discussions that, after all, are useful for differentiating the two groups. The digital motion capture appeared in the late 1980s. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, only body movements were captured while facial expressions were manually animated. This is due to the subtlety of facial movements and the consequent need for better accuracy in mapping the dozens of muscle groups and their links. When this facial technique was made possible, it was then named performance capture. Independently of the name given to the technique, the new possibilities of creation, production and improved performance are wide.

This article approaches these aspects from the point of view of the evolution of audio-visual production since the appearance of animation, while the process of motion capture is presented with its impact on animation and performance. The expectations about the use of the technique are discussed with the equipment available. The open source code software for motion capture, OpenMoCap, is presented here as an alternative for the current production scenario.

This article describes several artistic projects using the medium of augmented reality and gives a technical outline of how it works and its developing nature.

Some of the works were completely original, created specifically with the available functionality of augmented reality in mind. Others were adaptations of previous artworks, creating new challenges and opportunities in the change of medium.

Digital content permeates through the modern world, but the use of augmented–reality technologies allows meaningful connections to be made between digital content and real-world locations. Simulated artefacts can be embedded within real-world space, creating a live montage. Similar examples, of a less technological nature, can be found throughout modern history - variously described as tricks to fool observers or tools to enhance artistry, from apparitions in stage productions to mainstays of early cinema. A fundamental theme explored in this article is the artistic status of augmented reality. Is it a transitory fad, or an emerging platform? Does it matter which?

The artworks described vary from being placed at specific locations in public areas, being detached from place and available everywhere, to incorporation in traditional and non-traditional gallery spaces. Spectres of jazz migrants reinhabited venues that were meaningful in their lives, and an invisible artist offered a cynical tour of London's contemporary galleries. In response to the recent financial crisis, members of the public were invited to show wrath or mercy to a host of characters. A selection of the renowned painter Joseph Wright's works were augmented with images of contemporaneous ceramics in order to interrogate their divergent themes. The most recent work lifts characters from prints, and allowed them to inhabit the surrounding environment of Dr Freud's London house.

One of the great cultural mysteries of the twentieth century is how a radical new form of government would come to be represented in cultural terms by an art form so associated with its conservative predecessor. From Imperial Russia to the Soviet Union, ballet managed to survive a transition that was both creative and political. In this essay the reinvention of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow from Tsarist to Bolshevik is discovered through the archive materials of the Bolshoi itself. What were the dynamics that encouraged experimentation that of itself was then defined as failure precisely because of its experimental nature? What was the formula that enabled the Bolshoi to represent the Soviet Union despite its representation of an aristocratic past that the Revolution had swept away? In a society where everything is politicized, how does ballet contribute to the polity? From the threat of closure in the new regime's first days, through radical attempts to depict the proletariat in ballet action, to the descent into the creative stasis of socialist realism, we trace the path of ballet in the early Soviet period and its struggle to reform itself and represent the new society around it.

Immémorial is a work in progress which was begun in 1996, written, conceived and created by Pascale Weber and which deals with memory and identity. Its six versions question the interactions between technology, science and creation. 'Rew' is the title of the sixth version. As an abbreviation of 'Rewind', it raises the spectre of travelling back in the past, of accessing our childhood secrets, of revisiting, maybe rewriting our identity. Immémorial #6: 'Rew' was shown in Marseille (Friche de la Belle de Mai) during the 2012 Music Festival, following a two-year residency at the Experimental Music Group of Marseille [GMEM], Euphonia and the Music and Informatics Laboratory of Marseille [MIM].

The background and the lastest version of Immémorial allow us to investigate the relationship between technology, science and humanities. Science and the computer offer an emotional, aesthetical energy, a capacity to nourish poetry and imagination; the artist may intuitively propose free hypotheses, confronting his artistic project with scientific questioning, instead of giving meaning to his work. Doing so, he collaborates in the development of knowledge.

Immémorial proposes a taxonomy of models of recollections which form our identity and deals with the dynamic functioning of our memory. Conversely, the structure of the computer language used for distributing the video image and sound spatialization guide the construction of the narrative and the return of the memorial experience in the device. Owing to the technical process of audio and visual spatialization, Immémorial projects the viewer into the heart of an environment, which is divided into 24 memorial moods based on poignant experiences, in order to awaken long-term memory.

Immersive experiences pull us out of a reality too complex to grasp. This is the world narrowed in the heart of an enclosed space, a metaphor for a major societal issue: can we finally see the world as a plurality? Can we think outside of one’s body, from other bodies, from a common body?

Exhibition designers are now encountering unprecedented opportunities to merge the virtual and the real in the creation of scenes. I argue that there is a clear need to examine how the 'technospectacle' is transforming the visual and material regimes of scene design in a museum context. Bringing together the technique of Pepper's Ghost with new projection and filming technology, the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum introduces a 3D life-sized ghost of John McEnroe into a reconstruction of the 1980s Dressing Room. In this article I investigate the intersection of technology and tangible reconstruction in 'McEnroe's Ghost'. In my analysis I question not only how different arrangements of time and space constitute the scene as encountered by visitors but how these arrangements serve to create a real sense of presence in the experience of viewing the virtual body. I conclude that such technologically augmented scenes suggest rich possibilities to extend scene design visually, conceptually and dramatically, via new intersections of projection and performance.

This article discusses the digital dance archive Siobhan Davies RePlay to explore how the dancer's making and performance process translates to an online environment, to ask what is lost and what is gained? It will consider how the digital environment captures and transmits the material form of the 'object' and how RePlay seeks to convey something of the mutable nature of dance rather than a static, unchanging digital resource. The article will focus particularly on one aspect of RePlay, which more that any other part of the archive reveals the process of design and its role in conveying the artistic vision of the choreographer (Siobhan Davies) and the whole creative team involved in the archive development. These 'kitchens' are designed to provide users with a different experience of two dance works: Bird Song (2004) and In Plain Clothes (2006). Named 'kitchens' as a reference to a process involved in the construction of a dance work that is analogous to 'cooking', the kitchens were designed to enable the user to 'peel back' the many layers within the creative process of making and performing a dance. These two very different digital objects are designed to offer a visual way of comprehending the structure of the dance; the relationship between dance, sound, costume design and scenography; and to offer access to the dancer's own observations and reflections on their making process. Score-like in form, they also can be reactivated or reconstructed by the user, in physical or virtual space. But ultimately each exists as an aesthetic object in its own right, whilst offering a novel approach to distributing dance and the knowledge that is embodied within the dance.

ARTWORK AS SOCIAL MODEL: A MANUAL OF QUESTIONS AND PROPOSITIONS, STEPHEN WILLATS, (2012) Sheffield: RGAP, 336 pp., ISBN 978–0–9569024–2–9 (hbk), £18

AN INTRODUCTION TO THEATRE DESIGN, STEPHEN DI BENEDETTO, (2012) Oxford: Routledge, 222 pp., ISBN 978–0–415–54754–3 (pbk), £26.39