Yesterday, I went with Andrew Gagne and Dan Matysiak to
Leavitt & Peirce to buy a pipe.
Mission Accomplished!
Piping it up in the yard
The rest of the pictures can be found here: Piping it up in the yard
So this week I teamed up with Jenn Casper and Rita Chen to build something using paper computing (teardrop) from the High Low Tech Group at the media lab.
It was pretty fun, but a little harder than we thought it would be. It also took quite a bit longer than we envisioned.
Here's a video of our completed piece:
MAS.714 Paper Computing from danny on Vimeo.
Here's some pictures of it:
Glue! Bwaah!
Construction
Creating graphite switch
Working hard
Creating "wire" by painting tissue paper with copper paint
Creating a light stand.
Working hard
Aerial View
Completed View 1
Completed View 2
Sleep No More (Vinicius Salles)
In a previous post, I mentioned that there was a play Sleep No More that I was very interested in seeing. I have since been able to attend, and my quick review is that it is amazing, and I'd highly recommend that everyone should try to see it. I definitely plan on partaking again, and maybe even a third time. I hope to do a more detailed writeup in the future, with many more details and spoilers, but first I'll need to see it again.
Here's a quick writeup:
Sleep No More by punchdrunk re-imagines both Macbeth and what it means to experience a play. The play runs from 7pm to 10pm, and concludes with a night club for the audience to lounge and compare stories. Sleep No More, is different from most plays in three very important ways. First, instead of taking place on a stage the punchdrunk have taken over an entire building recreating it into Macbeth's Castle. Which leads to the second major difference, the audience is allowed to wander throughout the installation, exploring various rooms while the action plays out. You can follow characters around, stay in one location, or mix and match; this leads each individuals experience being strikingly different. The third major difference is that the play actually repeats itself three times, though the final iteration, I believe, has a few small changes. The Actors and Actresses do an amazing job in what has to be an extremely challenging environment.
A significant portion of the experience is exploration and confusion one must confront as audience member. To truly experience this play you must make decisions, and decide if you want to chase a character as they run down a hall or whom to follow. I won't ruin any of the surprises, because discovering them and being surprised by them is the purpose of the play. With that in mind, I will make a few recommendations that can maximize one's enjoyment of the play.
To best enjoy this Sleep No More, a thorough knowledge of Macbeth is essential. If one doesn't wish to read the play, they can review an outline/summarization at SparkNotes. It is key to know the plot and characters as that background will greatly enhance the story, and help situate the activity of the characters as you follow them around. Once the story is understood, I'd recommend watching Polanski's Macbeth as it is a great rendition and it will help to reinforce your prior knowledge.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Once the necessary preparation has been completed, you are ready to see the play. If you're open to seeing it multiple times, then I recommend that you explore on your own and ignore the following advice -- the sense of exploration and discovery is worth it. Whereas if this will be your only viewing, I have a few suggestions to help guide your behavior so that you'll be sure to see some of the important scenes. Remember that you'll invariably miss something, the play only repeats three times, and there is a lot more going on than you can see it that short amount of time. The best piece of advice I can give is to start as soon as possible by following a major character: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, King Duncan, or one of the Withces. Try your best to follow them for the full hour. During the second hour explore, and follow various characters around. In the third hour, once again follow a main character around -- make sure they're a different one than you did the first hour. You can, of course, switch who you're followig, but to see the most interesting parts I'd recommend only switching between the main characters. There are other character scattered about whom you can interract with, but there are some amazing scenes are on the main storyline, and you do not want to miss them. I'd also recommed buying a glass of punch in the opening room as it's very tasty, but - be warned - they will want you to drink it while in there, before the play starts.
There are few aspects of the play that I think warrant special recognition. Throughout the play, the audience are instructed to wear white masks. This serves a few purposes, first it allows one to clearly identify who the actors are, and second it greatly enhances the experience of the play. Instead of looking around and seeing fellow audience members standing around, one sees erry looking people wearing masks. This would be greatly enhanced if they also had the audience wear cloaks so that they all look the same. I also like how the actors interact with the audience. These interactions make for a memorable experience. I also think one interesting idea that they don't seem to play with, would be to have plants in the audience, that perform key interactions in the play that is having actors wearing masks like the audience every now and then.
To conclude, I really enjoyed this play and I hope that their are more plays that are created in this style. I think that this form of play would work in the heist genre, e.g. The Great Train Robbery, where multiple actors are all acting in parrallell and come together for a few key scense.
I've been working on a tutorial on Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees for a class I'm taking: 16.413 Principles of Autonomy and Decision Making. The tutorial is not finished, but here is an alpha version of the demo program.
All the core classes are implemented in vanilla java (1.6), the graphics and interface are done using processing and contrplP5.
There's an excellent video included in the article.
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=54836&PageMem=1
"Schuyler Towne is like McGuyver with a Mohawk"
R0x0R
I ran across a recent article on boston.com: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/10/04/sleep_no_more_allows_audience_members_to_pick_their_own_show/?page=full which describes a play that I'm really looking forward to seeing. Unfortunately the article is quite long winded, I've extracted the 3 most important paragraphs that describe the play below. If you want to buy tickets, here's the link: http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/sleep-no-more
Description:
The folks from Punchdrunk boil it down to “Macbeth’’ meets Hitchcock. With all that meeting going on, it’s hard to put a tidy label on these proceedings, but it’s safe to say that “Sleep No More’’ will be a new kind of experience for most theatergoers.
...
This is a show you move through. The creators of “Sleep No More’’ - Punchdrunk artistic director Felix Barrett, co-director/choreographer Maxine Doyle, and executive director Colin Marsh - have transformed the Old Lincoln School in Brookline into a sprawling, labyrinthine set that audience members roam. You choose where to go and when. Perhaps you’ll follow a shadowy form that rushes past you on the stairs to the basement, or the sound of a party on the floor above. You might decide to trail one performer for an hour, or set off to find the three witches you glimpsed earlier. Take one whiff of the spoiled food in the Macduffs’ dining room, and you may run the other way. Go ahead and open the cupboards. Rifle through drawers. Find yourself completely alone in a room with an actor whispering in your ear.
...
For all the freedom enjoyed by the audience, “Sleep No More’’ unfolds within a phenomenally complex structural framework and is 100 percent choreographed, down to where each performer is at a given moment in time, who he or she will meet and where, and how long a particular situation (Punchdrunk’s word for scene) will last. The plot unfolds in around an hour, but the evening lasts for three, meaning situations are repeated and audience members have a chance to encounter all the action.
Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.
There is an excellent writeup in the description section of the video: http://vimeo.com/6581009
Even though I knew the ending due to the video's title I still found this video to be extremely suspenseful and intense.
So as part of MAS.714 we were tasked with building a project using the Lego WeDo and Scratch. Overall the class projects were pretty great. There were alot of interesting uses of the sensors to create new controls (input devices) that were usted tell interactive stories, integrating the physical and the digital. One group built a little lego segway which was pretty cool.
Our project -- Team Awesome, Marie No & Danny Gagne, used Lego's to physically represent the game's state. I use the term game loosely as you cannot lose. In this piece of interactive fiction King Duck must defend his crown against you, the Fatman Protagonist (No relation to Hiro Protagonist). It starts off innocently enough as king duck is chilling on a rock contemplating his awesomeness and declaring his title to all who will listen. When all of a sudden, Fatman Protagonist challenges King Duck's rule and they're off to the scales to see who can rule the kingdom. Luckily, Fatman has a stash of bananas that he can weigh down King Duck, and by clicking on the bananas the user can feed the Duck. Once Fatman wins the scale-off, he becomes the true and rightful ruler of the land.
King Duck vs. Fatman Protagonist from danny on Vimeo.
The scratch project can be found here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/madhaxor/687936
Script
Characters: King Duck (KD), Fatman Protaganist (FP)
KD: I am the KING!!!
FP: No, I am the king.
FP: I'm the greatest character in the game.
KD: No way!!!
KD: You're too fat to rule this kingdom!
FP: TO THE SCALES!Scene Change -- TO THE MOON!
Interactive:
FP: <throws banana> hits KD
KD: No!!! You want to make me fat now?FP: <throws banana> hits KD
KD: TOO DELICIOUS!!!FP: <throws banana> hits KD
KD: YOU BASTARD!FP: <throws banana> hits KD
KD: You haven't seen the last of me, fat man!FP: The Day is MINE!!
Team Awesome!
The following is 1/4 of an episode on the PBS Show Art21 that focuses on Mathew Barney and the Cremaster Cycle, more specifically it was filmed during the creation of Cremaster 3.
Violence Sublimated into Form
Also, here is a cheat sheet for the cremaster cycle; I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but it is a great resource.