- Audience Relationships and Participation
The project methods will investigate how the body can sense diverse data about our environment, but also as a personal, felt intermingling between our inner bodily sensations and the Earth's 'body' as one entity. Physiological technology will map the interactions such as breath, heartrate/pulse, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)or nervousness, and movement and will send out haptic responses to various stimuli from vibration, sound, heat or cold, tightness / squeeze (or not) on top of a vast array of visual input from the ER. We will develop a range of of methods to measure participatory engagement and combine research approaches, such as:
1) Tactile & Sensory engagement - The project will develop narrative environments to stimulate participant’s other senses beyond sight and sound, but especially proprioceptive, tactile/haptic sensing, to trigger the
emotional and empathic senses and motiving social responsibility.
One design setup will involve turning audience groups into supportive team mates, who
guide and help each other through various environments, scenarios and interaction.
2) Visceral and Emotional engagement
Through the transformative power ofh narrative and performance, within each evolving situation the experience emphasises
creative participation, demonstrating how performance can motivate and inspire individuals, groups and communities into
collaborative creative action. The methods developed will provide a series of group and/or individuals with challenges that demand team action for survival and to save others within each scenario, these then are intended to be followed by further actions that
require participants to make more lasting choices toward concrete change in the real world and their own lives.
Working with Chroma Space's Kate Genevieve Vega, Ravensbourne’s Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) directed by Carl Smith, and Maskomi's Lee Robinson, methods will be developed for audiences to experience extreme events around the planet – emotionally,
viscerally, and physically – in simulated environments and scenarios. These scenarios will include environmental disasters, and extreme
weather events, but also beautiful places and space that presently exist in the world, to help audiences understand and engage with the wonder and instill love of the planet. These scenarios will require participants to be inventive and work
together to develop solutions that mirror real-world solutions to real-world problems with a positive impact.
The vision is to throw participants into extreme viscerally felt situations with others, to challenge them to experience simulated, but near-to-“real life” environments with life-threatening climate change events and consequences: weather/planetary/human catastrophes. These simulations are intended to rattle the body and the sense of mortality, mobilising participants into action, but also demonstrating how to prevent or mitigate these events with their own direct and personal action and commitment (as much as is possible at this late stage) through community action and individual motivation.
3) Participatory Performance & Narrative Dimension
Focus will be on non-linear narrative constructs and interactive storytelling across media streams. The immersive technology allows the project to integrate participatory performance techniques with 360 video and 3D VR with physical, aural and sensory/haptic interface embedded in bespoke costume design, within mixed reality environments, enabling different modes of
interaction within these contexts. The methods developed will involve creating flexible narratives frameworks to include highly personal, emotional and visceral first-person perspectives in each scenario, mixing scenes that open up the realities of losing everything to extreme climate events (fire, flood, Tsunami, famine, war, etc.), as well
as probable outcomes of poverty, being a refugee, being unemployed, having a mental illness or other
social concerns that require empathy and a fully experiential development of being in this crisis together.
The environments and narrative situations participants experience might include, for example: a wildly out-of-control forest fire, encroaching on a house or the house itself catching fire while people are still inside, only allowing them a narrow escape, but having them lose everything important to them (possibly even a loved pet or family member). Another scenario might be: participants being in a ferocious hurricane like Katrina, Sandy or Irma, with extreme winds and flooding that they desperately try to escape, or typhoon or earthquake, etc.