| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Play channels, media hybrids and the future of experience' |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Janet Abrams |
My name is Janet Abrams; I'm with the Netherlands Design Institute. I'm the XY chromosome on the program team for Doors 5, and I'm the editor of If/Then. And just in case you're not thoroughly bored with hearing the role call of people at the conference who are in the book of the conference, I will repeat the participants include Pauline Bax who has written about the project that Caroline Nevejan talked about this morning, Demi Dubbel. We have Gong Szeto, as he said, appearing both in the Knowledge Maps piece, and in the round table discussion on toys-versus-tools, called Long Lake III. There are pictures by Helen Levitt, although we had to cut short the screening today of her film In the Street. You'll also find contributions by Uri Tzaig and Danny Goldberg who will be speaking on the panel later on. In addition Femke Wolting, who is also joining us this afternoon, has written a piece that you'll find in this issue. And Alan Kay, who'll speak tomorrow, has an essay. This was a magazine that we'll officially launch tomorrow. It's sold out at the bookshop I've just been told. This afternoon's panel, which is called 'Play channels, media hybrids and the future of experience' brings together a large number of people for the discussion session which I hope will be very interactive and you'll get a fair share of the mic to ask them questions. This subject of media hybrids came about partly because some of the things I heard myself at the Rotterdam Film Festival's Exploding Cinema this year, which is curated by Femke Wolting, where a number of the most interesting projects were not in straight cinema, which is what most of the festival's concerned with, are looking at a blend of television and the web for example. And obviously there's a great deal of activity in the convergence of media. I also remember at a conference called TED - Technology, Entertainment and Design - a few years ago, Bob Greenberg of RGA and a gentleman who's name I've forgotten from Silicon Studio, which was or is still part of Silicon Graphics' research lab, showed a very interesting, simple slide of the relationship between a narrative and the kinds of experiences that could be leveraged through. So a single story might be experienced as a movie, a computer game, a theme park ride, an immersive experience and a toy or some range of merchandise. And those things are considered simultaneously. The narrative is often conceived in terms of how many places it can be marketed in those different ways. So I see this afternoon's conversation - looking at the ways in which storytelling is being transformed by the media in which it is being distributed and the kinds of innovation that the content produces as they try things out particularly with combinations of the Internet and television. And in what way we are stuck with thinking about the media in terms of old media, the genres. We already know that the games industry is something that can be taxonomised like the list that Eric Zimmerman showed us as a reported version of Roger Kaiwa's view of play as a huge subject. The games industry has first person shooters and third person narrators. Are we stuck with those categories instead of playing more and coming up with new concepts that are not recognisable under the terms that we already recognise, say, from television, with it's fixed commercial breaks and then the period of a soap opera before you get a new commercial break? And then the story lines can easily be picked up after say one minute of viewing? I have a few key words that I think might be useful to introduce the discussion this afternoon. I'm not going to elaborate on them. Some of them are: re-arrangement, transformation, improvisation, risk, winning, focus, global images, and game space. And the speakers that we have come from three or four areas. From theatre, we have Dragan Klaic who is the director of the Theatre Institute Netherlands, in Amsterdam; and Tony Graham, who's the director of the Unicorn children's theatre in London. We have Uri Tzaig who is an artist based in Tel Aviv, Israel who works on games but makes real sports events, team sports and changes the rules. Femke, who I've mentioned, Femke Wolting who'll be curating the next Exploding Cinema in 1999. We have Andrew Chitty from Illuminations television in place of John Wyver, who's unable to attend, but Andrew is manager and director of Illuminations and very capable of explaining to us some of the projects that they've worked on. And in case I forget, we're going to bring back to the panel David Vogler and Jan Willem Huisman, whom you heard from yesterday. And in addition we have professor Johannes Schade who is professor of medical education at the University of Geneva, in charge of multimedia projects here at the University of Utrecht, and has spent considerable time in the U.S. as a consultant to Time Warner, when they were trying out a run of 24-hour interactive television cable in Florida. And he'll tell us what interactivity does to the brain. So with that I'd like to ask Tony Graham to come up and speak about what the future is of the theatre in an age of digital media. What kind of space is most encouraging to a sense of play. And from there to the next speakers, professor Schade and Andrew Chitty and Femke Wolting. These will be very short seven minutes. We hope we can get the technology right. And then I will introduce questions and we will have at least half an hour for audience questions after that. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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