I was one of the lucky people who attended one of the many workshops Ms. Allison Dobbins presented for the department. The one I chose was called, "The Sky's the Limit" which invokes a certain kind of kumbaya, you can do anything you put your mind to, sort of mentality. What I experienced was nothing like that at all...
She began by introducing her concept through a video demonstration. It was a prototype video that displayed what she was striving for within a specific project. This project turned out to be a live dance performance in which the dancers would appear live as well as within handheld devices that the audience members were holding. The audience could then, through the technical prowess of Dobbins' programming, toss and catch the dancers as well as bring them out onstage. Dobbins has a strange sort of whimsy about her that makes her a perfect catalyst for outlandish ideas. Who would think to have the audience participate within a dance performance? She has a deep belief in getting the audience involved and letting them have a say in how the performance goes. Contrivance is something she turns away from, searching more for that spark of magic that comes from live entertainment. At one point she mentioned she wanted each performance to allow the audience to talk about it as though it was their performance too; say "you had to be there" when talking about it to friends. She views audience members as an asset to the general experience rather than a means to an end.
The great part of this workshop for me was the amount of time she took to demonstrate how she could build some of these visuals that reacted live. Rattling off a few programs to use, she deftly pulled up one called Isadora on her computer and began inserting all sorts of variables. It was amazing to see that just using a standard issue webcam built into her Mac, she began affecting the image coming through to the projector. So many different ways to affect the image; noise, light, speed, time, all of these things could be sensed. A lot of the media projections she comes up with come from fiddling with different kinds of sensors and tweaking them in the computer. Within this field there is a lot of programming going on as well, so I felt pretty lost at some points. When I asked her about it, she said that she was lost as well in the beginning and that as long as I paid attention to the program I run that it becomes second nature pretty quickly.
Being a gaffer at BYU Broadcasting I've learned a lot about the electric side of filming and I think it could translate very well into this strange new world of media projections. It fascinates me that I can make a naturally inanimate force such as light or sound sudden have a sentience, and sense it's surroundings. In my time as a student I want to find opportunities to try this kind of thing out and see what I can come up with on my own with my own specific skill set. Allison Dobbins emphasized the importance of collaboration on these things. If there's an aspect I don't like then I shouldn't do it, instead I should find someone who does and work closely with them. In this I can build new relationships as well as learn more about the artistic process and have my own improved. There's a bright teasing goal that takes a group of people to reach through their collective knowledge and ideas.
Never before had I heard of this kind of thing being done in a live setting, however it's a marriage of the two parts that I love about the arts: the image driven experience and the fleeting and ephemeral aspect of live performance. They don't have to be separated through the miracle of technology, they can become one in the same.
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