TIM BOUCHER, FALL 2010

Don’t have time right this second to develop this into a fully-fledged article, but want to capture and begin developing some of these ideas related to theatre and virtual/augmented computing environments.

Perceiving Centers

“God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Sensorium: The totality of those parts of the brain that receive, process and interpret sensory stimuli. The sensorium is the supposed seat of sensation, the place to which impressions from the external world are conveyed and perceived.

The sensorium also refers to the entire sensory apparatus of the body.

Compare to theatre, from the Greek theatron:

The Greek ancestor of theater is the?tron, “a place for seeing, especially for dramatic representation, theater.” The?tron is derived from the verb the?sthai, “to gaze at, contemplate, view as spectators, especially in the theater,” from the?, “a viewing.”

So, what I’m trying to say is that in an immersive, ambient, ubiquitous, pervasive computing environment, you have a plethora of perceiving centers. Anything which either has or which could be connected to some kind of sensor – whether natural or artificial – becomes a point of witness, a place of experience, a perceiving center.

Perceptual Fields & States

A perceptual field, then, would be whatever is within perceptable range of a given perceiving center (ie, what could be perceived). A given perceiving center’s perceptual field could be described by its field state: what occupies the field at any given moment, what the center is perceiving or witnessing.

When it comes to perception and experience, field states tend to flux: they change over time. So you have sequences or chains of field states as action progresses.

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Cue-to-Cue

Working backstage in technical theatre, I help to progress the action of the play by manipulating elements within the collective sensorium of the audience, the theatron. I do this through coordination with other technical staff members according to timed cues which are embedded within the script and action of the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a memory technique called the Roman Room Trick or memory palace, said to go back to ancient and medieval orators and scholars for remembering long sets of information. You’re supposed to step through, in your imagination, a physical place and “embed” along your route segments of the information to be remembered. Then, you can “walk” back through your memory palace and retrieve that information in sequence.

Working in a show is a lot like this: I have certain actions which are associated not just with temporal cues within the show, but which rely on my being within a specific part of the stage or backstage and using particular instruments or objects to help me achieve and action.

[See also: GPS walkabout, songlines]

Also looking at hobo signs, and trail markings of itinerant groups like the Gypsies (I’ve heard a special word used to describe the gypsy signs, but can’t locate it):

So, I’m thinking you could apply some kind of gestural, symbolic or other language to mixed-reality environments, where the symbols themselves become almost like functional programs which are embedded within rich datascapes…

More to follow – gotta get back to work!

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