Positive emotions
This is a great article that might be really helpful in generating positive memories:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-henley/what-are-the-top-10-posit_b_203797.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-henley/what-are-the-top-10-posit_b_203797.html
Zombies
Interesting article in Psychology Today about zombies and why they fall in the uncanny valley realm (though he doesn't use that term).
Pattern Recognition. That guy is staggering, so perhaps he is drunk. But wait! That kid is also staggering, and kids don't get drunk. And that woman is staggering; when was the last time I saw three staggerers at the same time? Things are not fitting into my usual patterns. I do not recognize this pattern, and I am therefore forced to switch off automatic and to perilously fly manually. Most of the time we're flying by instrument, but not now. Now, we need to look around.
...
And fear sprouts from the depths of your brain, your primitive cortex freaking the hell out and your frontal cortex madly searching the hippocampus for anything even remotely familiar.
And this is where you experience horror.
Horror is the initially familiar becoming increasingly unfamiliar. And the easier it is to question what you're seeing, the less familiar it is by definition, and the more familiar it was at first.
You can read the whole thing here.
Ursula, on time
… we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the fist page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers …
It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to the present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time…
-Ursula K Le Guin, from "The Dispossessed"
New ideas for Doubling
I have been thinking a lot about how we can break through to the other side with doubling on stage, particularly with the use of video projection or shadows. If we think more out of the box technically, embracing the possibilities of the proscenium stage, I think we could create some jaw-dropping doubling moments. Here are a couple of my ideas, but please comment on this post with your ideas.
1) I think we should experiment with projecting video or doing shadow puppetry onto volume media like smoke or fog. I'm imagining that if we had multiple angles projected from multiple projectors onto a column of smoke or layers of smoke, we could create a ghostly double. We could probably get a pretty good effect with just one projector on smoke. We could also interact and disturb the volume media while it's being projected on. There are some youtube videos of people playing with this and I think we could take it much further.
2) Use of multiple scrims or translucent plastic sheets to build hidden layers on stage. These could serve to let a second actor more effectively become a blurry or shadow double of someone. Also, we could project video or shadows onto the scrims from front or back to build deeply layered moving stage scenes filled with doubles, triples, quadruples ... you get it.
And I can't watch this at work, but from the description, it sounds cool.
3) Interaction with live video of yourself on stage using strange uncanny angles or uncanny projection surfaces. I've seen this effect used by Robert LePage though I can't find a video of it. I think we could break out of the mold with how the projection surface is created as well: imagine strips of translucent fabric that are blown up from the floor with air to create a sort of "fire" of fabric, or suspended from above, then project an image on that, maybe even a live image. What if we could create essentially a scrim strip projection that could be passed through by an actor. Imagine one of us seeing a fucked up projection of ourself live on such a surface, approaching it, then walking through ourself, like the Mirror Gate in The Neverending Story.
4) A less tech based idea is to use masks of strange uncanny versions of ourselves, or to blank out the face of a second actor, have them dressed the same as the first actor except faceless, an eerie body double.
5)Going further with replacing performers on stage with other similar looking performers. I like the idea, but I don't think we've really embraced it. What if we could really trick the audience, really replace someone on stage with such care (costumes, wigs, other identifiers) that the audience starts to question their own memory (a la Lost Highway).
Okay, that's all I have time for now. Time for the rest of you to comment on this!
1) I think we should experiment with projecting video or doing shadow puppetry onto volume media like smoke or fog. I'm imagining that if we had multiple angles projected from multiple projectors onto a column of smoke or layers of smoke, we could create a ghostly double. We could probably get a pretty good effect with just one projector on smoke. We could also interact and disturb the volume media while it's being projected on. There are some youtube videos of people playing with this and I think we could take it much further.
2) Use of multiple scrims or translucent plastic sheets to build hidden layers on stage. These could serve to let a second actor more effectively become a blurry or shadow double of someone. Also, we could project video or shadows onto the scrims from front or back to build deeply layered moving stage scenes filled with doubles, triples, quadruples ... you get it.
And I can't watch this at work, but from the description, it sounds cool.
3) Interaction with live video of yourself on stage using strange uncanny angles or uncanny projection surfaces. I've seen this effect used by Robert LePage though I can't find a video of it. I think we could break out of the mold with how the projection surface is created as well: imagine strips of translucent fabric that are blown up from the floor with air to create a sort of "fire" of fabric, or suspended from above, then project an image on that, maybe even a live image. What if we could create essentially a scrim strip projection that could be passed through by an actor. Imagine one of us seeing a fucked up projection of ourself live on such a surface, approaching it, then walking through ourself, like the Mirror Gate in The Neverending Story.
4) A less tech based idea is to use masks of strange uncanny versions of ourselves, or to blank out the face of a second actor, have them dressed the same as the first actor except faceless, an eerie body double.
5)Going further with replacing performers on stage with other similar looking performers. I like the idea, but I don't think we've really embraced it. What if we could really trick the audience, really replace someone on stage with such care (costumes, wigs, other identifiers) that the audience starts to question their own memory (a la Lost Highway).
Okay, that's all I have time for now. Time for the rest of you to comment on this!
Alternate universes
I think I had a breakthrough about UV tonight.
I was listening to Terry Gross interview a physicist about the real possibility of parallel universes. It's crazy, listen to it here.
I was listening to Terry Gross interview a physicist about the real possibility of parallel universes. It's crazy, listen to it here.
Suddenly I had a thought – what if Uncanny Valley isn't based on sense memories from childhood – what if it's our sense memories from an alternate childhood? An alternate/parallel universe?
This is akin to the “H2M alternate history” idea. But I feel like it goes deeper – alternate history not just as a wacky other version of our past, but a version of what could have happened – and maybe is happening, alongside us. Suddenly the twin/aliens make sense to me – they aren't the embodiment of our past, they are alternate selves, existing alongside us, suddenly made visible.
Am I the only one who is super excited about this idea???? It brings the disparate ideas of UV together for me.
When I think about "alternate memories", for H2M or my own life, I find that what I brainstorm and speculate about spells out very clearly my fears and hopes and regrets and wishes. The moments I immediately think about are the times when my life could have gone one way or another – turning points, which maybe at the time didn't seem momentous, but do in retrospect.
Here are some examples from H2M and my life -- they aren't really sense memories, but I think we could easily do writing exercises to come up with sense memories from our alternate lives.
→ Jonathan founded Hand2Mouth Theatre in Poland in 1999, after spending a year interning with famed troupe Biuro Podrozy. Their first piece, created by Walters and Polish actors Ida Z, Magda D, and Patryk C, was an outdoor/visual spectacle mixing the life of American slave/revolutionary Nat Turner with the surreal writings of Polish poet Bruno Schulz.
→ In 2006, H2M created Catacombs which was an underground hit amongst the so called “creative class”. Hand2Mouth was hired by Wieden Kennedy to create a similar installation, and after portions of this performance were featured in a Nike ad, Hand2Mouth partnered with Nike and W K to create Rooftops, a performance/ installation that took place on Portland rooftops.
→ The company broke up after creating Everyone Who Looks Like You, a performance using material from their own families and personal lives that was by all accounts a catastrophic failure. After a showing in May 2009 in the Goldsmith Building in which Carol Wells called the show “a harmonic convergence of the bad,” Jonathan and Faith moved to New York, Julie moved to Chicago to attend graduate school, Liz created a solo performance about her relationship with her brother called My Heart is like a Closed Terrarium, Jerry started a performance festival called Life is a Party, and Erin disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness.
Some events in my alternate life:
→ I started playing guitar in 5th grade (and never took up the trumpet), and my senior year of high school I joined jazz band as a bass player.
→ I stayed in Lansing after graduating from college, and got a job working at Barnes & Noble while acting in plays at Riverwalk Theater and playing bass with Lansing jazz/funk band Steppin In It.
→ After I started dating Jonathan in 2001, I stopped working with Hand2Mouth, and became active in poetry circles instead. In 2008 I published a book of poems based on the German fairy tale Undine.
A Case for Science Fiction...
Or, a thought on why we might consider how extremity of situation/imagination can bring us closer to the human element we are craving. From Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil.
I think the much discussed idea of how much science fiction to use or not use can be considered a detail oriented and aesthetic question. Are there beeps and protocols for two scenarios or 12? My question, and my hope, is we find a way to use fiction, may of a scientific bent, to create a bigger space for the imagination. This fiction may exist in script/text, situation, movement, relationship and is a huge possibility. I think we've just started to touch on it. Excited to dig in for more and to consider and create fictions we have yet to conceive.
..if I tell a story about a dentist from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, I have to deal with readers' notions about dentists and people from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, those preconceptions and stereotypes that lock people and stories into small boxes. But if it's a rhinoceros from Bavaria or Saskatchewan who is the dentist, then it's an entirely different matter. The reader pays closer attention, because he or she has no preconceptions about rhinoceros dentists -- from Bavaria or anywhere else. The reader's disbelief begins to lift, like a stage curtain. Now the story can unfold more easily. There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.I think we can consider the possibility of one or two big, imaginary ideas and how we can establish ideas as given truths quickly and undoubtedly in the early moments of the play. We have such a great opportunity with theater: there is a (hopefully) captive audience who are ready to believe what we tell/show them. This is what makes me hate the theater and love it at the same time. None of this is to say that the belief we hope the audience has is based on a replication of a variety of reality, rather that the world or scenario we present is unlikely enough to lodge them firmly in their imaginations from where they will, as Martel writes, pay attention to what is happening. Here we can think of the audiences' attention/imagination as a veil or window through which they watch Uncanny Valley; they enter the space, see the scenario exists outside the world/physics they know and expect, engage their imaginations in an unexpected way, and are then surprised (perhaps doubly so) to find a deep emotional engagement and attachment to what is happening. I think this is why we cry when Bambi's mother is shot.
I think the much discussed idea of how much science fiction to use or not use can be considered a detail oriented and aesthetic question. Are there beeps and protocols for two scenarios or 12? My question, and my hope, is we find a way to use fiction, may of a scientific bent, to create a bigger space for the imagination. This fiction may exist in script/text, situation, movement, relationship and is a huge possibility. I think we've just started to touch on it. Excited to dig in for more and to consider and create fictions we have yet to conceive.
Watch Tarkovsky films for free!
I just found this website where you can watch ALL of Tarkovsky's films for free!
http://www.openculture.com/2010/07/tarkovksy.html
Awesome! Enjoy.
http://www.openculture.com/2010/07/tarkovksy.html
Awesome! Enjoy.
NASA's best/worst sci fi movies
NASA just named the most realistic & unrealistic sci-fi films of all time. Interesting. I can back them up on "2012." According to NASA, "The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before."
Worst Sci-Fi Movies
1. 2012 (2009)
2. The Core (2003)
3. Armageddon (1998)
4. Volcano (1997)
5. Chain Reaction (1996)
6. The 6th Day (2000)
7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)
Most Realistic Films
1. Gattaca (1997)
2. Contact (1997)
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
5. Woman in the Moon (1929)
6. The Thing from Another World (1951)
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
1. 2012 (2009)
2. The Core (2003)
3. Armageddon (1998)
4. Volcano (1997)
5. Chain Reaction (1996)
6. The 6th Day (2000)
7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)
Most Realistic Films
1. Gattaca (1997)
2. Contact (1997)
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
5. Woman in the Moon (1929)
6. The Thing from Another World (1951)
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
Interviewing grandparents
I came across this on Yes! Magazine, and it reminded me first of Erin's show (where's THAT blog?), and then I thought it could be a tool for us to generate material for UV too, if we want to.
Tell Me Your Stories bridges the distance—both geographical and relational—between young people and older people through recording oral history interviews. The project offers curriculum, interview templates, and sample projects to help your students conduct interviews with elders from their families or community, and have conversations that may touch their hearts, and, perhaps, be life-changing.They have online classes in how to interview your grandma, how to prepare, what questions to ask, what equipment you'll need... it's pretty awesome.
memories of southern childhood
these images are from a design blog i like called clever nettle. they are so memories of southern childhood.
Complicite - Mnemonic
Has anyone read Complicite's devised play "Mnemonic"? I read it a few years ago and it suddenly dawned on me how relevant it all felt to Uncanny Valley. A quote from Simon McBurney about the production that particularly struck me:
"I had wanted to make a piece about memory for many years. At the source, we merely investigated our own memories and how they functioned. How much do you remember? How far back does your memory go? To your childhood? Beyond into your parent's childhood? If memory is not possible without consciousness, and our conscious selves are created by our backgrounds and where we come from, how does what we remember tell us who we are? And if we forget where we come from, what continuity we are part of, does that mean we forget who we are?"
I can't find my copy of the play but I'm gonna keep looking. Here's a look to the show's website anyway:
http://www.complicite.org/productions/detail.html?id=5
Space Suit Couture
From Thom Browne's Spring 2011 collection...
I really like the individual dressing stations: just a hanger and a shelf.
Bam! Shark print velvet shorts-suit! Glitter lips! Not in our world at all, but dang, space suits are so handy for reveals.
I really like the individual dressing stations: just a hanger and a shelf.
Bam! Shark print velvet shorts-suit! Glitter lips! Not in our world at all, but dang, space suits are so handy for reveals.
The Memory Doctor
Just came across this series in Slate about Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a scientist who studies and experiments with memory. She was instrumental in debunking 'recovered memories' of abuse in the 90s and ironically she has now been experimenting with how to implant positive false memories in patients to promote better eating habits.
Really fascinating -- and there is something strange about the way it is written that I can't put my finger on. Somehow it makes her sound like a fictional character.
Maybe that's why I was so strongly reminded of the psychiatrist in "Lathe of Heaven" -- and the mysterious 'doctor' character that Marc kind of played early on in UV (now that I think about it, maybe the doctor should come back as a stronger character in round two).
Really fascinating -- and there is something strange about the way it is written that I can't put my finger on. Somehow it makes her sound like a fictional character.
Maybe that's why I was so strongly reminded of the psychiatrist in "Lathe of Heaven" -- and the mysterious 'doctor' character that Marc kind of played early on in UV (now that I think about it, maybe the doctor should come back as a stronger character in round two).
Umm, WOW?
Ground control, a light table covered with sand & a camera mounted either above or below with occasional projections when we choose to do live animations over narrative or recollections. Anyone tempted?
Dance Notes
New Maya Deren Moves: the cheat sheet
1. Gesture forward
2. Gesture right
3. "Me" @ chest
4. Forehead hands and up
5. Look down w/ right hand ringing left
6. Hand on chin
7. Shift R-L-R as shoulders roll then head drops.
8. Shift center, gesture forward
9 Left hand down right arm, palm down, flip palm up, left arm goes up to R elbow
10. Gesture and look to left w/ left arm
11. gesture right w/ left arm to chest, hip and head to R also.
Alien Wall
And here are some really amazing pictures I found last night after the meeting to try and describe what the floating wall on the Other's side should look like. As its based on whatever found wall/items we can find, several options of the way in which it was burned/distorted/worn down, but all very, very cool!
Set image onslaught!
My apologies for the wait, but here are the original sketches we're working from, if it posts right from the first ones to the latest so that if you want to see how things have changed and solidified you can, but if you don't want to the important is at the top!
- Chad
Quivering Senses
So... more inspiration.
I read this blog pretty regularly. It's written by a woman with 7 children who has left the "quiverfull" movement -- a super conservative christian movement that believes in 'letting the lord do your family planning'. I heard about her through this Salon article, and have been oddly drawn back to her blog regularly. It's pretty fascinating, to see how she makes the transition from years of cult-like thinking to what I think of as 'normal' life.
Anyway. I haven't mentioned this because it didn't seem too relevant to space and memory and time. But today she posted about sensory hallucinations and it seemed eerily applicable.
I quote:
I read this blog pretty regularly. It's written by a woman with 7 children who has left the "quiverfull" movement -- a super conservative christian movement that believes in 'letting the lord do your family planning'. I heard about her through this Salon article, and have been oddly drawn back to her blog regularly. It's pretty fascinating, to see how she makes the transition from years of cult-like thinking to what I think of as 'normal' life.
Anyway. I haven't mentioned this because it didn't seem too relevant to space and memory and time. But today she posted about sensory hallucinations and it seemed eerily applicable.
I quote:
Anyway. If you want to read the whole post, here it is: http://nolongerquivering.com/2010/05/04/mayhem-on-the-homefront-dont-freak-out-2/The freakiest thing has been happening to me lately: I’m having sensory hallucinations. Weird smells that get stuck in my nose and mouth for days. The first time it happened was last summer ~ for several days, all I could smell was cinnamon. I tasted it too.
The cinnamon smell eventually went away ~ but since then, I’ve had the same thing happen with the smell of bleach, Listerine, oregano, dish soap, cat litter ~ it’s always a strong, distinct odor which completely overwhelms my sense of smell and taste.
For over a week now, all I can smell is fresh pencil shavings. Our lilacs are in bloom ~ and even when I stick a bunch of blossoms right under my nose and take a deep breath ~ all I smell is lead and sawdust. I usually chew Winterfresh gum ~ and lately, I can only taste the mint flavor for about a minute ~ and then the gum tastes like lead.
