Future Love at Nesta's FutureFest 2016
17 - 18 September 2016
London's Tobacco Docks
This installation comes alive when you come together. As aware of us as we are of it, this digital environment invites us to move and perform as a group to create unique visuals and sounds. Using a convergence of generative technologies, it looks ten years ahead, beyond the current VR headset craze, to a real-time collective reality.
Collective Reality – Experience Togetherness
2016 – present
Collective Reallity was created and became a place to play, initiate, respond and shift energies between people. A space to feel, meet and greet, collaborate and co-create through movement, connected and collectively enabling and generating real-time generative visuals and sound score. It is a large yet intimate immersive environment achieved through overhead projection, surround sound, projection mapping and motion capture to create a living, breathing virtual presence environment that can be experienced by groups in real-time. Collective Reality aims to be looking at the environments 10 years ahead – at a fluid immersive group environments where virtual and physical space is blended, where groups of people can move through the digital with the physical.
The imersive installation is composed of distinct zones:
The Engagement Zone
Where the audience (participants) arrive, hang out, feel, watch, hear move around and use their bodies and their interaction to intuition to feel this immersive responsive space.
The Motion Zone
MJs (movement jockeys) move around the space continuously with semi-pedestrian motion, and follow a series of pre-set choreographic rules to help enable participants to move into being performers themselves, even to encouraged the public to move into the performative zone and take a lead role.
The Performative Zone
A central circular interactive stage where professional duos and trios of dancers, and sports people were time slotted every 30 minutes creating individual performative dramaturgies relating to the experience. Contact improvisation, capoeira, free style football, salsa, hip hop, burlesque dance theatre and other social dance, the performers used the central interactive circle and the participants could observe the virtuosity of these professionals. This zone was used for Future Love content of the FutureFest 2016, where in the evening on Saturday the entire immersion space changed into the Party Room, a performance stage allowing the inputs of DJs and VJs as well as other live performances.
The Open Zone
The participants are encouraged by the MJ’s to become performers themselves, to await the opportunity to potentially participate when the time arrived for them to take to the central stage.
Therefore, constructing the immersive space into different zones was key to the creation of Collective Reality, giving the participants to either:
-
Enter and sit around the edge on bean bags / cushions as observers only, watching the visuals above and around them, and viewing the performances and listening to the sounds generated.
-
Move around the space, join in a few group induced moments, and watch the performances on stage.
-
Enter and gradually move into the middle of the Performative Zone, to watch closely and maybe to decide to perform themselves as duos, trios or more.
-
Join the performative zone as a large group into a finale.
FutureFest 2016
The project was premiered at and commissioned by FutureFest 2016 and created by interactive design collective body>data>space in collaboration with the University of Greenwich, d3 technologies and Genelec. With support from Panasonic, The Games Europe Plays, EUNIC, British Council, Stage Sound Services, iSci and the Freestyle Footballers Federation.
IX Immersion Experience Symposium 2017, SAT Montreal
Between the physical and the virtual, we now experience total immersion in information and art : always-on social networks; big data making the invisible visible; virtual architectures overlaid onto physical landscapes; windows from the physical world popping up in immersive gear… As the modalities to enter this persistent metaverse are multiplying with domes, HMDs and mobile screens, the question of presence, of how we connect and engage with our environment and each other, and of how our physical bodies and cultural identities are invited in, become central.
This fourth edition of the IX symposium on immersion and experience focused on the theme of Embodied Spaces.
Throughout the day, Ghislaine Boddington delivered several inputs including the Plenary Keynote, spatial/physical workshops in the dome for VR and AR coders and a presentation of body>data>space new commission Collective Reality in the SAT dome with Jo Hyde and Nick Rothwell.