Responsive Environments for Performance, Including Voice, Speech and Whole Body Interaction Techniques

For my Master of Arts in the Individualised Program, my practice-based research investigates a design and development framework within an artistic context of responsive environments for performance, including voice, speech and movement interaction techniques. To poetically address issues regarding the way people perform and experience a space, responsive environments, as ambient intelligence systems, should be able to coevolve and auto-adapt to its inhabitants and to the environment. Although relevant work and research has taken place in the fields of interactive art and installations, they primarily concern body tracking, while the potential for voice, spoken or written language, and sound has been left floundering. Positioned at the intersection of design, computation arts, performance and physical spaces, I introduce the role of natural language processing as a tool that aims to non-hierarchically co-construct, augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception in live events. Furthermore, by adopting different interaction design paradigms and collaborating with artists and performers, I am afforded the opportunity to reproducibly and rigorously investigate the potentialities of such systems under the demands of live improvised situations. In addition, these collaborations with non-digital artists and practitioners allowed me to better reflect on the effectiveness of such systems and re-evaluate the way I am developing them. The understanding of interactivity as a quality that exists between different systems and their ability to converse with and respond to any sensorial input correspondingly impacts the aesthetic and affective experience of the participants (performers and spectators). This allows for redefining the role of the participant from a spectator to a co-creator, as well as the role of the space itself. My practical explorations emerged as two complementary trajectories: the development of a responsive audio-visual Storytelling Space, and a technologically augmented - sound and movement improvisation - performance, Orbital Resonance