How to wear sensations?
#artresidency #interactive_theater #e-textile
About residency
Our Starts.ee residents Mihkel and Dila has worked on an interactive embodied theatre experience where they portray the story of Odysseus. In this interactive experience, e-textiles as storytellers and perception shifters cooperate with the biological and kinesthetic data and provide audio and visual feedback as an interaction modality.
Data collected from the sensors is embedded into the story via gamification; this makes data as a medium of story. They created an experience in between an audio-journey and a game. To create this embodied theatre experience for the participants, e-textiles were used as an essential tool in the form of wearable bodily extensions, props and spatial elements.
Game player has two tasks to complete to find Odysseus´s way back to home-island Ithaca. These tasks are based on physical movement and inner-movement as calming down at all times. First one is measured via a motion sensor whereas the latter is measured with EDA (electrodermal activity sensor) which measures biological excitement levels. When they fail to perform the tasks, they either stop on the way or fall back in the story, and try again.
Mihkel Kohava
He graduated theatre directing studies from Estonian Music and Theatre Academy. So far he worked with classical theatre productions as director and actor, such as Chekov or Estonian classic Kitzberg. Before drama school worked a bit on data processing projects. His interest is putting the biosensors and data they collect into service of a story, in our case Odysseia.
Dila Damir
PhD student at Estonian Academy of Arts. She works in the realms of electronic textiles and her research combines embodied design thinking and bodily interactions with her textile practice. Recently, she worked as an e-textile costume designer for an artificial intelligent brainwave opera titled AIBO.
During the residency
