Emily's Dissertation

Overall I enjoyed the experience, I feel that it allowed me to explore with how I created work and how I reacted to virtual interaction. Personally, trying to manipulate the virtual body was the most challenging principle for me as I didn’t feel I was being creative in what I was doing. I think it was easier to just improvise with the virtual body in all of the principles because it didn’t give you time to overthink what you were doing and if it looked right, on the flip side it was difficult to create work quickly that reacted to what we were being told to do. This was because I kept going back to the start of the video when I got stuck and I didn’t create much work. If I was to use these principles of interaction in my work I would use augmented expression. I think it allowed you to be more creative and didn’t really consist of any rules other than creating a relationship with the virtual body. I gained the confidence in using technology in my work which I was previously comfortable with mainly because I didn’t know how to use the projectors. Finally I have enjoyed working for someone else and being told what to do and how to create movement.

I found this principle easy when I used my own understanding of creating a relationship with my virtual body, however when I was told to create the relationship in a different way I became stuck with ideas. I couldn’t keep up with the directions in which my virtual body was looking. At some points I felt like I had a clear connections with my virtual body, I found that this happened naturally (so when I wasn’t trying to create something that looked interesting for the viewer). My favourite part was working with the two virtual bodies and one live, I felt that the video allowed me to pick who I wanted to interact or create a relationship with based on which movements I found most interesting at the time. There were a wide variety of movements I could develop or copy to make my performance look interesting. The only thing that was difficult was where I could place my live body so that I didn’t cover any of the virtual bodies up. I felt that I got stuck in the middle of the screen a lot.

Personally I found this the easiest of the principles explored so far, this is because there were no set rules apart from to build the level of interaction between the virtual body and the live body. I found that creating the build meant that I explored how to use individual parts of my body such as my hand, to create something that interacted, manipulated what was happening on the virtual body. In one way I found the quicker video easier to interact with because the movements on the virtual body were fast which meant that there was a wider range of movements for me to work with. However the speed was hard to keep up with when performing, so for the performance I preferred working with the slow video, this meant that I had more time to think about what I was doing and I wasn’t doing movements that didn’t build or work with the virtual body. If we were told to improvise for a ‘performance’ perspective then I would prefer to work with the faster video. I feel that this time I explored different movements and came up with some interesting things.

Overall I found this principle challenging, due to me feeling like I was just trying to copy what was happening on the projection rather than making new movements that complimented the virtual body. I found that using my arms to initiate movement worked well and it was easy to create interesting things on the live body. However, when it came to using other limbs like my legs I found it difficult because my legs are more rigid than my arms and a lot of my movement is fluid on the virtual body. The speed of the video made it easier to interact with the virtual body as it gave me time to think what was coming next and be able to get into the next position before it moved. I feel that I didn’t have clear interactivity when working with this principle because I didn’t want to manipulate or copy the virtual body but that is what I found myself doing most of the time. I think I made it more complicated for myself when I was improvising in the first sessions because I did a lot of my habitual movements, if I had thought ahead I would have tried to challenge my improvisation.

Overall I found todays session challenging, it was difficult to try and control the project as the video was improvised and not a set routine. This meant that I didn’t know the movements very well. Trying to influence what happened was also tricky as it was hard to not copy what was happening on the virtual body. I noticed that I relied on my hands to manipulate what was happening on the screen rather than using other body parts as they had the widest range of motion. Trying to interact with a virtual body was difficult because you couldn’t physically touch the body to manipulate it, this meant that if I was trying to grab a hand or other body part it didn’t look aesthetically pleasing. The three words we were given helped in terms of knowing what you wanted us to achieve otherwise I would have just danced along side the virtual body, however I do not think the helped me to come up with new ways to interact with the screen.