last wednesday marked a milestone in my pursuit of a graduate degree in creative practice for narrative environments at central saint martins. the entire graduating class was required to hand in and defend their final project. it was a challenging final presentation as the external examiner, all tutors and the entire class were there to bare witness.
what was most interesting to me was the paths of development undertaken by each student and their works. it amazes me how much an idea can change dramatically through the process of production, my project being no different. what started out as research into the phenomenon of boredom and purposeless play has turned into a collaborative project developing a realtime, visual storytelling tool for the video, installation and performance artist.
my project. those words no longer are relevant to the project i presented that day. almost a passing thought for the uses for multitouch technology outside the exhibition and museum world, StutterBox has become a project so far removed from the original idea that authorship should be dually credited to the following people:
Jan Berkel:
Jan’s background is in network engineering but now he prefers to develop software to network** other people. He works at Trampoline Systems, a London-based startup building a new generation of enterprise social software. Jan enjoys arguing about (and implementing) the software architecture for StutterBox together with Martin.
Multidisciplinary designer specializing in cross-platform multidisciplinary projects. As a member of Rosebud&Grumpers she has been pioneering VJing as a live performance tool for narrative, blending unconventional, traditional and modern equipment and methods. Crystal is the usability consultant for StutterBox.
Studied International Media and Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany, then moved from a comfortable life of slacking to a busy schedule as a software developer at Last.fm in London, UK where he handles large data sets in a variety of contexts. Does data visualizations on the side, some of which were featured on infosthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com. Martin is a software developer for StutterBox.
Adam Krause:
Industrial designer born and trained in Toronto, Canada. Completed his BDes in Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art & Design, he has worked for Canada’s National Ballet School an Phoenix Animation in Toronto, and has had success as a freelance web and industrial designer. Adam is the hardware designer and builder of the StutterBox table and Tangibles.
Alright… all these thoughts, all these people, but what the heck is it?
STUTTERBOX is a transdisciplinary platform to tell stories with. Its aim is to be impulsive and participatory, and provides a “no man’s land” between author and audience, in which the very act of narration becomes one with the performance.
Orchestration of a performance happens on multiple levels. The table itself hosts a horizontal surface in which a large display is contained. The display not only shows the user and audience an outcome of a narrative, but also acts as the instrument interface which users play so that a story may unfold.
Counterpart to the virtual narrative environment is a physical condition. In order to manipulate aspects contained within the surface of the display table, real-life, three dimensional objects must be used. These “Tangibles” house fiduciary symbols that act as triggers which activate elements that appear on the display. Tangibles can be any object so long as they contain a fiduciary symbol. This means that physical props arranged on the surface of the table can narrate a story in parallel and even interact with one another in real-time, affecting the virtual narrative displayed in the table. This synchronicity between virtual and tangible is an essential part to the interaction in STUTTERBOX.
When a person places a Tangible on the table, it activates elements of the narrative that are either characters or environments. Other Tangibles can be placed on the surface to effect the mood and disposition of each element. Not only does each element of the narrative act in accordance to the whim of the author, but they are also programmed to be generative. Combinations of characters, environments and disposition Tangibles produce new forms of output, each element building upon another in a semantic fashion.
STUTTERBOX effectively blurs the dichotomous relationship between author and audience. Both author and audience of the story constructed on STUTTERBOX become subject to each others influence, which in turn affects the story in unexpected and dynamic ways.
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