Shared ideation is a mode of devising hybrid work in which both digital and live artists co-devise digital iterations from the outset. The mode out of an analysis of difficulties within Chamber Made’s Digiwork program. These difficulties included: Maintaining the momentum of a work through to digital iteration, enriching digital material gathered in the devising process and scoping a work outside of one’s practice.
As a further software response to these difficulties, I was creative designer for the digital platform Agile Recorder, a rehearsal documentation tool to support remote and interdisciplinary collaboration. Agile Recorder was developed by Studio PDA and was used in the development of Nat Cursio’s work Loop, as well as in live and digital iterations of The Venusian Slip with Harrison Hall.
Agile Recorder
Agile Recorder allows video to be recorded using a computer’s in-built webcam, or an external camera connected with a video capture device. This video can be annotated, tagged, timestamped, clipped and organised into projects. The videos taken for a project will retain all the annotations and clips made by an operator, and so when Agile Recorder is used as a rehearsal documentation tool, notes can be made by a rehearsal director, then reviewed with reference to video of the precise moment that the note was made. This can help convey performance notes, directorial notes, lighting or staging notes.
It can be also used as a meeting documentation software. Notes taken within Agile Recorder will be linked to the audio of the pertinent moments of the discussion. Agile Recorder provides a catalogue, or database of creative decision-making with reference to the original material that inspired the decisions. As a process-oriented tool, it had applications for a variety of forms and so could be useful across the SMA sector. For a digital artist coming on board to develop a digital iteration, the access to the process of creative-decision making as it unfolded could also be invaluable.
Flexibility in form for digital iterations is critical. It is an essential part of the definition of the Digiwork program that these works can take many and varied digital forms. A presentation platform is inherently restrictive in the types of material it can present. If our platform had the functionality of YouTube or Soundcloud or Adobe Flash player, it would support only video, or sound or interactive web-based works. In Chamber Made’s own Digiwork program only Peter Humble’s initial Turbulence video work would be able to be presented comfortably on an online digital platform. Another Other, Permission to Speak and Captives of the City, each have spatial sound, spatial video and installed elements, or are their own presentation platform through a website. Thus, Studio PDA and I decided to focus our efforts on working towards software that could facilitate process.
Agile Recorder is available to download here.
The Venusian Slip
Following my research into the difficulties encountered in the Digiwork program, I worked with choreographer Harrison Hall on a digital iteration of his work The Venusian Slip. My role through the rehearsal process of The Venusian Slip arose from using the software Agile Recorder. In The Venusian Slip I was present as a media artist throughout the development and genesis of the work. This led to a shared creative understanding, and it was easy to imagine a form for a digital iteration. The performance work was cinematic in aesthetic, so we decided very early on that a screendance work was an appropriate form for the digital iteration. My presence throughout the development also supported a two-way creative exchange, from live performance to cinema through the screen dance digital iteration and also inspirations from cinema in the aesthetic and form of the performance work.
