Sensuous Geographies: a multi-user interactive/ responsive installation

This paper will discuss key issues which arose during the creation of Sensuous Geographies, a multi-user interactive/responsive installation created in 2003/4. In particular it will refer to the way in which the design of the installation was intended to draw attention to bodily sensation, facilitate collaborative interactivity between participants and bring about an emergent choreography, and to the collaborative methodology used in developing this work Introduction Sensuous Geographies is an immersive, multi-user interactive installation, created by composer Alistair MacDonald and choreographer Sarah Rubidge. It emerged from a research project, undertaken under the auspices of Sarah Rubidge’s AHRB Research Fellowship, which focused on the development of a multi-user interactive environment which was both legible to the user and complex enough to be artistically interesting in its own right, and MacDonald’s Creative Scotland Award, which is awarded to artists in Scotland to advance their practice into new domains. In this project the artists’ intentions expanded to include the notion that the installation would draw the attention of participants to bodily sensation, and use that awareness to guide movement behaviour, facilitate collaborative interactivity between participants and to bring about not only emergent sound worlds, but also an emergent choreographic form. It also became both a space for play, and a meditative, sometimes almost ritual space, in which the barriers between the audience and the artwork are dissolved. Another feature of the installation is that it is designed not only to allow participants to engage interactively with the installation (in a central, electronically sensitised space, some 5x5m), but also encourages participants to watch the activity of others as they do so. In doing this it challenges the roles of audience and participant in such installations. Sensuous Geographies is set in a large space (minimum of 10x10m) hung with translucent banners, on which liminal video images are projected. Predominantly a sound installation, it comprises a collection of rich polyphonic sound worlds, made up of independent strands of sound which are activated by the participants. The sound worlds differ from moment to moment, and come to being through the actions of its visitors – the public. As they enter the central interactive space visitors trigger individual strands of sound. As they move around the inner installation space they also influence the quality of their sound strand and consequently the overall texture of the sound environment. At the same time through the use of highly processed responsive video imagery, shadowy virtual counterparts of the visitors themselves are brought to presence, projected onto the banners floating in and out of vision. Several issues arose during the development of this installation. Within the context of the overarching desire to design an interactive/responsive multi-user interface which would facilitate cooperative interactivity amongst the participants, each of the artists had particular goals in mind which were influenced by their particular artistic backgrounds. Two central goals began to guide the choreographer. The first was to create a multi-user interactive installation which would generate emergent choreographic forms during its use. The second was to develop an installation in which the behaviours of participants would be guided not through conscious intentions or thought but through ‘subconscious’ physiological messages initiated by subtle sensory perceptions of the environment. In this Rubidge was exploring the notions of scientists such as J.J. Gibson, who understand perception to be a network of perceptual systems, including ‘unconscious’ systems (which he places under the group he terms the ‘haptic’ perceptual system). These systems are not independent, but interact with, and modulate, each other. The composer, Macdonald’s guiding intentions were less to do with the body and more to do with creating a complex musical environment each manifestation of which would be brought to life and given a distinctive character by the activities of the participants. He uses the term ‘musical environment’, rather than musical instrument, advisedly on the grounds that this environment is composed of pre-selected musical sound when activated, rather than creating sound from its structure These two sets of goals imply that the two artists were working towards providing the conditions to facilitate particular, but different, kinds of experience when they started work on the project. Although the two sets of goals remained distinctive throughout the development of the environment, they interpenetrated throughout the working process, modulating each other as they developed. The result is a work which has a richness of texture that perhaps would not have been generated had each artist focused on only their