June-July 2009 Pact Zollverein Essen

This article is still under construction.

Location and circumstances

It all started with a residence for the project Sweet Dreams Are Made (Simone Aughterlony and Isabelle Schad), where multimedia artist Olivier Heinry and lighting designer Bruno Pocheron developed a video based control interface for lights. Following the showings at the end of the residence, Pact Zollverein Essen offered the two of them the opportunity and the money for initiating and organizing an informal research gathering of artists, designers and technicians aimed at a collective reflection around their individual practices, an exchange of interests, tools and visions, as well as the development of a common language for making interdisciplinary stage work. The experience was then baptised Gangplank.

Participants

Florian Bach

Nadia Ratsimandresy

Ruth Waldeyer

Maika Knoblich

Mehdi Toutain-Lopez

Boris Hauf

Minna Tikkainen

Isabelle Schad

Heiko Schramm

Judith Depaule

Focus points

• interactivity and networks
• finding common languages
• strategy for the development of common tools
• circulation and sharing of knowledge
• the principle of open source
• publicizing our practices and the tools we develop
• the place of technology in performance-making
• how to include the notion of formation / education in our interdisciplinary practices
• which contexts, which time frames and which spaces to do work?
• activating the theatre space versus fitting in the theatre space
• continuous work, project-based work or both?
• money and production
• authorship and credits
• structural independence, to which extend?

Opening spaces for reflection, exchange and debate on interdisciplinary creation processes through:

• questioning and confronting ways of doing art and relations to technology in doing art
• developing and documenting dramaturgical, technological and communicative tools for network-based collaborative processes
• developing strategies of communication within network-based collaborative processes
• developing strategies of communication towards the other cultural actors Creating cross-project platforms: As a way to make things concrete and to initiate cooperative work, Gangplank invites each participant to share questions, desires, practical riddles he / she is dealing with in his / her current productions. The group will give feedback and collectively or in smaller working groups provide support to each participant's work. This support can take different shapes: dramaturgic advice, technical advice, development of a piece of software for show control etc. Developing and publishing open show control tools: Open source software (like for instance Pure Data) that allows actual communication between computer controlled items (light interfaces, sound interfaces, video players for instance) through the development of common IT protocols are nowadays more widely used. More and more low cost / high power personal interfaces tend to challenge the classical equipment dedicated to show control in the theatres (like for instance the Lanbox DMX controller for lights). We could thus say that the practice of interdisciplinary creation goes together with a greater independence from the venues in terms of show control. Gangplank aims to promote and develop further such tools for the possibilities they open in creative processes and to make them publicly accessible. The development of hardware / software tool-kits for show control is planned. Providing a data-base for interdisciplinary artistic processes: Gangplank aims to provide organized and rationalized documentation of cooperative artistic processes as well as libraries of downloadable material related to these.

What has been developed

as viewed by Olivier Heinry:

One of the immediate consequences of the 1st gangplank session was a new adaptative implementation of the moving matrix concept by Bruno Pocheron and Olivier Heinry, in the context of the "Sweet Dreams Are Made" dance show.

We further developed the idea of moving around a shadow by implementing more complicated patterns, a softpatch saving system and a graphical feedback system. One of the greatest new features we could develop was a video-to-dmx program, which allows us to play / scratch around a video file or use a live camera input that's filtered, adapted and then sent out as a DMX matrix.

We also further worked on the human interface side of things to control a moving light such as a computer keyboard, joysticks, joypads, a graphical tablet... The first system developed in Essen ( a LED movement tracked by a webcam) was not easy to travel with, so we dropped it, although we may still reactivate it in the future.

All in one, these developments allowed us to follow a different light programming paradigm than the usual rather intellectual one and let a more organic and sensitive relationship flourish. Still, on this show we mixed up both relationships, alternating between two symbolic universes.

Another side effect of the workshop was the implementation of matrix management for sound spatialization by Olivier Heinry, for his "74 minutes" performance, and re-using some of the collective work processes into his own workshops related to teaching interactive art.

as viewed by Maika Knoblich:

For me the first Gangplank in Essen raised questions of control and how technic influences performing arts and vice versa. These questions definitely had an impact on the following projects.

A first try out happened within the so called "Furnier/Furniture Piece" (Hendrik Quast). For this performance we were replacing the light-board with a Midi Controller, running the show from within a closet on stage. Hereby we were questioning the separation of technics from outside and performers on stage/inside.

On the project "Gimme Shelter" (Tanzinitiative Hamburg e.V.) Bruno Pocheron and me worked together. We were replacing the light-board with a Midi Controller in order to enable the performers to run the show themselves. Therefore we used pure data to Lanbox objects that were created within the frame of Gangplank. During the show the performers decided how to interfere and by that they shaped the light design according to their action. This was crucial since the performance took place within a durational frame (four hours for each performance), and provided a lot of flexibility.

as viewed by Ruth Waldeyer:

The first project which was strongly influenced by gangplank was The 64 Solobulb Matrix by Florian Bach, Bruno Pocheron and me: Lights for the Sololala Festival 2009 http://www.ausland-berlin.de/sololala-2009: The Sololala light consisted of 8 x 8 light bulbs. We made an open call for light designers to create a solo for each of the bulbs. The choice of intensity, rhythm of the light and length of the solo was completely free. The solos were triggered simultaneously at the beginning of the festival and ran in loops during the whole festival period. The differing lengths of the solos caused the overall picture of the light to shift constantly. Solos were made by Peter Freeman (UK), Jan Fedinger (FI/NL), Maika Knoblich (D), Jan van Giesel (B), Holger Friese (D), Conrad Noack (D), Mona Jas (D) and us.

Impact: We fed an input into the matrix which was not controlled by us from the start: solos created by people all over the world whom we did not even know, written independently following a set of rules we provided. This project uses strongly the features of the Lanbox as layers, cuelists, transparency to construct one overall project out of the different solos.

Questions/Problems: Not enough solos, so we had to deal with 11 solos instead of 64.

The most exciting reason for not giving a solo: one person told that as a light designer he feels like god, and he did not find a good solution how to be one of 64 designers of a show and still be god.

Bumping into technical restrictions of the lanbox: The light did not always fit to the performances on stage, so we used it mainly in the break and sometimes very delicately during the performance: This touches one of the core questions of gangplank: to redefine the relation between performance and tech(nology) - in this case light and performances were not developed together from the start, but the light rather traditionally added in the end.

as viewed by Boris Hauf:

resumed

The Missing Dance No7 (Litó Walkey) this was the first piece/project Bruno Pocheron & Boris Hauf worked together. It was also the first piece we worked with a Lanbox. Interesting to revisit this piece from 2005 and rewrite our clunky code from back then.

new piece drama queen (zoe knights) Florian Back lights, rotator Boris Hauf music (multichannel sound system)

sound computer sends midi commands to Lanbox (abe live -> PD -> Lanbox). works great, but is oneway system.

next step is to define a perception analysis. this turns out to be more complex than anticipated. Olivier Heinry and Boris Hauf are working on this.