On the Art of Making Better Problems: Improvisation, Experiment, and Transmedia Performance Research

Name: On the Art of Making Better Problems: Improvisation, Experiment, and Transmedia Performance Research
Start: 2023-12-08T11:00:00-05:00

Speaker

Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman

Please join ENTANGLEMENT: STRANGE LIFE for "On the Art of Making Better Problems: Improvisation, Experiment, and Transmedia Performance Research" a talk by Patrick Jagoda (William Rainey Harper Professor of English, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Program Director of Media Arts and Design) and Heidi Coleman (Associate Senior Instructional Professor of the Committee for Theater and Performance Studies), co-founding directors of The Fourcast Lab at the University of Chicago.

RSVP for lunch: https://duke.is/v/avws

This talk explores a transmedia, improvisational, and interactive performance platform entitled Encounter that the Fourcast Lab is developing at the University of Chicago. This platform enables a live networked audience to interact, via chat, with a live actor in order to co-create a series of narrative performances. To construct this experience, we draw from art forms including creative writing, theater, filmmaking, and game design. As humanistic research, this work is an intervention into fields that include performance studies, media studies, narrative theory, science fiction studies, and game studies. Beyond the formal innovation, the project aims to establish both a theoretical and practical framework for live performance online that can be used to run research projects across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. In particular, we will discuss possible applications across areas such as applied ethics and mental health research.

This talk follows up on an interactive playtest of Encounter on Monday, December 4th at 6 PM EST. Details and registration for the event can be found here. Participation in that initial event is not required to attend the lecture.

STRANGE LIFE is part of The Entanglement Project, a multi-stranded initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute focused on race, health, and climate convened by Priscilla Wald (R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English).