Press play
Collaboration on an interactive theatre piece —
Scope
What if you were looking at a theatre piece, and you could decide the routes the play takes, influence the world around the actors, or decide on the following dialogue? You have the control button at your fingertips. You decide what happens on stage. PRESS Play emerges you in an interactive performance that plays with the wonderful/treacherous freedom of a virtual world full of hidden algorithms.
In 2022, I collaborated with the Kopergietery, and playfield collective to create a play where the audience is enabled to vote for different outcomes of the play using a remote control. I've created a server to handle the incoming messages and to enable the actors and the PA to gain an overview of the next steps and the current data and state of the system.
The server uses a cluster of docker containers written in Nodejs to distribute the different functionalities. I chose for a separation by concerns approach and created a container to calculate the votes, one to control the light and sound computer, one to send messages to the controllers over MQTT, and some others to perform various functions. I've written a web interface to visualize what the system was doing at any time and to monitor the 150 controllers present. The visualization was made in processing, using a flocking algorithm to keep the representing dots (one for every audience member) at the chosen option (moving when the audience member votes for a certain option), and slightly moving in-between questions. The movement can be regulated using sliders in the debug part of the interface, and connects to the server using the MQTT network. Each dot grows with every right option, and a special mode is programmed when the controller is the only one in charge of the show.
Download the processing application here
Picture credits to (c) Kurt Van Der Elst
