CARTOGRAPHY
"Technology, for example, becomes not a gimmick but a way to echo elements of the refugee experience". - The National, UAE, June 2018
Cartography is a theatrical work created by Kaneza Schaal and Christopher Myers that explores themes of geography, displacement, and tracing personal narratives of refugee youth in the context; beginnings, endings, and the journeys in between. Cartography leverages interactive technologies to involve audience members in experiencing and understanding the scale and trajectories of displacement. The piece unfolds in a reactive sound environment in which elements of the performers’ voices give life to the character of The Ocean - at times stormy, at times tranquil - an ever-present witness and medium to the characters' journeys and fates. The piece was co-commissioned by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi.
As part of the development of the piece, the artists undertook a two weeklong creative residency at the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center in June 2018 to workshop creative technologies that they wanted to use in Cartography. As a recent graduate, I was selected to work as part of the creative development team under the Interactive Media Department. I focused on developing a reactive sound environment where different sonic elements of the performance (loudness, pitch, rate of speech) could be used to control, in realtime, a projection of an ocean storm.
Stills from a rehearsal showing the projection and projection surface
A work-in-progress demonstration of the tools we developed was performed at the Arts Center at the end of the residency, and the piece was debuted in a complete form at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. in January 2019. The finished work returns to the NYUAD Arts Center in February 2020.
Below you can watch a video produced by the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center that chronicles the creative residency.
The audio-reactive ocean system was built in Max and Isadora, and makes heavy use of OSC communication between the two programs to co-ordinate audio processing in Max and its relation to the ocean's behavior in Isadora. Along with this, we developed an OSC user control interface for a smoother experience running the show, and making changes to the presets.
The audio sensing and processing patch in Max
The tablet OSC control interface, showing various control pages