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Trajets :: User Workshop Reports |
CREATIVE USER RESEARCH by Steve Boxer Case Study 1: TRAJETS Introduction The Trajets installation provided a unique opportunity to investigate the way in which audiences respond to interactive digital art. Both due to its nature as an installation of unfamiliar and undefined form, which users had to explore and define themselves, and due to its portability and flexibility when, having run in its base configuration to various different audiences at the ICA, it became the subject of workshops held by amateur and professional groups in Chelmsford. Observing the installation in its different states in different venues yielded the following observations about the nature of how audiences approach digital art. Research aims By watching how different groups of people approach initially mysterious installations like Trajets, it should be possible to gain an insight into how people approach digital installations in general. Do such installations offer an engaging spectacle? Do different people derive different things from them? How can they be improved to offer a better spectacle or generate a more profound viewing/interaction experience? Could - and should -- Trajets itself be altered in specific ways? The very nature of interactive art challenges preconceptions of how art is "viewed". If you're interacting with an installation, are you a spectator or a part of the installation? Because interactive art is such new territory, such questions remain to be answered in any definitive manner. Initial impressions - Trajets at the ICA Trajets' first incarnation in the UK was at the ICA, in its most basic state. The most immediately striking aspect of the installation was its lack of explanation. Susan Kozel explained that it had been decided to provide the minimum amount of instruction - although the ICA staff had been in favour of more instructions than an easily overlooked sign. This, allied to the unpredictable nature of Trajets' interactivity - certain screens have been programmed to interact more responsively with users than others - led to enormous variation in the behaviour of people entering the installation. Some passed through quickly without engaging any true interaction, while those who lingered longest in the installation were generally rewarded. Interestingly, several people were observed sitting down in the middle of Trajets while it was at the ICA - behaviour which completely negated the point of Trajets. We strongly suspect this was due to environmental influences - regular ICA-goers will have sat in the main room before, as that is typical behaviour when bands and the like play in there. Many ICA visitors commented that they had only "got" Trajets when returning to it a second time. Because of the camera-triggered interactivity, operating at floor level only, the installation only interacts with participants when they move around it - although the presence of the screens led many to expect interaction when they were stationary but moved their upper bodies. The ambient music and subdued video in the installation at the ICA led many to comment that they found Trajets "relaxing". Which is good in the sense that "relaxing" experiences are generally held to be pleasant, but suggested they hadn't explored the full interactive capabilities of the installation. A few ICA participants found they could generate movement from the screens when one person stood each side of a screen, which comes close to Susan Kozel's aim of using Trajets to: "Explore the idea of choreography across the images and screens". This, in turn, suggests that observation of peers in installations such as Trajets is a crucial means of teaching people about the capabilities of those installations. But that factor was negated to an extent by the need to restrict the number of people in the installation to five at a time, since the presence of greater numbers causes Trajets to respond to the group as a whole rather than individuals. Rather than posting signs explaining the installation (which Susan Kozel and Gretchen Schiller, understandably, were reluctant to do, as it could lead to railroaded behaviour), those running Trajets could perhaps consider putting a "plant" in each visiting group, to demonstrate at least some of the installation's interactivity. The presence of a projection in the ICA's bar tracking the movement of people in the installation was undoubtedly a good idea: members of the public should, perhaps, have surmised from it that movement was the key to unlocking the installation's potential. But none seemed to pick up on that. Perhaps that projection could have been combined with some explanatory poster. The projection also introduced a basic idea of the antechamber model, which is sometimes employed by interactive installations, and neatly side-stepped the common criticism of antechambers, namely that those in the installation feel like they're in a goldfish bowl and become self-conscious. But, arguably, not enough was made of that movement-tracking projection. Trajets at Essex Dance Susan Kozel and Gretchen Schiller used Trajets as the basis for two workshops in Chelmsford, Essex, at the Essex Dance theatre. Youth Dance workshop: 25 October 2001 Trajets was used as the basis for a four-day workshop in which teenagers, aged between 14 and 17, from three local schools participated. The workshop essentially focused on helping the participants generate video imagery for projection onto the installation's screens. Visually, Trajets was held to be more successful at Chelmsford than at the ICA, as the quality of the projections seemed to be better. Susan Kozel made a number of interesting observations: "Initially, the group's speed of movement through Trajets was quite high: youngsters tend to move quicker. And time in the installation is important - large groups tend to move more quickly, and perhaps don't get the installation as a result. In such situations, people typically walk through the middle and round the outside, which switches the video, but little else. I'm more interested in kinetic pathways through Trajets, not the body itself." The main things the students derived from the workshop was a grounding in Final Cut, and improved awareness of the body through making body-related video - most used the "bodycam" which Gretchen and Susan developed, but more time would have been spent interacting with Trajets if technical problems and a lack of Apple Macs had not hindered the students' attempts to complete their videos more quickly. Kozel described the main aim of the workshop: "We did lots of movement experiments to work into the imagery, and started playing with movement in conjunction with a moving camera. Which undoubtedly aroused an interest among the students in video art. Most seemed to have enjoyed their acquaintance with Trajets - many said they particularly liked "Cowgirl", the most responsive screen, which provided the most obvious interaction. A younger audience, less used to digital installations, clearly prefers instant gratification to a subtle response. While the video projections showed impressive grasp of cinematic techniques considering the shortness of the workshop, and undoubtedly fuelled a new awareness of how movement could be translated into video imagery, they did not really explore the installation's potential depths. That may have been different if the workshop had been one day longer. Susan and Gretchen pointed out that even between 14 and 17-year-olds, there was a marked difference in appreciation of Trajets' aims, with the older teenagers much more readily able to grasp the aims behind the installation. Nevertheless, the exercise demonstrated that Trajets can be used as an impressive means of generating an interest in digital art among youngsters - it can, undoubtedly, be employed as an effective educational tool, demonstrating that multimedia art need not be inaccessible and intimidating. The availability of support equipment - particularly, digital video cameras and Apple Macs loaded with editing software, and video mixing hardware - also proved to be a stumbling block in terms of what could be achieved in the limited time available. The more such equipment at hand, the more powerful an educational tool Trajets can be. Professional Dance Workshop The following week, a group of modern dance professionals superseded Essex Youth Dance at Trajets in Chelmsford. The group was quite diverse, consisting of a cross-section of ages (from roughly 20 to approximately 50), and a mixture of currently operational dancers and people more involved in the teaching side. Many had experience of video editing - taking the workshop, almost instantly, beyond what Essex Youth Dance had been able to achieve. The Professional Dance Workshop groups (typically, the group as a whole was split into working groups of three individuals) were able to immerse themselves more deeply in Trajets - bringing, in particular, an element of live performance to the installation -- and clearly enjoyed the experience. Although not all the performances given in Trajets on the last day of the workshop contained a physical element, with dancers moving around the installation, interacting with video projected onto the "sails" and music, most did. Susan Kozel confirmed that, although populating Trajets with dancers wasn't necessarily a priority, it was an interesting exercise: "Perhaps this workshop was a day too short - with another day, the camerawork could give way to physical work. I think encouraging people to dance in performances in Trajets is less a question of revealing potential than, maybe, another tangent. Gretchen and I feel that it doesn't need to have people performing in it - but we wanted to explore those possibilities. Robert Eugene made an interesting point: he felt that, working with imagery on the screens, we still weren't getting a sense of depth, and he thought that maybe you could put people in the space to achieve that." The participants' thoughts With the workshop split into various groups working to performances in Trajets, we canvassed the opinion of various participants. Their general view of Trajets was that it had an awful lot more depth than they initially thought and presented almost limitless possibilities for different types of performances. Dancer Rob Clark had the following to say: "It's something that is best enjoyed over a number of visits. I deliberately didn't try to see it from an outside perspective - I wanted fully to find that interaction. On the second or third visit to the installation, I started breaking it down and looking at the component parts." Clark pointed out that because there were several people in each group, no single person's interests were pursued fully in the group's final performance. It could be interesting to track the differences between performances in Trajets between groups comprising four and two people - particularly if they had been allowed to approach the installation with existing video material to play through the projectors. Clark clearly enjoyed devising a performance in Trajets: "With the images, you had a sense of loss of fine detail at some points and then clarification of it at others - the experience could be almost disorientating. The possibilities of physical interaction with the space are limitless: it sparks off so many ideas. I would like to work with quite a lot of people in the installation if it could be tuned to be responsive to them. I think there are wonderful possibilities in treating the sails like dancers. If the sails reacted more to whole-body movement, you could use them to perform duets, or even use them as performers. Where it's normally easy to separate an installation and a performance within it, in Trajets, there is no separation." Digital artist Catherine Watling added the following: "I think it works really well, particularly in this situation rather than in the ICA. Here, it is a nurturing space. Once you get used to the feeling that you are allowed to play in it, it can be stunning. From my point of view as a digital artist, Trajets comes up with similar problems to user interfaces. People expect instant gratification and demand interactivity." "Your perception of Trajets changes with time. Once you've created a setup with mechanics and a concept behind the interactivity, plus image material, the possibilities in the space are infinite. At the moment, for example, it's ambient, but it could support high drama." Other comments gleaned from the professional dance workshop include: "As an installation, it's really unpredictable - each time we performed in it, it would be different." "I liked the sense of space sometimes, but at others, I became screen-obsessed." "I could find it frustrating, because I could move towards one screen and it wouldn't always do the same thing. So we couldn't choreograph as we generally do - we had to improvise all the time." "Some of the things that worked on film didn't work in the installation. We did some interesting fast and slow video stuff, but when we projected it, it seemed too fragmented." "I really enjoyed playing with Trajets, seeing what works in it and what doesn't." "The first time I went in it, in the ICA, I found it relaxing and pleasant, but didn't feel I was interacting with it. But the more times I've gone into Trajets, the more it has come alive." The performances The resulting workshop performances, reflecting the inbuilt diversity of Trajets, varied quite markedly. One had no dancer-interaction but focused on projecting images onto the sails which fed tightly off the music played into the space. Another explored the potential for changing the installation's ambience, by contrasting periods of frenetic movement - with several dancers running around and through the space - with reflective periods in which lower-energy dancing prevailed. Another employed three dancers, and it was generally agreed that that seemed to be the optimal number. After the performances, a number of discussion points emerged:
Conclusions
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