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Monday, April 17, 2000
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For a look at other events, click here. |
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A Digital Tempest |
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The drama department’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest concludes this week, with performances at 8 p.m. April 19–22 in the Fine Arts Theatre.
UGA’s Interactive Performance Laboratory is pushing the boundaries of live theatre with this unique production, combining actors with digitally created characters using motion-capture technology.
“Up to now technology has been used in the theater to create flashy special effects that ultimately serve to distract the audience from the drama and from the vitality of the live performances,” says David Z. Saltz, the play’s director and the professor spearheading the Interactive Performance Laboratory. “We propose a new way to use technology that enhances the text, broadens the expressive range of actors and redefines what it means for a performance to be live.”
The character of the spirit Ariel will appear on stage as a large-scale computer animation, but one that varies with each performance because its movements and voice are controlled by a live actor. As a result, the production will retain all the spontaneity of live theater, while exploiting the unique capabilities of digital technology to convey Ariel’s magic nature.
The actor playing Ariel will be trapped in a small cage in full view of the audience, with sensors strapped to her head, wrist, elbows, hands, waist, knees and ankles, and special gloves that will allow for more nuanced control over facial expressions. The actor’s movements will control the movements of the animation--a kind of virtual puppet. The digital technology will enable Ariel to appear and disappear in a sparkle of light, and to fly, grow, shrink, stretch and twirl. “Prospero’s magic is a perfect metaphor for contemporary digital media,” says Saltz. |
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Museum looks at photography’s future |
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The Georgia Museum of Art is currently showing two exhibitions of contemporary photography, one of works from eastern Germany and one of digital manipulations from Nash Editions.
The Ir-Real of the Real: Nine Photographers from Eastern Germany will be on exhibit through May 14. The exhibition examines the responses of artists living in two states in the former German Democratic Republic. Over the past decade, artists in eastern Germany have endeavored to escape from the situation in which they found themselves when the Communist state dissolved in 1989. Without money, respect or capitalist skills, they were regarded by their Western compatriots with contempt. As unification has proceeded, they have begun to develop their own distinctive voices.
Digital Frontiers: Photography’s Future at Nash Editions will be up through May 28. The works on display were produced at the Nash Editions studio in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The first fine-art studio in the world dedicated to digital printmaking, Nash Editions was founded in 1991 by musician and photographer Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills and Nash) and his colleague Mac Holbert.
The photographers who work at the studio use various tools of digital technology--primarily a computer, a scanner and a color ink-jet printer made by Iris Graphics. This technology allows photographers to think beyond conventions of traditional photography to new levels of photo imaging. Their approaches, like their subject matter, are diverse, ranging from mass media to seamless montages of found or invented pictures.
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