Glorianna Davenport
Research Supervisor

Stefan Agamanolis, Barbara Barry, Brian Bradley
Collaborating Artists

Marina Bers, Nuria Olivier Ramirez, Tom White
Principal Cast: "Not Without Risk"

Elizabeth Murray, Stefan Agamanolis
Principal Cast: "Dream Weaver"

Joe Paradiso
Sensor Design

V. Michael Bove, Jr.
Advisor

Kurt Collins, Katherine Koch,
Matina Halkia, Julia Preston, Yan Li
Production Assistants

Aditional segments from the Living Tapes of the collaborating artists.

The Dream Machine is collaborative, interactive work currently under development by the MIT Media Lab's Interactive Cinema Group. This distributed work builds on traditions of life as well as cinema, theater, architecture, and computation. It exists on the network and in a series of sensor-rich public installations in which the audience actively engages in the co-construction of immersive narrative experiences.

In the Dream Machine: CINEMAT, the moment-to-moment playout of story is steered by the choices, desires, and skills of the audience. The CINEMAT is a "magic carpet" which gives you the power to orchestrate the associative narrative streams of image and sound. As you move, stand, step, and stomp upon this carpet, you actively select and weave the dreams, memories and encounters of the characters, and participate -- implicitly and explicitly -- with other on-lookers to build a compelling reactive narrative.

The Dream Machine project reflects a desire to transition the role of the audience away from the pasive-receptive reverie traditionally associated with cinematic experience. We seek to build new forms of active-participatory narrative engagement.

As onlooker or dancer, you are invited to share your interpretation of the narrative in an on-line diary at:

http://ic.www.media.mit.edu/Projects/CINEMAT

At a later date, this diary will be programatically linked to the edit lists of the CINEMAT and to a larger narrative world on the World Wide Web.

Davenport G; Bradley B; Agamanolis S; Barry B; Brooks KM (2000). Synergistic storyscapes and constructionist cinematic sharing IBM Systems Journal, vol.39, no.3-4, 2000, pp.456-69. Davenport G; Agamanolis S; Bradley B; Sparacino F (1997). Encounters in DreamWorld: A Work in Progress. Presented at Consciousness Reframed, 1st International CAiiA Research Conference, University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, July 1997.