1001 Electronic Story Nights

In 1992, the idea of community led me to extend the scenario for interaction beyond the notion of a single user on a single machine. I began exploring a scenario which encompassed two users: one acting as an Explorer and the other as a Guide. In fiction, many stories juxtapose the journey of a main character with advice from a guide or with difficulties imposed by an obstacle character. Guide characters help the main character forge ahead, while obstacle characters inhibit her progress, often by requiring some level of accountability. As we explored the interface, we focused on several considerations: the scale of the interaction, the relation of the audience to a story goal, and the narrative structures which would act as an invitation to the audience.

I was contemplating the problem of how to move the interactive experience out of the desktop video "box" and into the room as a direct, human-scale experience. I invited Larry Friedlander (a Professor of Literature and Theater at Stanford University and an accomplished Shakespearean actor) to take a sabbatical and join me in my work at the MIT Media Laboratory. In 1992, we co-taught a workshop in which students and faculty collaborated on an creation of an installation piece: a series of large-scale, walk-through participatory environments which we called "The Wheel of Life." [5]

The "Wheel of Life" was developed for and installed in "The Cube," a 60 x60 x50 foot open room in the center of the Media Laboratory. The exploration spaces, inspired by the rich symbology of the Buddhist Mandalas, were implemented on the scale of a small theme park. The Guide stations invited visitors to collaborate with the Explorers' efforts by sending non-verbal messages to them or by solving some related, parallel puzzle. The work was open to the public for 10 days in January 1993.

As I have worked with students over the past decade , I have evolved a collaborative workshop method which allows us to create works which push the edges of expression and the new digital technologies. In this work, I focus less on longevity and issues of distribution than on general principles, with the practical goal of prototyping work in a short period of time. The "Wheel of Life" was particularly impractical in regard to distribution. It was built by some 25 students, faculty, and staff in one 13-week semester, which was a challenge in and of itself. The spaces had to be large. For Water and Earth, we hung huge, sculpted scrims from the ceiling to define and enclose their spaces. Air invited the audience to walk into a large mylar balloon, the size and shape of a Quonset hut. Each space was constructed with its own cosmology of experience. As you walked into the Water space, a short movie rear-projected onto an overhead screen conveyed the impression that you were being released from a huge fist into an expanse of water; immediately, schools of colorful fish began to swim by on monitors around you. Very quickly, you discovered that you were sharing this space with a large whale whose florescent pink throat you could walk into. The Guide sent you messages, such as images of a child's fingers pointing and an accompanying whisper, "move left," "move right," "speak to me." The goal in this space was to get the Explorer to sing into the ear of the whale. Adults resisted this particular interaction because the ear was way down near the floor. If you did indeed sing into the whale's ear, you were rewarded by an outstanding light show and the memorable lines from The Tempest, "Full fathom five, my father lies..."

In the Earth space, the Guide sent a cryptic request to the Explorer, who had to decipher the request in order to move on through the space. Earth was inspired by the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem "Ozymandias" -- the Explorer entered the site to discover it in ruins; the Explorer had to solve three puzzles to reconstruct it and experience its former glory.

By exiting Earth, the Explorer entered the Air environment: the interior of a large, inflated mylar balloon representing a space ship in crisis. The fate of the Explorer was critically dependent on the collective work of five crew members currently in a state of drunkenness. By standing close to an individual crew member, the Explorer was able to awaken him briefly. However as soon as the Explorer left, the crew member fell back into stupefaction. In order to succeed, the crew members had to be revived in a specific order within a specified period of time. Since the space was quite large, this task involved considerable movement on the part of the Explorer. Meanwhile, the Guide played what was ostensibly a computer game; the task was to launch a collection of logs down a moving stream, one by one, in proper order to form a bridge. Part of the Guide's challenge was to discover exactly what this "proper" order was: once the rules became clear, the Guide could move down to the colored squares at the bottom of the screen. These squares directly controlled the lights within the spaceship. If sequenced in parallel with the moving logs, these squares showed the Explorer the order in which to revive the crew members. Thus, there was a necessary collaboration between the Guide and the Explorer.

The "Wheel of Life," while not technically perfect, was a grand success in terms of its fanciful spirit and the fun of its interactivity. The limited speed of the network and inadequate sensor technology did present some major problems. As I stated earlier, there is now a group at the Media Laboratory which is actively pursuing new technologies for sensing human interactions. One class of sensors responds to the electrical currents which flow within our bodies. We can use this technology in a cello and a violin to precisely measure the musicians' movements; through their actions, the musician can control their accompaniment, the background orchestration of music in a solo performance. Similar sensors can be used in other venues where the human wishes to control computer output. This focus on sensors has lead to significant work by Neil Gershenfeld and the Computers and Media Group at the Media Lab.[6]