A major objective is to maintain the integrity of Büchner's story in the face of such high technology. As in traditional theater, I don't want the costume to wear the actor. In other words, I don't want the technology to overwhelm the expression of the piece, but only to serve it as transparently as possible. Bran Ferren addresses this need for balance between technology and content in his paper, The Medium is Only Half the Message. Ferren writes: Engineers describe the performance of new media [...] in terms of technical resolution. [...] But if you're a writer or film director, you need another axis--'emotional resolution'--to describe how well you are using the technology to convey a message to your audience. [...] Most of us don't watch test patterns for fun, and moviegoers shouldn't be thinking about the theater's projection or sound systems. The engineer should design these systems so well that they are transparent to the viewer. And paradoxically, increasing the technical resolution of an imaging system can sometimes diminish the quality of the viewer's experience. (5) Ferren's points are well made. Every element of an experience should contribute to telling the story to the audience, and sometimes, the best tool for telling a particular story may not be the most technically advanced. In Woyzeck, the main character struggles with insanity and hallucinations, which can be particularly well evoked through AR at this stage in the technology's development. At this point in time, AR often appears ghostly or hallucinatory; for example, a building may appear to float a few feet off the ground or the edges of a person may appear to shift and blur. The resolution of images played through AR goggles does not achieve a glossy cinematic verisimilitude. Current kinks in the technology are, in this case, not a hindrance to the project, but will instead assist in the telling of the story and creating Woyzeck's mental state as an inhabitable space for the audience.
The AR system used to create this project consists of a inertial and ultrasonic fusion tracking grid and sensors from Intersense and head mounted displays by NVIS. This technology works by sending out ultrasonic and inertial pulses from a grid of rails mounted in the ceiling of the installation space to sensors worn on the head and hands of the audience member. These sensors are connected by wire cables to a computer that contains the music and video clips for the piece. By communicating with the sensors worn by the audience member, the grid determines the location of the audience member's head and hands and uses this information to determine when the computer should display the appropriate media. In this way, the installation can be designed to have certain pieces of video and music located at specific coordinates in the space.
A particular advantage of AR and the see-through head mounted displays or goggles is that the final product is a combination of the real world and digital materials. The powerful relationship between human bodies and physical spaces is described well by Tuan, who notes, "Architecture continues to exert a direct impact on the senses and feeling. The body responds, as it has always done, to such basic features of design as enclosure and exposure, verticality and horizontality, mass, volume, interior spaciousness and light" (116). The use of actual physical spaces and physical objects enhances the audience member's feeling of really being in a place; the storyworld of Woyzeck in particular; as opposed to VR or total digital immersion which can feel like being no place. This combination of the real and digital in AR also creates the conditions for ambiguity and doubt as discussed earlier by Jentsch, which can result in a feeling of the uncanny.
While the AR technology is the only technology the audience members come into contact with, many other technologies were used in the process of creating Woyzeck. Of course, I used word processing software to write the translation and adaptation. To communicate effectively with New York City-based composer Brendan Padgett and choreographer Kyle Shepard, we used Apple's video conferencing software iChat. Padgett used Finale music composition software and a midi-enabled digital piano to create the score. We used GoogleDocs, an online file sharing site, to share and collaboratively edit documents, such as our complex shooting and recording schedules. To build our chromakey studio, we used electric drills and a Genie, or compressed air lift, to hang backdrops and high voltage film lights. We filmed dance using a mini DV camera and recorded sound using a USB microphone and laptop computer. Sound editing was done with GarageBand and Finale software, and video editing was done in FinalCut and AfterEffects.
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