New title and new interviewee

This weekend has been productive in terms of researching and brainstorming, not much actual production happened in terms of 'creating' but that's ok. The idea is much more important. Today I was scheduled to do storyboarding, but I felt I need to look at the foundation of the storyboard first before getting into more detail, so instead I did some research.

Change in Proposal title



This was my previous title:
Affective Interaction as experience: Employing Immersive Interaction Design to influence a User-Directed, audiovisual Dionysian experience.

Now it’s going to have to change. I don’t want to ‘force’ a Dionysian experience on my viewers; they are free to feel whatever they want. However I’m still interested in what they experience, and the focus is still to create an interesting experience for them.

This is my new title:

Observing the affective outcome of a non-semantic, open-ended interactive installation. 

Semantic - the study of meaning; I need to look further into this.

I want to see what people feel when interacting with something that is not designed to make them feel anything conceptually. I was speaking with a friend today and she mentioned 'Closure' in Psychology which I'm going to have to look into. She also mentioned the Kuleshov experiment, which shows that even the montage of pictures and videos can give them a different meaning. This is why part of the structure of my interactive project will have to be randomised.

Structure of storyboard

There is a starting-point for the basic structure of the interactive installation; it is a Dionysian one, a dream-state, a substance-influenced experience. Everything starts normal, reaches a climax, and then gets out of control. There is one beginning,  several different choices and of course different endings. The experience is not meant to be positive or negative, the viewer may decide for his/herself.

The contents of the video will be that of everyday life events, some more surreal than others, as the experience moves forward. After the user goes through the first couple of shots, the selection becomes randomized however continues to move forward. I need to make sure the videos are not personal and can be interpreted differently by anyone, this is why I need to test them.

Rather than music, I want to have a selection of ‘meaningless’ sounds.
Music can influence how a viewer feels and as much as possible I want to avoid this.

Antoine Beuger


I was thrilled to be contacted by Antoine Beuger on Facebook, who found my blog and messaged me to give me links to Empty Words by John Cage. I will be interviewing him before I decide on the audio for my project. Antoine Beuger is the founder of the Wandelweiser Group. Here's more from Wikipedia (2011)

The Wandelweiser Group is an international group of composers/performers. It was founded in 1992 by Dutch-born flautist Antoine Beuger and German violinist Burkhard Schlothauer. In 1993 Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey was invited to join, followed by American guitarist Michael Pisaro, Swiss pianist Manfred Werder, then Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti the following year, then American trombonistCraig Shepard, and others.

The group runs its own publishing operation, Edition Wandelweiser, and its own record label Wandelweiser Records. According to Radu Malfatti, Wandelweiser music is about "the evaluation and integration of silence(s) rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds." John Cage is a figure of central importance to the Wandelweiser composers; their music is often referred to as "silent music," taking as its starting point Cage’s work 4'33", the first composition to consist largely of silence, after the "Marche Funebre" by the Frenchman Alfons Allais.