Demo
Christopher Kampe and Bethany Bradshaw, North Carolina State University
Biographies
Christopher Kampe is a PhD student in the department of Communication Rhetoric and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. His interests are primarily in game studies, specifically the use of games as a means of exploring complex issues towards pedagogical or didactic ends.
Bethany Bradshaw is a MA student in the English department at North Carolina State University. Her studies focus on the materiality of poetics and she is always looking for new intersections between pedagogy, poetry, and digital practices.
Abstract
We propose a new media art installation that incorporates physical computing in a space of embodied poetics. In this space, a Kinect will interpret the movements or hesitations of a participant and respond with textual, visual, and aural feedback on a monitor; thus a digital poetic text will come into being in response to the participant’s interactions with the space. The space will be divided into invisible sections that will be demarcated for the participant by objects within them and lines of poems that appear when the participant occupies a section for a period of time – information that can be read by the Kinect. The poetry of this exhibit will work through parataxis, calling on the participant to author the meaning that joins the objects in the space, the textual lines of poetry that are produced, and the time and space that must be passed through in order to evoke them.
By creating a space that invites participants to imagine ways in which corporeal experience is mediated through technology and poetics, we intend to bring attention to a digital future in which technological interactions are increasingly embodied. The purpose of the space will not be made clear to participants, however we will leave clues directing them to certain areas and times which will trigger events (video explanations of the project and printed texts that their movements create). Our intention is to create a space of play and curiosity, but also a puzzle that will not reveal meaning without the participant’s effort. In this same spirit of play, this exhibit will reveal (if it is asked correctly) the limitations of the technology that drives it and the capacities with which technology can meaningfully discern human action.