Xenosomatics LARP (1/2)

We started our second term with an outside partner for a weeklong project.

Our guest lecturer, Susan Ploetz comes to talk to us about Nordic LARPs and how this relates to UX Design

She is an artist-researcher working with Somatics, writing, performance, simulation and live action role plays (Larping) in different configurations.

We started our week reading about Somatics, a concept we learned would be very relevant for this week's program.

What was my understanding of the term Somatics?

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It is the way how we feel in our body, its internal awareness, thus when we become somatically or internally aware, we become sensitive in how our body is dealing along with certain scenarios, so with this skill-set of internal awareness we explore our life differently. For instance, the way we use our body, like our muscle memories, engagement with our muscle models.

It is immediate proprioception -- a sensory mode that provides unique data. First-person observation of the soma is immediately factual. (hanna)

Your own experience is your own truthfulness.

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Our first session started with an introduction of Nordic Larp by Susan. I personally had never experienced a LARP before, and reading about made me feel playful and curious that how will we engage our senses in it.

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Susan showed a very useful video to gain understanding which I would like to share here.

Highlighting what Bjarke wants to say is ‘the brain is bad at distinguishing between reality and fiction — you’re bringing in sensory information either way. He talks about Nordic larp as specific subset of collaborative storytelling. Making other characters part of you and stepping in their shoes makes you sense information which you cannot gain without indulging or engaging in their cosmos to create way more beautiful stories.

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Moving to the second half of the day, Susan introduced us to it.

Skinship L-A-R-P 🖖🏻 (or, Touching Intelligence in its online iteration)

She described Larp as creative storytelling that encourages players to step into Characters. For that, she got us through a mediation in which she first asked us to close our eyes and breathe deeply to make ourselves more focused within. She asked us to picture ourselves as a new alien being and adopt a new name with a new alien outlook.

I called myself Layla, and as soon as I did, I had an image of myself being in that alien character.

The participants play alien sensing-creatures exploring our surroundings and objects/beings in a strange new land. We were asked to get materials from our own space to pick up a pillow, sheet, rock, cup with water, and toilet paper and wait for more instructions.

Further, we were instructed to explore and touch every element through our alien mindset and say aloud what we associate as an object. We were supposed to combine the information we collect in a multi-lingual word-like matrix for collective intelligence or memory. 

We were encouraged to repeat words that we heard somebody say, echo the same word, and made a collaborative aspect. For example, as I am touching a stone, and I said ‘rough’, everyone will repeat it in their voices, making it a collective experience.

Working together with Susan made me feel the engagement she made us create while she adopted the role of speaker and helped us be a partner in that whole experience.

It was an experience that taught me how humans connect with our perceptions and senses to co-create an experience.

For our learning about making a LARP work, Susan puts us into groups to produce characters and relationships between them in a new world: the one where alien and human life is inextricably linked.

Brief

The goal of the remaining 3 days was to design a sensory-based experience of a ritual based on the Susan’s Xenosomatics LARP.

The experience needed to happen online 👩🏻‍💻 and use senses besides sight 🧿.

Having only 3 days, we immediately started brainstorming, with the goal of prototyping and iterating quickly, which is explained in XENOSOMATICS 2/2

Xenosomatics LARP (2/2)

Task: Create a sensory based 20 minute ritual in the alien world for the class to experience digitally.

🤝🏻Team

Tatiana, Ines, Cat, Manali

We jumped on a zoom-call together to discuss our ideas, and went through what we caught from our learning through the Skinship Larp.

We looked through the video Mechanics - Fader talk by Bjarke Pedersen, mentioned to us in the session with Susan. Mechanics means the instructions or object that regulates how the players interact with the fiction and each other. It’s like a tool box which is specifically made for the L-A-R-P seeing what connectivity we are trying to achieve.

We all were clear about creating a ritual, and preparing a script together with keeping in mind of choosing a sense beside sight. Immediately I started thinking about the platform zoom where we will be performing together and that made me think of creating a sense of aura of having a set of background. We together started to create ideas in direction of experimenting with objects, food, smell, sound. Immediately my team mate Ines talked about her experience with greetings+ sound. She talked about how we can communicate through clapping and making a language to understand.

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After a quick Mindstorm we came up with different scenarios, which were living under water and another one was living with a virus.

After tutorial session with Professor Dr. John Fass we mutually decided to go forward with the idea of

“A Spaceborne Virus”

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Ritual

SPACE VIRUS 👾

It’s the year 2367. The human race has vanished. Or has it? A space-borne virus called the CIMT has caused the invisibility of the infected individuals. Their only hope is to get help from a recovered alien, through a healing process conducted by the Venti Cirri, a human-alien hybrid who already went to space during the past five years, and is immune to the Virus.

The main aim of this LARP is experiencing the process of Aliens healing the human race from a space-borne virus: CIMT Virus. Each participant will have to take part in this Somatic experience.

Run-through

On Thursday, we were able to test our initial idea with another group. We guided them through the experience of healing/ purifying from the CIMT Virus; the recovery consisted of removing layers of warm cloth from your own body and feel recovered from the CIMT virus. They were able to give us feedback.

They enjoyed the process of Larp, but they were confused by knowing what has to be done next. There were moments when they opened their eyes to see what we have to the next. They suggested that there could be a visual script sent to them before to get a clear picture.

As moving forward, we again questioned ourselves for better understanding like

• Are the rules clear enough?

• Have we explained all the things clearly?

• How do you feel about doing this Larp online?

• Anything you like about the Larp? Anything didn’t work well?

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Final

We made few changes to the ritual in sense of instructions, and making it more collaborative. I drew up the character to give an outlook of the characters.

The ritual consists of guiding participants through an “uploading” process, where they are being transformed into their virtual spaces using zoom backgrounds.

Screenshot of Live-Action-Role-Play with Class Online.

We included a meditation technique to engage participants and build their focus for the healing process to start. We made guidelines to heal for Venti Cirri to instruct the players and gave time breaks and easy voice instructions to make them aware of their progress. We also shared a thought on incorporating sounds by having them in the repetition of different languages. These sounds will activate other parts of the body. Continuous repetition of the sound of words and building focuses on body parts with a sense of warmth. The ritual guides players through several steps involving making invisible, visible by removing layers of warm cloth and touching vegetables to be synced to the healing process through the instructions provided.

Symptoms of CIMT: Very high temperature, feeling cold, and being invisible.
HIDDEN UNDER A PILE OF WARM CLOTHING
INVISIBLE (OFF SCREEN) DURING THE EXPERIENCE

Online LARP Recorded Video

Feedback Time! 👍

Our classmate Sanjana said that it was great that we asked the participants to focus on the area where they felt like the temperature was the highest during the meditation. This was an exciting element to add to our LARP because we often never pay attention to these high temperature ‘red zones’ whenever we fall ill. 

Also, Sue mentioned that she liked our LARP and enjoyed being the ‘Venti Cirri’; however, she said that she found it confusing to know who was meant to repeat a word at the given/specific sequence. I agree to incorporate a more direct sentence to mention how to teach the audience in term of voices.

Our lecturer, Dr John Fass, said, ‘‘It was a good experience because of all the incorporations that we made (Xeno + Somatics)’’. 

Alaister was also happy with our LARP execution. He enjoyed the concept of being invisible and healing through exploring our bodily temperatures. 

Final Thoughts! 💭

Creating a ritual and storyline, building that in reality, getting into character at last acting it out, was quite a learning experience for me. From my childhood, I stayed away from getting into such a collaborative experience. Still, this time with the visiting faculty and cheerful batch-mates, I succeeded in learning a new way to bring a collective indulgence. I feel this is a valuable process that could make you step into the world as a designer and express yourself and build an experience for others, too, at the same time.

Many thanks to Susan for introducing us that how a process that is not a design process can also be incorporated to make us understand and help us possibly achieve our goals. Xeno-Somatics made me think more about investing in learning about non-design skill more. No input, no output (John Fass). 

References

• Nordic Larp Talks Stockholm 2010, 2011. Introduction to Nordic Larp — Johanna Koljonen. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH_RLgR4DI4&feature=emb_logo> [Accessed 25 January 2021].

• Future of StoryTelling, 2016. Bjarke Pedersen — Becoming The Story (FoST 2016). [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuT88CnQ4xY> [Accessed 25 January 2021].

• Sanders, L. and Stappers, P.J., 2014. From designing to co-designing to collective dreaming: three slices in time. interactions, 21(6), pp.24–33.

Telesthetic Prehensions (1/2)

We began by reading about Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) (Lindley et al, 2019).

Reading OOO (Lindley et al, 2019) was not easy to grab in one, but it really helped to bring in the design research.

The word ontology is derived from the Greek words ‘ontos’ which means being and ‘logos’ which means study. It tries to pin point things around us that actually exist. It is the study of the nature of being or becoming existence and their differences and similarities. It is a sub field of metaphysics, which is nature of being ( of what relates to what and how should we be in this world. Creating all new doors for moral questions.

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In our first meeting with Tyler he introduced us to the concept of Prehension, describing it as “an affordance within the interaction”. Here, the object prehends you, and your interactions with it. example the way your hand curls around mug, its prehension. He also gave insights onwe can construct certain prehension to certain extend, its not a process its processual(things go on).

Things + behaviour

Professor Dr. John Fass mentioned design as intensification, things in relations to other things (interaction take place between two things) makes a kind of illusive quality to designing behaviour to happend around it. Things + behaviour

Agenda of this week, we were asked to consider the following:

Design a digital & physical object that prehends its surroundings.

It is an experimental brief about how would we design object which will prehend environment, which design methods could be used , quality of material tangibilty

In Xenosomatics we designed Situation, but in this brief its inverted. We need to design object that senses other things that are not in the same place.

What does tele-esthetics means?

Tele means reaching over a distance, carried out between two remote points, esthetics means how our perseptions shapes our understanding or opinions. delivers through our senses, we are talikng about how sensing beings we move through the world. embodies telesthesis

A flower senses the sun. that is telesthetic relation, where prehension is taking place.

A flower senses the sun and that is telesthetic relation. Senses are prehensions.

After this day of initial reasearch, learning and discussion, we got with our teams and started with desktop research on how can we bring in prehensions which we are facing in this lockdown period. Lack of technological possibiland lack of access to LCC Building made it more difficult in terms of making a working prortype. In the next half of this post you will look through how our team came up with Ideation Building.

Telesthetic Prehension (2/2)

Design a digital and physical object that prehends its surroundings

After our initial research our team started analysing different research methods which could help us understand the object interactions. To better analyse how an object interacts with its surroundings within a set environment, sebastian combined the AEIOU method and the Artefact Analysis, and came up with what I referred to as an “object-centred diagram”.

Object-centred diagrams, inspired by the AEIOU and Artefact Analysis methods by Sebastian

While exploring all around like magnetic fiels and smartphone sensors. We further referred to the project ODE TO SOIL: Turning Soil Data into Music, which me and Ines had taken reference for the project UX of soil in Studip Practices. We discussed about folllowing questions on :

How does your object prehend the spaces and other objects around it? 

How can it be understood as relational? 

How is it prehended telesethetically?

Drawings made by me, Ines and Damul

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Ideation

We all agreed to the idea of ‘Prehending the weather of a place and transmitting to another place’.

We started thinking about ideas to amplify the vibrations. Ex. Vibrating walls from the rain and storm + light with colour for the temperature. I tried the first experiment of creating a box with a speaker inside it to create sound waves. Sebastian shared an excellent reference work by Christine Sun Kim’s. We imagined two different use cases for this idea: understanding what the weather is like from the inside, for example, how windy or rainy is it — and feeling the temperature from a distance when calling a relative from another country.

Development and Iteration

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We experimented with different materials and documented what worked and what did not. I enjoyed what I have in my tiny house and what I can create in the lockdown period. I experimented with inked liquid and small grains. Sebastian experimented with making the vibration more embodied by involving prominent speakers.

Testing and Making of Concept

While developing the idea, we did many testings with materials and technology. Our prototype included a Sensor Catcher (outside) and a device (inside) to prehend outside weather.

Further developing the idea of

Outside Sensors : prehending and transmitting temperature.

Indoor object: receiving signals and transforming. The humans prehend colours.

I gave my idea to take colour signals for prehending temperature change. This creative thought came from thermochromatic paints. I also experimented with frequency of sounds at the same time to prehend weather outside. As I was developing it further, it made me think of many situational ideas: What if? We can feel temperature through a device inside our houses; maybe it can be more than visual. I illustrated a homepod that can provide an embodied experience. We discussed this imagination, and I quickly made a low fidelity prototype to convey the idea.

As we were going to demonstrate the concept live on zoom, we thought to make the experience better by tweaking some (zoom video call) setting options; Damul helped create an easy way by making visuals for the same.

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The feedback

Overall the feedback that we received was positive. Our class and John and Alaistair found our concept interesting, pointing out that we could also think about an exciting way to prehend the environment in other ways. They liked how we made it telesthetic in the sense of connecting locations with making the prehension work.

My insights for this project went positive as we were clearing our mindset on what is prehension by improving on the concept and building more layers. Lack of technical resources made us feel restrictive, but we made it work with what we had, and that is where the creative mind pushes boundaries. I am proud of how we managed to communicate complicated ideas and made it a working prototype in a small time frame.

References

Lindley, J., Akmal, H., Coulton, P., (2020). Design Research and Object-Oriented Ontology in: Open Philosophy Vol 3, №1, Pp.11–41

Roberts, T., (2014). “From Things to Events: Whitehead and the Materiality of Process”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 32, №6

Ascott, R., (1996). “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” Behaviourables and Futuribles. in: K. STILES and P. SELZ, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 396, 489–498.

Szuyuliu.com. (2021). [online] Available at: <https://www.szuyuliu.com/ode-to-soil>