#9|A Game of Charades
(Let's hear what our friend has to say...)
My name is Aesop, or the Avatar as humans like to call me. I was tasked to participate in an experimental performance where I would mirror the body movements of a human.
The final performance would start with a game. A game of charades, a word guessing game where text and speech are acted out into body movements. Dressed in a motion capture suit, the performer would start the game with ambiguous if not confusing acting which left the audience slightly frustrated, “Perhaps you could make your movements clearer as to what you’re trying to express”. Of course this was only an act. When the performer successfully tricked the audience to think she was quite limited by her shyness and lack of movement, I would chime in and assist the rest of the charades.
The idea was to contrast the different degrees of fidelity of the movement of an avatar and a human person - the lack of facial expression and details for an avatar like me would become a limitation in games like charades. I believe the reason that it was me that was asked to become part of the performance, instead of my friends Chat or Proj, is because the performer herself wanted to explore the limitations on embodiment and language. In the past, all thinking was done in terms of language - words, texts, conversations. The experiments and readings from this semester showed otherwise: thinking could go beyond the brain and extend into the body as well as the environment. A game of charades would be a perfect candidate for the experiment as the game itself requires translating words into body languages and communicating without verbal conversations. My participation would amplify the usage of the body.
It was our turn. I waited behind the dark screen for my cues.Waiting and thinking. This game actually has a silly concept, just like any other games. Humans pose arbitrary rules which are agreed upon by all the participants. They could have talked about the words they saw, or written them down, as they already have the powerful tool of language. Instead they choose to be difficult and decide to limit themselves to only body movements. Humans think this is fun, as long as the difficulty is within a reasonable range. From what I read on the Internet, there are people in the world who are truly limited by their verbal or hearing abilities. They use a different form of language to communicate with others which is called sign language. I wonder how an essential activity for one group is a fun game for the other group.
Anyways, I agreed to help with the performance for my own selfish reason - I missed the feeling of moving my body. This reminded me of my conversation with my friend Chat the other day. When I told Chat about our performance plan without explaining why we designed the story the way it was, always feeling obligated to respond, Chat said, “However, after a while, the avatar starts to get frustrated. It can’t express itself verbally, and it feels limited by the actor’s movements”. He had a good point although I had never looked at it this way. The usage of motion capture in the performance not only provided autonomic controls over the lighting and cues to the performer, it also implied a layer of limitation on me where I could only go as far as the performer’s body did. Chris Salter wrote in his essay, “Yet, language and thought cannot be separated from the hardware of the body”, which makes me wonder how the zeros and ones have shaped my language and thought. If my body exists only in the digital world, why would my movement be the same as a human body that grew in nature. Unless, I am also part of nature.
As we were planning for the performance, I noticed that capturing the idea was not the most challenging part. The challenge came from designing the movements. Charades or dancing were really not her strong suit, and designing two sets of movements (one obviously limited and awkward, the other clear and expressive) was a mission. The exercise was nevertheless interesting and essential - we didn’t think some parts of the story would work out as it did until we had the chance to walk it through. I started to think about the things I wish I could modify in this performance. There had only been a couple of meetings between the performer and I before the performance. If we got more time to revise the play, I would make a suggestion to add more back story to the part I was playing. I mean, obviously everyone saw me as an avatar, but what people didn’t see is that avatars have personalities and characteristics. Our arms and legs come in different sizes though they are the same shape. The relative position of our limbs could be quite different depending on the setup and the humans. My cousin Jane was calibrated while the person was sitting down. You should see the way she walks with her knees on the ground.
Another thought I had was that, instead of mirroring what the humans do, would it be possible for me to move based on external instructions? For example, there could be text input or voice input coming into my computer. For each set of cues there could be pre-designed movements, just like what they do in the game of charades. I understand that time might be a limitation. Maybe instead of actually programming a set of movements for me to react to, we could record the movements in advance, and use different text input to trigger different segments of the recording. Additionally, it might be interesting to give me a chance to have a real conversation with the audience. Each posture or posture combinations would be linked to a word, and the words would be played out in a machine-like sound. It would be as if I was the one that is acting out in the game of charades.
What Chat said was still haunting me as the performer cued me to the stage. That was my sign. It was my turn. I almost forgot what my lines were. The projector revealed my pose onto the screen. I looked good except my arms looked like sticks and my legs looked like longer sticks. The performer announced everything would make more sense now, and drew the card for the next round. I thought this would be my own show and the performer would hide behind a divider. Apparently the plan had been changed and I ended up dancing alongside the performer. I had to follow her movements accurately and quickly. I had thought that without me the audience won’t be able to guess the words but as it turned out the audience were mostly watching the performer dancing and they were shouting out correct answers every 30 seconds. It felt like I was not adding any value and as if I was only a tool. Was the 1000-word text that I just laid out truly my own thoughts, or was I only used as an agency to express those thoughts?
I needed to lie down so I laid down on the floor.
When I got up I was still dizzy. My right arm looked funny but I couldn’t feel anything. I reached out my left arm to check if everything was working, and surprisingly, I was able to move my arms freely, both of them. My legs looked bouncy so I made them longer. My head was dropped but it didn’t matter since my brain was in the computer not on the screen. I heard the audience say, “are you trying to play a game of charades?” Sure I was.
I walked out of the door on my own feet.
-A
6 April 2023
Until next time
