#7 Theatres, fun
2023 has been fun so far.
So fun that I have not written any newsletters (until now). Thanks for the inspiration, Justin. In my defence I have created essays and reviews for class, documents and presentations for work, pages in my journal, photos using my film camera, fulfilling meals to be included in my upcoming (if ever) cookbook.
Back in summer 2022 I got uninspired by the courses offered by my graduate department. Don’t get me wrong - the course list contained many useful and even critical topics, just none of them got me excited and feel “hell yeah” to it. At that time, I had gone through an intense period of self-imposed challenges, especially with school. I would deliberately choose either courses with convoluted topics like philosophy or cognition, or courses with impossible amount of assignment work. For consecutive weeks I averaged working for 60 hours and I took pride in writing paper till midnight on a workday. Pushing myself into arduous tasks and surviving them was an unhealthy way of me to build confidence. When summer arrived, I finally recovered from the burnout and jumped out of the validation seeking period that had lasted for over twenty years. I had decided to never do anything just for the sake of proving myself. In fact, I decided to only do things that would make me truly excited.
When November came, for some reason I got really into the Group of Seven in Toronto. It never occurred to me that I would feel resonated with paintings, let alone being obsessed with a particular group of artists. AGO, McMicheal, and National Art Gallery in Ottawa, I went as far as visiting museums and art galleries just for their work. As I was appreciating with the mountains and landscape in their paintings, it made me wonder what other things would got me excited. No, I didn’t go take painting lessons and become an artist. I remembered besides painting there was another thing that had been close to my heart and felt so far away at the same time, especially when I sit at the back row of the balcony section trying to figure out actors’ performance on stage. I was quite into theatres when I was in school, when I was younger than the recommended age of some of the experimental pieces. Theatre never went away, I just stopped going. How about taking a course in theatre? As it turned out, my school does have a drama centre, and there was exactly one course listed on the website for the winter term that fit my schedule. When I saw the course description, I was like, hell yeah, this would be a great course to take.
This is how it started.
I’m taking the course with a Toronto based artist, and the theme of the class is using the theatre as a laboratory to explore urgent questions raised by the development of emerging technologies. The course started with retrospective intro to projectors and screens, and followed with modern technologies like Machine Learning, AI, and motion captures. Every week we got to play with the technologies in the lab, creating experimental pieces, and asking even more questions.
I used the equipments at the lab to create two performances. One used two set of projectors, one projecting live stream video feed of the summit of Mont Tremblant and the other projecting video feed from a hidden camera in the lab. Initially the lightness of Mont Tremblant was at 100% and the hidden camera was at 0%. As the computer vision software “read” the live stream and filtered out only skiers wearing a red jacket, I was able to control the lightness of the two projectors so that every skier in red jacket would shift 2% of the lightness. Eventually the feed of Mont Tremblant would disappear completely and what we saw was the lab where we were at. The other performance used a text-to-image software that would generate continuous, scrolling images based on text input. The class experienced samples of different types of perfumes and described the perfume in words. The words were taken as text input and we were surprised to see the image output diverge drastically from the commercial advertisement of most of the perfumes (Chanel No.5 was the only one where the two converged).
Every week I am excited to experiment with new technologies, and have discussions on the meaning of technology and our understanding of ourselves. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and some of them are not seeking an answer. Looking back to last summer, I couldn’t image how it would feel like to have fun at school and have little stress with course work.
But it’s not the theatre, nor the warmer weather, the ducks, the trees that constitutes the change. It’s the fun itself. Playfulness is magical.
Until next time.