Extended Reality and Interactive Media for Performance: TouchDesigner x IOT
Savanna (she/her)
I am an extended reality creator, porting into projects with an armful of scavenged electronic parts, coils of ethernet cables, scraps of code, and a roll of duct tape. Technology, whether it be flashlights in the dark or microprocessors connected to the cloud, have always been the tools I’ve turned to when engineering audience experiences. Devised, site-specific, and immersive theatre protocols have proven perfectly compatible with any of the internet of things (IOT), livestreaming and content creation, robotics, or extended reality technologies I’ve been exploring these past few years.
Secret worlds, parallel universes, and alternate dimensions
- Writer, designer, director, and collaborator
- Live event producer (shows, festivals, events, experiences)
- Immersive, site-specific, and interactive performance creation
- Experience design (XD), user experience (UX), and interaction design (IxD)
- Alternative performance practices (mask, puppetry, clown, collective creation/devising, installation, intermedial, etc.)
- Innovative storytelling experiments
- Performance studies and critical theory
Telling stories with robot brains
- Artist and experience director/designer
- Digital dramaturgy
- Experience design (XD), user experience (UX), and interaction design (IxD)
- Digital and hybrid performance (intermedial)
- Performative and creative technologies (internet of things, Arduino, Raspberry pi, Touch Designer, livestreaming, media and content creation, etc.)
- Creative engineering and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math)
Dangerous ideas for the planetary resistance
- Ecodramaturgy (performance creation)
- Ecocriticism (critical theory)
- Ecoscenography (design)
- Regenerative creativity (art as protest)
Since March 2020, I’ve supported 300+ artists adapt their work to a digital medium and run over 15 major livestream and hybrid events. To support the community-wide challenge of creating impactful theatre during the pandemic, I founded and continue to lead an ad hoc creative technology R+D laboratory. We host fellow geeks for collaborations and mentorships, conducting experiments in artistic alchemy and electronic explosions. I’ve mentored practicum students from across Western Canada and this past year supported x2 year-long, salaried apprentices with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. My current focus is on capacity-building for the lab so I can lead creative research and share learning resources consistently throughout the year.
My most recent writing/directing was a multi-year project that opened this past spring. Wastelands is an apocalyptic comedy about garbage and the pieces of trash who produce it. The clown and puppet show was performed with junk in an immersive/interactive environment made entirely out of single-use plastics. Wastelands was streamed on a custom-built, interactive digital platform in response to COVID-19 restrictions.
Land Acknowledgement
I live and create in Treaty 6 and 7 territories in amiskwaciywâskahikan-Edmonton and mohkínstsis-Calgary. I strive to be a de/colonizer and have historically benefited from the systemic racism and genocide of Canada’s indigenous peoples. I am committed to dismantling oppressive systems and fighting in solidarity with land and water protectors. Indigenous sovereignty and reconciliation should be the cornerstones of climate action because environmentalism without intersectionality is just white supremacy with trees. We are all treaty people.
Digital Citizenship Statement
As a creator impassioned by the artistic and technological possibilities of digital creation, I nevertheless acknowledge and grapple with issues of the technological waste crisis, human rights violations and environmental destruction within technological resource extraction (cobalt, lithium, etc.), surveillance capitalism, digital literacy and the digital divide, the right to repair, cyberbullying and hate groups, unequitable access to broadband, and the many other dark corners of the internet that are not just silly cat videos and dank memes.
