Love this painting wherein you see me smear'd

The Stratford Festival and Ex Machina's technical pros get a CrossFit workout with Robert Lepage's Coriolanus. 

A behind-the-scenes on the show's infrared-tracking, projection-mapped "video sandwich":



And here's a reminder that you've got to have atoms to pixel on:

Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery

I'm delighted that Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic will finally be getting its North American debut as part of the exhibition Public Notice at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

The exhibition is thoughtfully timed for the centenary of the 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic (which, if not for wartime media censorship in countries other than Spain, could just as easily have been dubbed the "Kansas flu").

If you're in the Toronto area this fall, please come play the game!

Update December 2018: 

Please see this page for a talk I gave at the Ideas Digital Forum, a two-day symposium hosted by the The Robert McLaughlin Gallery for the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. 

https://www.alisonhumphrey.com/2018/12/inoculating-at-ideas-digital-forum.html

And the gallery's Facebook trailer for the game is below:

Update October 2018: 

Please see this page for some gorgeous photos from the show, along with the full exhibition catalogue:
https://www.alisonhumphrey.com/2018/10/shadowpox-antibody-politic-at-robert.html

Public Notice 

September 15, 2018 - January 19, 2019

Alison Humphrey, Ruth Cuthand, Elaine Whittaker, Ho Tam, Stephen Andrews, Abraham Anghik Ruben, Kim Morgan

Elaine Whittaker, I Caught it at The Movies (detail), 2013, Petri dishes, digital images, mylar, gouache, agar, Halobacterium sp. NRC-1

Exhibition description:

"A hundred years ago, when World War I was winding down and peace was right around the corner, a new strain of influenza swept the world, killing more people than the war. The 1918 Spanish Influenza is considered the deadliest outbreak of infectious disease in recorded history.

World Building, Wicked Problems, and the Civic Imagination

Just listened to "Ann Pendleton-Jullian on World Building, Architecture, and Wicked Problems," an episode of the podcast How Do You Like It So Far? with Colin Maclay and Henry Jenkins. I found this interview so resonant for my research that I needed it in text form, so after some YouTube auto-transcription and a whole lot of cleanup, I'm posting it here in the hopes it will be useful to others too.

Here's the audio:



Here's the blurb:

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect by training but increasingly she is being hired as a world-builder, someone who can put into process a collaborative, multidisciplinary mode of thinking which approaches complex problems in a systemic way. Her professional and civic practice has been informed by ideas from speculative fiction and production design, including by Alex McDowell, who we featured on our program last week. As we explore some of the implications of Ready Player One, we decided to dedicate these two programs to the ways world building has evolved from as a way of developing on-screen fictional worlds to a way of confronting challenging problems in our own world. 

Alex and Ann teamed up for the RiLAo project, where students and experts around the world collaborated to imagine and document an imaginary floating city which contained aspects of Los Angeles and Rio De Janeiro. Ann has also developed a forthcoming book, Design Unbound, with John Seely Brown (formerly of Xerox PARC) which releases this fall. I had previously conducted an expansive interview with Ann for this blog about one segment from the book which introduced their concept of the Pragmatic Imagination. 

This discussion is high flying and rapid-fire: she was racing to the airport and we were happy to grab a few minutes with her. Afterwards, Colin and I discuss world-building more generally and explore some of our own thoughts on Ready Player One.

And here's the transcript:

Ann Pendleton-Jullian on World Building, Architecture, and Wicked Problems

[Intro excerpt] Ann Pendleton-Jullian: ...And world building isn't just saying, "Okay, now I'll entertain them, what a great idea!” It's to say, “What are the repercussions? What would it mean for this? What would it mean for that? Who would be involved? How would they be involved?" And when you can actually begin to allow yourself to play it out, only then can you go, "Oh, maybe that's okay. Maybe that would work." There's this way we stop ourselves at the barrier of constraints, and not see all the other things we could be doing.

Cultures of Participation: Arts, Digital Media and Politics

I'm looking forward to presenting this week at a conference titled Cultures of Participation – Arts, Digital Media and Politics at Aarhus University in Denmark. Here's the conference blurb:

Over the last decade cultural participation and cultures of participation have received increased (and renewed) attention within different academic disciplines, cultural institutions and societal sectors – and over time also more critical reflection. On policy levels, citizen participation and engagement are emphasized as key components of democratic societies and these policies are currently being practiced and put to work at cultural institutions and cultural houses, in artistic production, in architectural and urban ‘smart city’ designs and various digital media spaces. But what are the characteristics of cultural participation and how do these manifest themselves in cultures of participation?

There are some intriguing-sounding presentations listed, including keynotes by Lisanne Gibson on "Museums and Participation – Who Goes (and Who Doesn’t)?," Shannon Jackson on "Civic Re-Enactment and Public Re-Assembly," and Zizi Papacharissi on "Affective Publics: News Storytelling, Sentiment and Twitter."

Here's the abstract for my talk, part of the session "Body, Health Technologies and Participation." 

Imagination, Inoculation and the Cosmopolitics of Co-immunity 

Shadowpox is a research-creation doctoral dissertation testing a science fiction fantasy framework for young adults' imaginative civic engagement and public health problem-solving. Its participatory storyworld posits a new disease, a virus composed of living shadow. Augmented-reality technology projection-maps the fictional pathogen onto the actor’s body using live-animated digital effects, and an online video portal, the International Shadowpox Research Network, chronicles the testing of a new vaccine at the height of a pandemic, through the eyes of laboratory trial volunteers whose stories are co-created by drama students in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

The Shadowpox project explores co-immunity (also called community or herd immunity), a participatory biomedical effect created when enough individuals in a community are vaccinated to make it difficult for a disease to travel from person to person. This population-level protection is achieved not by the actions of a single hero, but by the dragon-slaying courage of hundreds of thousands. Yet public participation in co-immunity has been undermined in recent years by a polarized social media debate over the validity of the scientific consensus on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, rooted in a complex mix of ancient fears and modern anxieties.

The first half of this talk critically reflects on the procedural rhetoric of phase one of the project, Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic, a full-body video game exhibited during the 2017 World Health Assembly in Geneva. Then, moving from the casual participation of gallery game-play into the more complex augmented reality role-play of the current second phase, Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm, the presentation will interrogate the superhero genre as a storytelling and narrative analysis framework for young adults’ exploration of affect, belonging, and the cosmopolitics of voluntary participation in the collective good.

For more information please visit: www.shadowpox.org.

Fantasists and Sociologists

"At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. A scientist who creates a monster in the laboratory; a librarian in the library of Babel; a wizard unable to cast a spell; a space ship having trouble in getting to Alpha Centauri: all these may be precise and profound metaphors of the human condition. 

"Fantasists, whether they use the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist – and a good deal more directly – about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. 

"For after all, as great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope." 

– Ursula Le Guin, National Book Award acceptance speech (1972), in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

A fire has gone out.

But then again...

"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?" 

– The Dispossessed (1974)

The Art and Science of Immunization

“The Art and Science of Immunization” is a University of Toronto Jackman Humanities Institute working group I've been part of for the past year and a half. (See this post for more, including Shadowpox's Canadian debut!)

In an interview this week, co-lead Katherine Shwetz says:

"Vaccine hesitance is one of the most perplexing (and urgent) phenomena in contemporary health... [It] has profound implications for public health, medicine, social work, and also the issue of narrative competence—how do vaccine-hesitant parents parse health information to inform their decisions, and how can healthcare professionals effectively respond to false narratives about vaccines and health?  

"Our group demonstrates that an interdisciplinary approach to these questions leads to an understanding of vaccine hesitancy that is theoretically nuanced, scientifically accurate, and grounded in the lived experience of vaccine hesitant people and the healthcare providers who are responding to this problem." 

In addition to a mind-expanding reading list, the best thing about being a part of this group is the chance to have a long-running conversation with fellow PhD students working in very unfamiliar languages and cultures: epidemiology, immunology and public health. It’s made me realize that immunization, at its core, is a deliberate action to get acquainted with "foreigners"!

Presenters at "The Art and Science of Immunization: A Symposium" this spring, where Shadowpox had its Canadian premiere

Image: Shadowpox at RADA: Abraham Popoola (photo: Simon Eves)

Playing Shadowpox

Some of my favourite photos from the Shadowpox installation at <Immune Nations> in Geneva this summer (more photos on the opening of the exhibition):

Monica Geignos, First Lady of Namibia, starts the game by selecting a region from the world map

Steven Hoffman, Scientific Director, CIHR Institute of Population & Public Health, chooses a country 

An inventive player finds a workaround for an oversight in our user interface, and...

...his little brother chooses the vaccine to protect a community of sprites not much shorter than him. 

Lab coats aren't chic, but they do show the pox!

Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, Minister of Health for Ghana, stands in front of the Shadowpox tent
to host the farewell for outgoing WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, and then...

...goes inside to rack up an impressive Protection Score!

Not to be outdone, Jane Philpott, Canada's Minister of Health, takes a turn
with the expert guidance of York Augmented Reality Lab Director Caitlin Fisher

A wide-angle shot showing both screens. The projection is identical, but flipped
on the player's side, so it can be viewed right-way around outside the tent.
(Check out the Kinect sensor on the shelf at the top left.)

Huge thanks to all the players who enjoyed the game at UNAIDS. Next stop: Canada!

Breakout Shakespeare

After seeing the Donmar Warehouse's intriguing verbatim musical The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall's Relationship with Kids Company (check out this musically-informed review by one of its MP subjects), I got a second dose of Josie Rourke's Donmar with their cinema broadcast of Phyllida Lloyd's Julius Caesar this week.



Thrillingly, the whole cast is female, with the framing device that the show is being staged by a drama group in a women's prison. The Donmar collaborated with arts charity Clean Break, which also contributed two graduates to the company.

This is the first of a "Shakespeare Trilogy" with the same concept – I managed to see the second, Henry IV, on stage in 2015 – and when The Guardian calls it "one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years," I thoroughly agree. It fruitfully disrespects not only the gender line, but the colour bar, and class and regional-accent silos as well. What if this weren't a one-off, but part of a sea change in how brave we're willing to be in our make-believe?

All three productions will be broadcast, but no dates are listed yet for Canada. (Get a move on, Cineplex!)

In New York earlier this year, the cast recorded videos to give more voice to their prison characters:

Performance Capture in Live Theatre

I spent last night in an alternate future. The RSC's Tempest had its press night at the Barbican Theatre, and I finally had the chance to see the show in the flesh after following its development online for ages.

This is the kind of mainstream breakthrough for performance-capture theatre that I've been waiting for for half a decade, from our 2013 mocap Midsummer Night's Dream at Theatre@York, through subsequent live-animated collaborations Faster than Night and The Augmentalist with innovator Pascal Langdale, and now the forthcoming Shadowpox. I was mesmerized.



I don't regret being out of town for the Tempest's cinema broadcast in March. It's an odd irony that as much as theatre almost always loses something indefinable by being filmed, theatre with projected effects (screen-on-stage-on-screen) loses double:

Annemarie Hou on Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic at UNAIDS

Annemarie Hou reflects on Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic, part of the exhibition <ImmuneNations> at UNAIDS, Geneva, Switzerland (2 July 2017).

Transcript

My name is Annemarie Hou, and I am the chief of staff at UNAIDS. I'm also one of the artists participating in this exhibition. I'm in a very interesting space here in that we are working on global health issues, policy issues and political issues, and I also happen to curate the art. 

So when Steven [Hoffman] said that he wanted to bring all of these different disciplines together to look at how advocacy works and art works in conjunction with policy, it sounded like a really interesting opportunity that I couldn't pass up. 

The Lancet and Canadian Art review Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic

An article today in the UK medical journal The Lancet reviews Shadowpox and the <Immune Nations> exhibition at UNAIDS for the 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva.

James Smith writes that "the eight artworks in this exhibition demonstrate how to engage productively and provocatively with policy makers and the public." After describing Jesper Alvær's Upstream the Cold Chain, Kaisu Koski's Conversations with Vaccine-Critical Parents, and Sean Caulfield's Anatomy Table, Smith continues:

"Of the remaining contributions, one of the most engaging is Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic, developed by Alison Humphrey, Caitlin Fisher, Steven J Hoffman, and Lalaine Ulit-Destajo. 

This interactive installation quite literally renders visible the invisible, as participants must choose whether or not to be vaccinated against the 'shadowpox' pathogen, before having the opportunity to trace the impact of their decision as an animated population is exposed to the threat of infection. 

On completion, participants are able to view their 'infection collection' or 'protection collection', as the population is transformed from an aggregate statistic with a series of detailed individual stories. 

This is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity."

(Click to enlarge)

The journal Canadian Art also reviewed the exhibition:

“Another unique artistic take on the global vaccination issue is Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic by a Canadian team: media artist Alison Humphrey, digital storyteller Caitlin Fisher and interaction designer LaLaine Ulit-Destajo, as well as [Steven] Hoffman himself. 

This “gamification of an epidemic,” as Hoffman puts it, invites visitors to try to wipe projections of various 'pox' off of their bodies. The number of pox to eliminate is scaled for whatever country the visitor has chosen, and thus underlines the way that resourcing affects risk around the world, says Hoffman. ...

Emotion certainly is something that runs high around vaccination debates, and one aim of <Immune Nations> is to find other ways of working with and through those emotions rather than just allowing the debate to become polarized.... 

'It is particularly timely now, given that we see around the world people questioning the role of science and alternative facts,' says Hoffman. 'It’s really important to us that we engage across sectors and find a new language in which to ensure people can be as healthy as possible.'”

Shadowpox at RADA, video stills, 2016, “Immune Nations” at Galleri KiT, Trondheim, Norway. Photo: Natalie Loveless. Left to right: Skye Hallam, Fehinti Balogun, Tom Martin, Sayre Fox, Maisie Robinson, Natasha Cowley, Abraham Popoola, Jamael Westman and Polly Misch.