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!
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 Guardiancalls 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:
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 NightandThe 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 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.
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."
The journal Canadian Artalso 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.
<Immune Nations>, an evidence-based art exhibition about the constructive role that art can play in global political discourse around life-saving vaccines, opened yesterday and will run till the end of June 2017.
Steven J. Hoffman, Alison Humphrey and Caitlin Fisher in front of the tent for Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic
Monica Geingos, First Lady of Namibia and UNAIDS Special Advocate,
playing Shadowpox at the <Immune Nations> opening
The Lancetreviewed the exhibition, calling Shadowpox "undoubtedly one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity."
La Repubblica quoted Hoffman describing the paradox that the exhibition highlights: "On the one hand, millions of the world's poorest people do not have access to vaccines, while on the other, millions of wealthy people refuse to vaccinate themselves or their children because of unfounded safety fears."
Technical director LaLaine Ulit-Destajo, Theatre@York technician James McQuay and I brought the Shadowpox project to its North American debut this week at a symposium hosted by the Art and Science of Immunization working group at the University of Toronto's Jackman Humanities Institute, in conjunction with Public Health Ontario.
This event explored the breadth of perspectives on immunization issues and how those in arts and science fields can work together to address them. A major focus of the day was on vaccine hesitancy. There was significant discussion around how a humanities approach can inform how we communicate with the public and weave a narrative to help bridge the gap between science and the public. Attendees were a diverse mix, with backgrounds in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, history, English, anthropology and even theatre studies....
Allison Humphrey, a PhD student in Cinema and Media Arts from York University, introduced her interactive motion capture game, Poxémon. Players users use their arms and legs to fight off the “shadowpox” disease that attacks the individual, meanwhile trying to protect 100 other characters on the screen from infection. This game helps players to understand how infectious diseases can spread in a population, or be protected by vaccination. Attendees had the opportunity to demo the game during breaks.
Their video even includes footage (at 0:40) of Shadowpox in action:
Shadowpox made its debut in Trondheim, Norway, at <Immune Nations>, an evidence-based art exhibition about the constructive role that art can play in global political discourse around life-saving vaccines.
The strapline reads, "What does the future hold for digital storytelling in theatre?" and the speakers include the visionary Sarah Ellis, RSC Head of Digital Development. I had a chance to talk with Sarah this summer about the breathtakingly ambitious production, and all the brain-bending, tech-twisting challenges that go into animating in real time, live on stage.
Mark Quartley as Ariel and Simon Russell Beale as Prospero (photo: Topher McGrillis)
I'm hoping I'll also have a chance to see the final show in person, even if the cinema broadcast makes it to Toronto, because one of those many vexed questions is what surfaces and substances to project the avatar onto once you've cooked it up in the computer.
Judging by the production photos, it looks like the RSC's answer is: "Everything that's nailed down, and maybe a few people who aren't." So it would be a shame to have to squint at that 360-degree experience through the keyhole of a movie screen.
But in a way, watching a theatre actor... tracked by infrared motion-capture cameras and inertial sensors... driving real-time digital animation... projected onto a cylindrical scrim and a thrust stage... all recaptured on HD cameras... and broadcast into cinemas around the world? That's no more meta than watching a male actor play the female Rosalind pretending to be the male Ganymede role-playing "Rosalind" so that Orlando can hone his wooing chops.
Simon Russell Beale as Prospero and Mark Quartley as Ariel (photo: Topher McGrillis)
