The discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie

In this 1972 masterpiece, Luis Bu–uel makes his characters repeatedly try and fail to enjoy an opulent dining experience , Bunuel achieves this sense of incompleted closure by bringing into play a symbolic world of subconscious imagery. Thus, Bunuel's movie was inspiring both for the very setting chosen and for the dream-like state of mind that is fundamental as an element of narrative.

One of the most poignant scenes takes place when the two couples are invited to a misterious dinner. When they're finally sitting at the table, after several failed attempts to have a dinner, they realize they're on a stage. The curtains go up and they find themselves facing this hidden prompter, very angry at th efact that tehy don't remember the scripted lines they must recite Ñ and forget Ñ in front of an displeased audience. Dream sequences such as this one repeat throughout the movie and are quite characteristic of the surrealist movement, from which Bunuel never got free since his 1929 work with Dali "Un chien andalou".

Bill Lundberg

Lundberg is a video artist and co-director of the Transmedia Lab at the Fine Arts Department at UT. Most of his video art installations play with the surfaces of projection, suggesting spaces that are close to the audience. In some of them, the point of view is such that it draws the audience into the piece. Obviously, both these points werre crucial sources of inspiration for our project. In "Dinner" the surface of projection is an actual dinnertable. The projection consists of the characteristic gesture involved in a dinner, through a framing of projection which is cut off at the wrists level; there are four pairs of hands on the table. In the "cocktail" piece, Bill filmed a cocktail party from a bird's eye point of view. The piece shows constellations of social interactions that occur dring this cocktail. Again, this piece was invaluable in our exploration of the camera angle as a powerful aesthetic tool.

Oz team

The Oz team is the result of a collaboration betwen the Dept. of Computer Science and the Dept. of Drama at CMU. The initial mentor was Joseph Bates and the project gained wide recognition and publicity when Brenda Laurel mentioned it extensively in her clasic "Computers as Theatre".

The crucial concept involved in the Oz Team is the "interactor". This concept was put into practice by having a naif actor interacting with the actual actors. These get their directions from the stage director in real time and as the play develops, through head-phones. On the other hand, the audience is in a separate room and can control the channel which commands the point of view. The points of view are the ones obtained by the cameras mouted on helmet-like devices that each actor carries. The team is currently focusing on "believable agents" that act and use natural language in a real-time animated, visual world.

The way in which the work produced by the Oz Team influenced our work has to do with their emphasis on the phrase ``interactive drama''; on their own words, this is "the presentation by computers of rich, highly interactive worlds, inhabited by dynamic and complex characters, and shaped by aesthetically pleasing stories". In our final project, we want to stress the co-existence of the worlds that are crucial in the theoretical description of this interactive drama architecture: a simulated physical world, several characters, an interactor, a theory of presentation, and a drama manager. In our case we consider these to be, respectively:

an actual physical world where some of the objects are replaced by surfaces of projection,

the characters whose absence is identified by the background noise

the interactor is... yourself.

the theory of presentation being the concept behind our project where senses of closeness and touch are translated into layers of meaning.

the drama manager being the system design with specification of aural and visual layers.