Translation is a multimedia dance performed on a vertical wall filled with the projected image of a lunar surface. Pendaphonics is a low-cost, versatile, and robust motion-sensing hardware-software system integrated with the rigging of Translation to detect the dancers' motion and provide real-time control of the virtual moonscape. Replacing remotely triggered manual cues with high-resolution, real-time control by the performers expands the expressive range and ensures synchronization of feedback with the performers' movements. This project is the first application of an ongoing collaboration between the Motivational Environments Research Group at Arizona State University (ASU) and STREB Extreme Action Company.

This paper focuses on two projects, Still Life No. 1 and Shadow Worlds | Writers' Rooms [Brontë Parsonage], to reveal the creative approaches the authors take to site, technology, and the self in their production of shadow worlds as sites of wonder. Informed by the uncanny (re-animation and the double) and an interest in the limen (thresholds in the real and virtual realms), the projects explore white light and infrared digital 3D scanning technologies as tools for capture and transformation. The authors will discuss how they suture the past with the present and ways that light slips secretly between us, revealing other realms.

Looking at new public-space formations today, the roles of new technologies grow not only prominent but also noticeably time-sensitive. Due in part to the rapidly changing nature of communications media and the diverse stakeholders, the theatrical “entr'acte” appears to be an apt model for forms and durations of public space with diverse performers (both human and material elements) of different sorts: entr'acteurs. How is public space as physical construct changing with new embedded forms of computing? How is a public formed? What new material sensibilities emerge? And what role does their essentially fleeting or transitional character play?

This paper develops a brief historical account of the architectural development of auditory space and identifies the “soundsphere” as an acoustic project that connects the interrelationships between material, spatial form and sound. The instrumental design of the soundsphere has focused on three types of shells: hard, static, and inflexible; physically manipulable; and immaterial (or electroacoustic). This frames a disciplinary and historical context for Resonant Chamber, a prototype-based design research project that develops a kinetic and interactive interior envelope system aimed at transforming the acoustic environment through dynamic spatial, material, and electroacoustic technologies.

This paper documents explorations into an alternative platform for immersive and affective expression within spatial mixed reality installation experiences. It discusses and analyzes experiments that use an advanced LED cube to create immersive, interactive installations and environments where visitors and visuals share a common physical space. As a visual medium, the LED cube has very specific properties and affordances, and optimizing the potential for such systems to create meaningful experiences presents many interlinked challenges. Two artworks exploring these possibilities are discussed. Both have been exhibited internationally in a variety of settings. Together with this paper, the works shed some light on the design considerations and experiential possibilities afforded by LED cubes and arrays. They also suggest that LED grids have potential as an emerging medium for immersive volumetric visualizations that occupy physical space.