Deep - Shiori Saito

Deep – prototype (2010)
Live Cinema Performance

: : Sensory Performance

From March 23 to 26, 2010, as a part of 2010 Reel Artists Film Festival Calgary, I was attending and organizing Live Cinema Workshop with Mia Makela held @ CE3C, Alberta College of Art and Design.

Under the mentorship of Berlin-based digital artist, Mia Makela, 11 participants joined and presented live performance based on a graphic programming environment for interactive control over digital media, called Isadora that Mia was teaching us in this workshop.

This 4-day workshop was very intensive (learning the software and making a piece from scratch in 3 days!), but I learned a lot of fun things about Isadora and live cinema. Although I’ve had never done performance before so it was a big challenge (I was really, really nervous), this live, performative, “actually happening” and non-linear narrative inspired me a lot, making me want to do something like this again.

The participants consisted of hybrid of current students and alumni from different departments in ACAD, which made me so happy for having an event that unties artists from diverse disciplines (sculpture, drawing, photography, film, animation, web, interactivity and etcetera etcetera etcetera!).

My performance, Deep is still a prototype for future piece even though I made it in 3 days during the workshop. We created a pair of gloves that reads skin conductance of skin to generate sounds while I touch my face during this performance with experimental video of one nervous night. The gloves were working .. but they stop working as soon as we connect it to a projector thus, we were not able to use the gloves for public performance..which was very sad.