Scale 0 - Augmenting the Gothic

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Scale 0 - Augmenting the Gothic

Scale 0 - Augmenting the Gothic

“A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality”

By attempting to Augment the Gothic, a polychromatic narrative has formed between the realms of the physical (and its bodies), the fabricated virtual, and the indefinable psyche or imagination. The result is a contrived dramaturgic set-up which becomes a parody for the Gothic fiction from which it was initially inspired.

Playing on the human faculty of perception was central to the story. It is demonstrated on many different levels. Firstly, the audience’s perception of the performance as a whole is affected by the overall dramaturgic set-up - the setting of the story, as well as the course the plot takes – like the introduction of other characters wielding the i-Phone. Our understanding of the character also develops throughout the performance, and she has been deliberately ‘marked’ to evoke strong connotations and highlight social stereotypes within the viewer. The third level of perception operates within a different context altogether, and is the faculty of the technology (in this case the software Junaio coupled with the device the i-Phone) to perceive symbols and signs and react to them. These three levels of perception have allowed for a narrative which explores ideas of identity whilst we are thrown deeper and deeper into a world of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, to the point where it begins to touch the body.

The Gothic Context

Gothic Fiction

“The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition the disability of being female.”[1]

With the emergence of Gothic fiction came the brand new domain of female authors. Social reform was taking place with the industrial evolution and the bourgeois society which came with it. The female Gothic novel became a symbol of femininity and sexuality and served to overthrow the classical patriarchal set-up of the domestic ideal. Insidious notions of body-image were epitomized by fashion garments like the corset, and women were portrayed as decorated ‘ideals of perfection’.

Gothic authors sought to overthrow this controlled state of consciousness in favour of a freedom of expression, indulgence in extreme emotion, and the creation of often supernatural atmosphere and mood. Authors such as Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters and Ann Radcliffe, used a particular technique - the Supernatural Explained. In this, the terrorizing and frightening acts that take place in the text are eventually traced back to natural causes. The narratives usually involved a struggle between man and woman – mostly a male villain pursuing a victimised female. However it is the poised conduct of the heroines throughout these traumatic events which rendered the narratives successful and highly popular with their female (and male) contemporary readers. Young women saw these fantastical terrors as symbols for issues in their own lives and helped them deal with issues of identity and place in society.

Gothic Subculture

Modern Gothic or “Neo-Gothic” subculture also plays its role in “A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality”. Concerned largely with mood and aestheticism, the movement has no manifesto – nor any political or religious affiliations. Individuality, creativity and intellectualism are all concerns of the movement alongside a basic set of simplified ethics. Recognition and grief over what Goths consider to be the evils that mainstream culture has chosen to ignore or forget has paved the way for their extreme aesthetic sensibilities which can be seen very clearly in their dress and music. It “is not so much a way of life but a state of hopelessness – amplified with cynicism and derision, provocation and aggression in order to stifle despair”[2]. They deliberately pursue disassociation, largely through aesthetic means by piercings, tattoos, black clothes and their obsession with macabre imagery.

My Gothic Fantasy Narrative

The narrative that I have set up seeks to portray a victimized female character, awakened from her sleep of fantasy to find herself a kind of “freak-show” to society. She is adorned in black and decorated with tattoos and is at once meant to be vulnerable and victimized, while also retaining a certain predatory and unstable presence. An ambiguous fantasy world is created for her, and we wonder if her presence is in reality, or within her own psyche.

The villains here are other women. They are women from modern society, wielding their weapon – the i-Phone. They manipulate and attack the sleeping heroine, attempting to forcibly return her to her reality and her true identity.

The Marker

Women and Tattoos

“Examined against the shifting social backdrop of Western Culture in the last two centuries, tattoos serve as touch stones for women’s changing roles and evolving concerns during the most progressive era in women’s history, and as pass keys to the psyches of women who are rewriting accepted notions of feminine beauty and self expression.”[3]

The act of being tattooed has transformative powers for women, and can symbolise self-empowerment especially after traumatic events. Tattoos also serve to deliberately or unintentionally shift “the tattooed person” into a specific sub-culture along with which often brings social stigma. In the case of those who call themselves Goths, this choice is deliberate, a special marker or insignia which signifies rejection of the norm and affiliation with those on the margins of society.

The Marker > The Glyph > The Tattoo

Signs and markers are particularly relevant with today’s ever evolving computer iconography. Human perception allows us to make the link between the signifier (the marker) and the signified. “Umberto Eco defines “signs” as everything which stands for something else based on our social conventions.”[4]

Since the beginning of time humans have sought to signify and categorize physical objects and the non-physical - cultural ideas, information and association. A simple example of this working for a cultural group is the symbol used by Early Christians which allowed them to meet in secret by means of an “invitation-only” marker (traced into the dirt or otherwise).

The burgeoning computer-age has seen the number of visual symbols we humans see everyday rise exponentially. This will continue to increase with the development of Augmented Reality, whereby we will not only see imagery in the physical world around us, or in the virtual world of the computer, but in a pervasive amalgamation of the two. In this case the Augmented Reality is based on the idea that it must be activated by a symbol, which then causes a programmed outcome.

So this marker essentially serves to give us access to something – which we may or may not know yet. However, at this stage in the technology, both the human component of the equation and the technology (the i-Phone through Junaio) must be able to recognise the insignia.

The Gothic Heroine and her Tattoos

“In a culture where surfaces matter, skin, the largest organ, is the scrim on which we project our greatest fantasies and deepest fears about our bodies.”[5]

The heroine’s extreme tattoos serve as a voluntary branding. They help to place her inside her fictitious gothic fantasy world, and instantly signify her as different from the real people and from the audience. They are only one part of her heavily costumed appearance, which serves to evoke in the audience all the preconceptions they have when experiencing the narrative.

The tattoos transcend this aesthetic misconception however, and become the main subject matter in question here. They are integral to the project in that they serve to be the augmenting device. Their function is to connect the female protagonist’s fantasy with what we perceive is her reality. However, they also operate on an even higher level – that of wearable augmented reality. They allow for the development of the powerful connection between the body and the virtual.

The Technology – Making “A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality”

“A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality” was made possible by the application Junaio available on Androids and the i-Phone. A “Glue” developer channel was established, in which the marker and the “revealed” information was set-up. When the i-Phone is directed at the marker image – Junaio activates text, a still image, or moving image.

Accompanying “A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality” is the work produced for submission B, with slight variation. The nature of the story requires quite a personal exchange between the characters, thus I wanted to maintain a degree of face-to-face interaction between the heroine and her on-looker. In this case the protagonist is the passive participant at the point of communication. Hidden behind her created identity, she must be approached in order to begin the performance. The active participant/“audience” yields the iPhone, which becomes the key to the Augmented Reality experience.

Again the body becomes the performance device, and since Augmented Reality is the addition of Real Life and Virtual Reality, it seemed piquant to include the protagonist’s own physical presence in Real Life in the workings of the Augmented Reality Design. Her marker then, signifies that she is in costume, and invites the participants to “unlock” her true identity simply by the act of directing the i-Phone. In this way the costuming and masking is removed.

The Success of My Proposal

My original conception of this Augmented Reality fragment of the design has proved to be successful in terms of its overall completion. The process works, however due to slight technical issues it is not as poetic as it could be.

The first issue arose as a need to solve the problem of the protagonist’s false identity. In the end a still image of reality worked much more smoothly than the short film which had been uploaded for submission B.

The marker was the major technical obstacle to overcome in the scheme. Several images were rejected by Junaio itself, yet they were under the recommended KB limit. Others were accepted by the channel-creator yet failed when tested. Testing of a tattoo on the character’s skin also failed, but this is probably due to the image submitted on the channel in conjunction with a poor “tattoo” rendered on the skin. On the performance day of submission B, the marker, which had previously been tested and had worked smoothly, failed to work as some of the image had been slightly lost, in conjunction with a different set of lighting conditions. This is one of the major limitations of the technology. On a larger scale, if one was to attempt to set up some kind of “tattooed community” which held information on their skin, they would have a hard time keeping the lighting variables constant enough to yield a consistent enough result. The ephemeral nature of the body also comes into play here. As humans grow and age their skin becomes stretched and irregular. This means that any information imbedded into the skin would need to be of a temporal nature.

An area which was lost in the fabrication of submission B was the idea presented in submission A, of the imagination. This came to be depicted in “A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality” when the heroine falls inward into her own created world and becomes who she would like to be. This is integral to the subject of the Gothic addressed here; it serves to enrich the overall interactive dramaturgy of the performance, and sets up the satirical poke at Gothic fiction.

Bibliography

Buurman, G.M. (2005) Total Interaction: Theory and practice of a new paradigm for the design disciplines, Basel, Switzerland, Birkhauser.

Byron, G. and Punter, D. (2004) The Gothic, Malden, MA, Blackwell Pub.

Celant G. (2001) Marina Abramovic: Public Body Installations and Objects 1965-2001, Milano, Italy, Edizioni Charta.

Coyne, R. (1999) Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.

da Vinci Nichols, N. (1983) Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Bronte, J. Fleenor (Ed) The Female Gothic, Montreal, Eden Press.

Gröning, K. (1997) Decorated Skin: A World Survey of Body Art. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Mifflin, M. (1997) Bodies of subversion: a secret history of women and tattoo, New York, NY, Juno Books.

[1] Nichols, Nina da Vinci. "Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Bronte" in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983.

[2] Gröning, Karl. Decorated Skin: A World Survey of Body Art. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1997. pp 234-5

[3] Mifflin, Margot. Bodies of subversion: a secret history of women and tattoo, New York, NY, Juno Books, (1997) pp. vi

[4] Späth, Jürgen. “Question on the Method of Visual Design.” In Total Interaction: Theory and practice of a new paradigm for the design disciplines, edited by G.M Buurman.143-164. Basel, Switzerland, Birkhauser, 2005. Pp 145

[5] Mifflin, Margot. Bodies of subversion: a secret history of women and tattoo, New York, NY, Juno Books, (1997) pp. i

Scale 0 - Augmenting the Gothic

Here is a sneak peak at the Animation entitled "A Gothic Tale of Fantasy and Reality"

Scale 0 - Media

Gothic Deviations

Gothic Deviations is an Experimental studio project for my third year of my bachelor of Architectural Studies at the University of Auckland.

The scheme encompasses many aspects. The varying narratives within the idea of the Gothic are expressed using an incredibly wide range of different media such as Stereo-lithography Printing (3-D), illustration, models and marquettes, photography, film, animation, and the "architectural drawing".

I have divided my Gothic Deviations into five major projects ranging from scale zero through four.

Scale zero is a submission for my Digital Media 373 paper "Contingency and Praxis" run by Dermott Mcmeel and is a study in Augmented Reality and performance.

Scales one to four are concepts for my main paper - Design 5 tutored by Judy Cockeram. Scale one is represented by a piece of Jewellery at 1:1, scale two is a jewellery box to encompass scale one (1:1 and 1:4), scale three is a multi-media and light projection set-design, and scale four is a resolved theatre to house all of the work beneath in the tier.

Each student was assigned an Architectural Theorician, who became the client for which the work was designed. Neil Spiller, and Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, has been the muse and guide of the entire project Gothic Deviations.