In the latest of a range of Shadowplay collaborations that I and Roger have set up, back in November we went to spend the weekend with Klanghaus at their beautiful premises in Norwich. I first met these guys at the Edinburgh Fringe after attending their wonderful Inhaus show and I thought, maybe, they’d be interested in what Shadowplay can do, so I reached out.
Image taken from KlangHaus’s Last Haus on Earth show, featuring images created using Shadowplay
First of all, I just want to say a huge thank you to the whole group for being incredibly warm, inviting, and convivial. Thank you!
Second, a quick note on what happened. We tentatively set up a bare-bones version of the Shadowplay set up in the rehearsal space and experimented with a few different ideas, from adding elements of audio-reactivity, inviting dancers to cast the Shadows, using a piano keyboard as the input image, and many other things. Before long we handed over the controls via our PromptJ interface to the group’s filmmaker Sal Pittman. In Sal’s hands we saw a whole new creative spectrum get opened up, with a combination of prompts and manipulating the input images, Sal took the AI model to places we’d never seen before and quickly established a kind of Klanghaus aesthetic. Of course we couldn’t have anticipated exactly how this collaboration would go, but, this is precisely the sort of thing we had hoped for.
Here’s a quick video showing some extracts of our weekend’s experiments:
Ultimately the group used Shadowplay to generate video content which was used in their Last Haus on Earth shows over the Christmas holidays, saying the system ‘exploded our creative process’. We’re looking forward to working with them again soon!
We are starting to develop the idea of Shadowplay (and our novel user interfaces that sit behind it) as a kind of research and collaboration platform, so if you have any ideas for this please do reach out.
