Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Newton Armstrong is a composer/performer, ex of Melbourne, now ensconced in research at Princeton University in the US. His recent project for kids, SPACE MONKEYS, focused on interaction design and performance. It involves rethinking and reconfiguring generic game controllers as tools for facilitating alternative forms of conversation.

In its first incarnation, SPACE MONKEYS was the work of 5 students from the Princeton Young Achievers after-school program. According to Newton, the project could not have happened without the help of Janet Stern from the Arts Council of Princeton, Ann Marie Grocholski and Dana Hughes from Princeton Young Achievers, Emily Doolittle, Laura Blinkhorn and Ted Coffey.

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– Simon Sellars
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How did the Space Monkeys project come into being?

There were two basic motivations behind Space Monkeys, both of them negative. In standard school curricula there’s a heavy bias towards visual media in the teaching of design, and there’s also this implicit notion that technology is what manufacturers of technology tell you it is. So what I wanted to do was put together a project that would get kids thinking about designing with sound, and at the same time get them thinking about alternative applications of standard consumer technologies.

Why exactly did you want to get the kids thinking about alternative applications of standard consumer technologies?

It was entirely political. For the most part, kids are not being taught how to engage these technologies tactically. It’s bleak that in ten or twelve years of schooling the relationship to technology is only ever defined by a standardised repertoire of techniques. But these are the systems that are in place, and these techniques are being incorporated – actually registered in the sensory-motor mechanism – by all these millions of kids. This is not to say that the producers of consumer tech are all colluding in some dark conspiracy, but I do think it’s important to teach that media are not passive, impartial things.

How can it be of benefit to rethink a manufacturer’s stated purpose?

This varies with the medium. If we take some game controller or other as an example, then it’s unlikely that the manufacturer will state its purpose on the box. But this is a generic device and there’s already a presumption that it’s going to be used in a fairly diverse range of contexts. That a great many of these contexts involve the simulation of violence (whether that purpose is stated or not) is already sufficient reason to start thinking about alternative applications. The rationale behind the rethinking we did in Space Monkeys is pretty explicit, I think. We took this device that’s emblematic of anti-social practices (not just in terms of shooting stuff, but also in terms of the hours spent in seclusion while doing so), and we redefined it as a tool for facilitating technologically-enhanced conversations.

What would be a practical example of this outside of Playstation technology?

Again, I think these kinds of questions begin at the medium. Take some random piece of technology, examine how it works, think about the ends to which it is regularly put, take it apart, reverse engineer it, and so on. Already you’ll start devising any number of alternative scenarios and many of them will be both more interesting and more useful than the scenarios that are prescribed by the standard implementation. I’m not sure if this is what you mean by a practical example but there are plenty of people out there who are doing this kind of thing.

Did the kids respond enthusiastically?

They were mostly enthusiastic. I guess we were up against it, because the workshops were right after school and they just wanted to run around. Things seemed a bit underdone in the days before the gig, because we’d tried to cram a lot into the sessions and hadn’t really accounted for the many hours that would be spent on distractions. But the kids were right on top of it. And it seems likely now that they were paying more attention during the workshops – when appearing to be enthusiastic would of course have been uncool – than they were ever prepared to let on.

Did they require much impetus to think outside their normal perceptions of Playstation technology?

I wonder how you measure their normal perceptions of Playstation technology. Each of the kids developed a fairly unique gestural vocabulary with the controllers, and none of them ever looked as though they were driving a racing car or shooting zombies. In the early stages we were designing the mappings between controls and actions, and I think this provided some impetus for addressing the possibilities of the medium. But I don’t remember ever having to prod them. Kids are much more adept than adults when it comes to relearning or redefining performative habits.

What was your role in the final performance?

I didn’t do much at all in the final performance. I sat at the computer to make sure it didn’t crash, and I occasionally provided timed cues for the kids, as per their instructions.

Any plans for future Space Monkeys?

Sure. And a bunch of half-formulated plans for other projects with kids. I’d like to take a version of Space Monkeys on tour, where we’d spend something like a week in a single school, working with different groups of kids throughout the day. Then there’d be some kind of collective performance at the end of the week. But this will have to be next year. I’m much too busy with other stuff right now.

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>> NEWTON’S SPACE MONKEY SCHEMATICS
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SESSION 1: Readings/Recordings
Each of the kids records a reading from a favourite story. The recordings are edited and used as source material for the instrument design tasks in sessions 2 and 3.

SESSIONS 2 & 3: Interface/Instrument Design
During sessions 2 and 3, the kids design the interface between a generic (Playstation) game controller and a software framework for manipulating recorded sound. They have their own controllers in hand, but they work together to define a common set of mappings between controls and software tasks.

The design process begins with an examination of the components of both the controller and the software system. The kids are asked to describe the differences between button controls and continuous controls (throttles and directional pads), and to think about the ways that these differences might inform the mapping of controls to the various software objects.

They are then asked to suggest single words that describe the software objects (where each object is the abstract encapsulation of a sound manipulation process), and to design simple icons that represent each object graphically. For example, an object that represents the process of shifting a sound source around the soundfield might be named MOVE , and it might be assigned the icon:

The word/icon pairs corresponding to each of the software objects are represented as graphical objects in the form:These objects serve as the building blocks of the design during the controller mapping tasks. The kids sketch connections between controls and the objects on large pieces of paper. The sketches take the form:

This is an iterative process. Controls are connected to objects in various combinations, and the pros and cons of different designs are discussed among the group. By the end of session 3, the kids will have arrived at a final design and the interface will be fully implemented.

SESSIONS 4, 5 & 6: Performance Design
Over the course of the last 3 sessions the kids improvise with the instruments in an environment based on experimentation, listening and discussion. The pieces are recorded and the kids have the opportunity to listen back to them. They are asked to describe the patterns at play and — on the basis of their response — to consider how they might redesign the relationships among the different objects in the system, and among the different performers in the group.

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..: LINKS
>> Newton Armstrong
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