August 14, 2014 by katie
The Protagonist project is ahead of its time. The ideas are sound, the research relatively easy to complete, and the concept is strong. The problem is that current computer technology and proprietary ownership of that technology makes creating a Protagonist platform difficult and somewhat expensive. At a future date, and perhaps not that far in the future, this kind of cross-platform video creation will be possible. At that point the technology will be used by a wide array of businesses and individuals. From my own research, I know that the Protagonist platform would create the kind of video content that funeral directors and other organisations working on personal memorialisation projects would find quite useful. One of the other groups that will benefit from this technology is archivists, many of whom will encounter enormous difficulties in the near future when it comes to storing digital content and information for prolonged periods of time.
For me, the entire project, and working with Katie, pointed towards what kind of future these online content platforms are working towards. At this point and time it seems far-fetched that one single company or government entity will own and run all online content platforms, so these disparate groups could end up creating a Protagonist-like system that runs across the groups. I have my doubts that this will happen, but it could.
The project also opened up another point for me, which is this: Maybe it is completely acceptable that most of a person’s online content is eventually lost and ultimately deleted. We first world Homo sapiens currently live in a historical moment in which the concept and practice of information preservation is crucial for an individual’s identity. I’m no longer convinced that our future cousins will necessarily view a lifetime’s worth of digital content with such reverence. Indeed, the difficulties in maintaining accessibility to that information as computer technology changes is itself alone a fundamental issue. Many people fail to realise, I think, that internet years are significantly shorter than human years.
Dr. John Troyer
Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society
University of Bath
by katie
We contracted two developers, independently of each other, to draw up a Technical Feasibility and Specification document for the build of a prototype of the Protagonist service. We wanted to get different ideas about how the problems could be solved, and get a sense of what approaches we could take.
We provided this Requirements Document as something to work from.
Here are their reports:
by katie
Research
We undertook research into existing systems, ideas, companies and academic research to build our understanding of the area.
Pinterest Board with links to projects, people and services of interest to the project
http://www.pinterest.com/otherwayworks/protagonist/
Market Research
Focus Group – Bees in a Tin Event, Birmingham, February 2014
An initial session to gauge potential user interest, and discover what kind of features would be appealing in a product like this.
Focus Group – Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, April 2014
A drop in session. Using printed versions of the online survey to provoke discussion and feedback. To gain specific feedback on video structure, which events were thought ‘important’, and highlight any concerns around privacy.
Online Survey
A survey was put together using Google Forms, and disseminated via online networks, to provide us with a wider range of feedback on our proposals. A summary of responses can be seen in Appendix.
Above is the graph of responses to the question “Which social networks hold your richest content?”:
by katie
The test user for the film, Hannah Nicklin, has kindly agreed to our use of her content in this context to allow us to illustrate the Protagonist concept.
The test user was selected because of her active use of many social media platforms, which would provide us with a good range of content to work with.
The user’s content was selected manually, using the Specification as a guideline for the selection process.
The animation effects were created by animator Hazel O’Brien, using paper folding and green screen filming. The content used is in a digital format. These effects could easily become templates.
The music was composed and produced in response to the film by Mark Day.
Some brief initial feedback from the test user after seeing her film for the first time
It was nicely esoteric
I couldn’t tell how it had decided to choose some stuff
It was about 65%70% on the money with what was significant (i.e. it didn’t know I was broken up with on graduation night!)
It was really nice to see family
The ‘on this date’ stuff was nice but it made me feel like an asshole I was complaining about having holes in my shoes on the day the first black president of the USA was elected.
The design was lovely
I was engaged the whole way through
I didn’t feel like it represented me
I did feel like it represented me online
I wanted there to be more Instagram because I like that place most
I wondered what other people were saying back to me, it felt odd for me to exist in a vacuum using content from such social space
I wanted it to choose some music from stuff I like on Soundcloud
by katie
The aesthetic of the film received positive responses, and people appreciated the home-made look.
The ‘on this day in history’ snapshots had a good impact, and are technically the easiest to select user content for (the primary selection method being the datestamp, which is a universal item of metadata).
An example of this is shown in two screen shots from the design fiction film above.
by katie
Funeral Directors
In the future, when there will be more electronic, online documentation of peoples’ whole lives, the Funeral industry would be a strong market for this type of fully automated product. At this moment in time, manual selection of images from online and offline sources by friends and family using an image slideshow programme will produce the best effect.
Gift Experience
As a direct to consumer service Protagonist would be best pitched at the gift market. Our market research suggested that people would be more likely to buy the service for a friend or family member than for themselves (which would feel/be perceived to be vain or self-obsessed). This may work better on an annual model (showing the user’s year online, rather than their whole life), to allow for repeat custom.
Brand/Event Marketing Campaign
The service could be built for a one-off brand marketing campaign if commissioned.
A focus on an individual’s, or a group of friends’ experience of a specific event as documented on social media could be a good adaptation of the service for this market.
by katie
In the last 12 months there has been a burgeoning of services and tools exploring the challenge of drawing out a narrative from users’ recent and archived photo and video content. Many of these are single platform services, often developed by the platforms themselves.
Facebook LookBack Film
https://www.facebook.com/lookback / https://www.facebook.com/help/206982576163229/
A free automatically created 1 minute film, showing highlights from a user’s Facebook timeline. Uses chronology and number of likes to identify usable content. Only displays content uploaded by the user (not content that the user is tagged in). Latterly added a post-video manual editing function, which allowed users to swap photos in and out of the video within the existing structure.
Carousel by Dropbox
https://www.carousel.com/
Free display tool for Dropbox users to apply to their content on Dropbox.
Google+ Stories, Movies, and Auto Awesome
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/google-stories-and-movies-memories-made.html
Free tools for Google+ users to apply to a user’s content on Google+. Auto Awesome automatically creates daily video edits of photos and videos shot that day, with customisable options.
The Wilderness Downtown
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
HTML5 video experience by Arcade Fire. The user enters the location of their childhood home or school, and the programme uses Google Maps and Streetview to customise a music video with this location.
Museum of Me
http://www.intel.com/museumofme/r/index.htm
HTML5 video experience by Intel that uses a Facebook App to create a virtual museum fly-through from your Facebook content.
Take this Lollipop
http://www.takethislollipop.com/
A ‘scare’ film in HTML5, highlighting the unexpected and unpleasant ways in which a Facebook user’s content may be viewed or used when they allow a Facebook App access to their account.
Animoto / Magisto
http://www.animoto.com / http://www.magisto.com
Cloud services that makes photos and video clips into rich videos. Magisto also auto-video edits.
by katie
Various existing services could potentially be integrated into the Protagonist system, as follows:
Stupeflix
http://studio.stupeflix.com/en/
Allows users to make videos from photos and video from social media sites and uploads, using pre-defined themes. Has a for-business package and API. Could use this to produce the videos from the selected content.
Watercolour Maps
http://maps.stamen.com
Beautiful watercolour-look maps using Open Street Map. Could be used as a personalisable map element within the video.
User Testing
http://usertesting.com
Remote video documented user testing service. Could be used to obtain rich feedback on the sign-up process and responses to the video outputs.
AlchemyAPI
http://www.alchemyapi.com/
A web service for real-time text analysis and computer vision. Performs sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, entity extraction, image tagging etc on web content.
Full Contact API
http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/person-api/
A web service that creates a blended person profile and friends list from a user’s various social media accounts.
TinyEye Reverse Image service
https://api.tineye.com/
A service to see if images are original or have been posted elsewhere online. This can be used to identify meme images that are re-posted by social media users. Could be used for meme removal to ensure only content personal content is included in the user’s video.
Encoding.com
http://www.encoding.com/programmatic-video-editing/
A cloud media processing service. Could use for online, programatic video rendering.
August 7, 2014 by katie
Katie Day is Artistic Director of The Other Way Works, who create daring and remarkable theatre drawing the audience into the very heart of the experience. We recently produced Bandstand, a collection of audio performances for Bandstands delivered via a location-aware smartphone app. Katie Day produced Theatre Sandbox for Watershed in 2010, and brings that experience of developing theatre and technology projects to her own work on this project. “The Other Way Works is a dynamic young company that is successfully exploring the possibilities of what theatre can and might be” Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
Dr John Troyer is Deputy Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices, concepts of space and place, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr. Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe.
July 17, 2014 by katie
Afterlife
R&D Retreat
Monnington House, Herefordshire February 2014
Watch the film documenting the week here
In February 2014 we brought together a small group of artists to develop ideas for a new project ‘Afterlife’ during a residential R&D week in rural Herefordshire.
‘Afterlife’ will be a 3 night residential retreat for 12 participants, where they are supported to select ONE memory from their life so far that would like to live in for eternity, and to receive artistic interpretations of the memory to take home that will act as memory triggers.
Our aim for the R&D week was to creatively interrogate the idea, and explore ways in which we could create this kind of experience for our participantaudience.
The artists all kept a journal during the week to note reflections and insights. Extracts from these are quoted below to help tell the story of the week.
SUNDAY: ARRIVAL
We arrived at night, so none of us had a real sense of where we were, the look of the land nearby, if there were any houses, animals, etc… All this was unveiled the next morning. Having a secret location where participants arrive by cabs at night, might help with the sense of being retreated or in another dimension.
MONDAY : INTRODUCTORY EXERCISE: MAKING & WALKING A LABYRINTH
Every Monday should be labyrinth day! This was our first activity and one that I’ll keep in my mind forever.
The Labyrinth for me was a very apt introduction to what we are exploring. The group got together pretty fast and devised a way to make the shape of the Labyrinth collectively. The way these group dynamics worked contributed, I found, to the overall experience. The participation of everyone in the making of a common “game” with specific rules, and then the experience of walking the Labyrinth, helped me enter the right state of mind for thinking about the memories I would visit, and for sharing the space with the rest of the group.
TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY: CREATIVE EXERCISES TO SURFACE & REFINE MEMORIES
We tried out a variety of creative techniques to find ways to unlock our memories, using smells, music, meditation, writing exercises, and visual prompt cards.
I like the more tangential sessions, approaching memory less directly: so, meditation and images are good and fruitful, the ‘think of a happy memory’ questions less so.
One writing exercise was based on our five senses: smell, taste, touch, sound and sight. What I found surprising was that every single sense brought completely different memories to the ones I had over the week. Five brand new memories.
Next we experimented with ways to get inside the memory and flesh it out, using drawing and writing exercises, and describing the environment of the memory to camera, then watching the films back.
Feelings and emotions are a key to this retreat. As a participant I was asked to delve into my past memories and pick one. This process, apart from bringing back these memories as images, brought up feelings and emotions. In some cases more intense than others.
THURSDAY: CREATION OF IMMERSIVE MEMORY EXPERIENCES & CREATIVE MEMORY TRIGGERS
We created immersive re-enactments of two artists’ selected memories, and sought theirs and each others’ feedback on these.
Members of the team also created artistic interpretations of the two memories that would act as memory triggers: a haiku, a short piece of prose, a design for a trinket, a short film, an audio clip.
What worked for me was the interaction with other people’s memories.
The act of making the memory is a form of mythmaking. This has the power to make the participants feel like they really are the heroes of their stories if only momentarily.
We learned that the immersive experience is a powerful thing and valuable. It creates a new memory, linked to the original one.
Seeing her reaction [to the immersive reenactment of her memory] made me a little emotional, but in a very positive way as I felt we’d nailed her memory recall experience. I felt proud of our work as a team and could imagine the sense of achievement we’d get from helping other people to relive their memories and experiences.
Presentation to each other of artistic interpretations of our memories: micro films, creative writing, and designs for trinkets.
Creating something symbolic/impressionistic is more effective than something realistic. Also fragments are more successful as they allow room for the imagination. A sequence of fragments works well.
The team produced some beautiful things and experiences: films, immersive sensory experiences, poems, creative prose, designs for bespoke objects (drawings), tastes etc.
We found that the ‘metaphor’ of the memory is really helpful for creating the artistic memory triggers.
FRIDAY: A FINAL WALK & DEPARTURE
The difference with the sort of performance approach we have is that it puts the audience at the centre of the performance experience. The participants become directors of their own memories.
Artists:
Katie Day | Mark Day | Chris Keenan | Jorge Lizalde | Katherine MaxwellCook | Xristina Penna | Louise Platt
Producer: Thomas Wildish
Director: Katie Day
Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
