No One Died is a horror theatre where viewers discover multiple perspectives of a murder may or may not have taken place. This is a horror drama that reveals itself through spatiality.
Co-created with scriptwriter/director Michelle Mead. Script is treated like lyrics as we exploit sync patterns found in works like Steve Reich and cicadas and map them to storytelling structures. This is a creative application of dichotic listening experiments. We used AI actors in this one for the creepy uncanny valley effect.
Presented in Ars Electronica 2023
https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/en/events/no-one-died/
Listen to Michele Mead’s thoughts on writing in this space
References:
[1] S. Reich and P. Van Der Ham, “Clapping Music Steve Reich.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY4bL_bO8sA (accessed Aug. 21, 2023).
[2] Original Source Unknown (Deadspin), “Sinclair’s Soldiers in Trump’s War on Media.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo (accessed Aug. 21, 2023).
[3] N. Iyer, E. R. Thompson, B. D. Simpson, D. Brungart, and V. Summers, “Exploring auditory gist: Comprehension of two dichotic, simultaneously presented stories,” in Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 2013. doi: 10.1121/1.4800507.
[4] Y. Ong, “Empires Prototype (Night) .” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Is6MbgRVE8cjnAOPMSN2u17f–TpB3O1/view?usp=drive_link (accessed Jun. 14, 2023).
[5] M. J. Henry, P. F. Cook, K. De Reus, V. Nityananda, A. A. Rouse, and S. A. Kotz, “An ecological approach to measuring synchronization abilities across the animal kingdom,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 376, no. 1835. Royal Society Publishing, Oct. 11, 2021. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0336