Overview

Intrapology is a new project in interactive online theatre and performance. Our custom-made web app allows the audience to influence what the performers say and do. A video demonstration is available at Intrapology.com.

We’re soon going to release an open-source version of our software, for other artists making interactive live online performances. To do the best job we can, we want to learn about what other artists experience when making work using our software. To that end, we are now commissioning 7 artists to create their own short test works, which will be performed at an online scratch night.

Honorarium: £1000 GBP

Performance date: late October

Performance length: up to 10 minutes

How we got here

Our software was first developed in a 2021 collaboration funded by the New Conversations programme (British Council, Canadian Council for the Arts) between the Zoyander Street and Canadian artist Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer. The design was based on Squinky’s MFA project, Coffee: A Misunderstanding, which was a finalist at IndieCade 2014, and toured internationally in venues ranging from fancy academic conferences to an anarchist bookstore in Santa Cruz.

Building on Squinky’s experience with Coffee: A Misunderstanding, our software focuses on the following features:

• The current line of dialogue is shown live to actors on a computer or smartphone screen
• Audience members vote on a menu of choices that appear at key decision points
• The winning choice leads to automatic changes to the script

In 2023 Zoyander added more features, such as:

• Extended, colour-coded view of the script for actors
• Audience members can send improv prompts to the actors through a tweet-like interface
• The current line of dialogue is shown to all users as integrated subtitles
• A video calling window is integrated into this webpage, allowing actors and the audience to access the interaction app and video stream in the same place
• Said webpage is designed for a high level of aesthetic customisation, as part of the digital scenery of the play

We have received a grant from Innovate UK to carry out upgrades to our software and a programme of activities with other artists in the sector. We aim to:

• Improve our conformity with open internet standards
• Eliminate reliance on proprietary software by designing for Open Broadcasting Software.
• Facilitate interoperability with a variety of streaming and video calling solutions through adoption of open standards
• Support other artists to create work using our software, by creating clear documentation, an open-source repository, and organising a game jam / hackathon / residency for rapid prototyping of new works.

You’re reading this because you have been invited to join this hackathon!

What we provide

• £1000 commission fee
• Access to our software, and source files from Intrapology shows
• Training on how to use the software, accessible design, writing for interaction, etc.
• Support from the Intrapology team throughout the commission period
• Discord server channel to discuss your work with other commissioned artists
• Technicians during the scratch performance to sort out audio, captioning, etc.
• BSL interpretation during the scratch performance
• Marketing and publicity associated with the scratch performance night

What you bring

• Idea for a 10-minute interactive performance using our software

• Capacity to work on this project over September and October. We’ll help you to scope your project idea to fit within your availability.

• A minimal degree of confidence writing in a markup language, or coding. I estimate this to be about the same level of difficulty as:

  • Editing Wikipedia
  • Programming an Arduino to turn on a light whenever you press a button
  • Customising CSS (e.g. for a Tumblr blog)

  We intend to work with a technical writer to create clear documentation, but it won’t be ready yet when you start work. You will write the interactive script using Inkle Studios’s Ink, which has excellent documentation: https://github.com/inkle/ink/blob/master/Documentation/WritingWithInk.md

• Actor(s)

  We are not supplying actors as part of this project, so if you wanted to work with an actor you would be making that arrangement and paying them out of your £1000 commission fee. However, we are supplying technicians, which includes a person who will move the script along, so you should be able to perform the piece yourself if you like.

What we are looking for

If you’ve been invited to contribute, we trust that your work is the kind of thing we want to support. We care about:

• A flourishing culture of networked live art that centres people who have been let down by the illusory “return to normal”: disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people, as well as people who face other barriers to in-person venues such as geographic inequality.
• Anti-racist and decolonial worlding, neuroqueering, and solidarity with all oppressed people.
• Sustainable technology, frugal computing, open source, right to repair, keeping the web free, and pursuing the dream of permacomputing. No blockchain, no Web3, no “AI”.

Timeline

August

Reaching out to artists - ideal time to contact us with questions, feature requests, and ideas, but you’re not expected to be working on this project at this time.

1st September

Activity is officially allowed to begin, under the terms of the grant

• Squinky will be working on a cleaner "hello world" build that's a little easier for people to adapt for their own work, but I can share the files for Assigned Earth at Birth with you whenever.
• Commissioned artists can start to discuss their projects in a channel on the Intrapology Discord
• Agreements will be sent out to all commissioned artists in the first week of September.

September - October

Meetings of commissioned artists, myself, and other members of the Intrapology team, including:

• Tutorials on how the software works
• Writing advice e.g. pacing the interactions
• Access dramaturgy workshop with Quiplash
• A session with our tech director to discuss issues around sound, staging, etc.

Late October (provisional date 24th, 6pm UK time)

Online scratch performance event for all commissioned artists

Questions

When would you need an answer?

A lukewarm "yes" in the next week is sufficient, just to help me keep track of invitations. You can withdraw any time until 12th September

Do you want us to tell stories in the Intrapology storyworld?

You’re welcome to do so, but this is not expected or required! We ideally want to facilitate work that supports the development of your own practice and potential future projects, so please treat this as a canvas for whatever you are called to create.

Is audience input voting (e.g. picking actor's response) or typing in text?

These are the two interaction types that we currently support. The purpose of this project is to learn what artists need, including any new features that we should aim to add. If you let us know what you want early on, we might potentially be able to build the feature for you, depending on complexity.

Could actors share audio? Like have audience suggest youtube vids for background sound?

I think this is possible, yes. One easy version of this would be to include background sounds in your build, and have specific sounds trigger in response to audience votes. Alternatively, if you just want to play any requested Youtube video, we could do this manually during the performance.

Could actors get different cues from each other too, depending on the logic etc?

Yes, this can and does happen. Actors have directions and dialogue shown to them on screen at all times, so they’re not necessarily memorising cues. Depending on the type of logic used, the next line of dialogue may or may not already be displayed to them.

Could an actor be musical accompaniment as well?

In principle, yes. Here are the limitations that I’m aware of:

• If singing is involved, musical accompaniment has to be playing at the same source location as the singer, to ensure they stay in sync
• You’d need to spend time setting up an appropriate situation regarding microphones. We’d be delighted to help you figure that out, as it is important research for us as well.

What should I use to read and write .ink files?

Any plain text editor such as Notepad is sufficient. The most user-friendly option is to download Inkle Studios’s app Inky, which allows you to continuously test the logic while you edit:

http://inklestudios.com/ink