"BETWEEN GAGA AND MADONNA" - New Modes of Reading

“BETWEEN GAGA AND MADONNA” is an explorative piece of interactive art using collaborative gesture-driven narration.

In a designed situation, topic-specific lyrics are excerpted from a collection of songs by Lady Gaga and Madonna, and are triggered in the display interface by the dancing of two participants that impersonate the singers.

The interface uses the spatial relationship between the dancers as the indicator of the ‘drama,’ and the closer the participants are to one another, the greater the instance of neutral, descriptive content. The further apart the dancers are triggers a more attitudinal and emotional quality of lyric. Keywords that specify different motifs are displayed in a linear sequence that slowly cascades and switches every 20 seconds, creating room for the dancer to creatively control the mood of the performance by adjusting the pace and the position of the dance.

The project is also an exploration of technology for display-based stories that create a decentralized reading experience for the audience, where the role shift between a spectator and a storyteller becomes an inviting space for participatory narration.

  

 
The project also resonates my interest in collaborative storytelling by using trans-mediary technologies. By assigning a role of performance to two random visitors, this space takes on its narrative characteristic. Though it was not the participants who created the contents of the text, their impersonated behaviors became the media of storytelling in a specially designed space.