Setting the Stage: When Arts, Science and Technology Converge

This fall, UK-based theater pioneers curious directive bring to the Hop their acclaimed work Frogman, a supernatural thriller, experienced in virtual reality and live theater. The company is known for linking theater and science and has garnered many awards in the field. We talked to company director Jack Lowe, who will be on a week-long residency at Dartmouth, as well as Research Professor of Computer Science Lorie Loeb about the joys and challenges of working with science, technology and the arts.

Asmaa Abdallah: curious directive is one of the pioneering theater companies to employ digital tools in its work. What initially inspired you to explore this intersection? 

Jack Lowe: The science-and-art provocation came instinctively from wanting to make a piece about neuroscience when I was in my early 20s. I wanted to make a work about the physics involved in the concept of light. Then it developed from there. Of course, as an artist, you start to introspect, and I realized that my dad was a science teacher and my mom was an actor until her early 30s, and the books on my bookshelf when I was growing up were on morphology, astrophysics and Stanislavsky. So I'm a natural manifestation of that upbringing. Then I realized a lot of my training has involved metaphysical thinking and abstract artistic expression, so those two things came together. 

Lorie Loeb: I've been at Dartmouth for 21 years. Before that I was at Stanford in computer science. I studied art as an undergraduate and graduate student and worked in New York in the arts, film, animation and combined media. In the early to mid-1980s, computer scientists would say to me, this is too hard to do traditionally, can you help me build a tool to do this on the computer? And I was naive enough to say, sure. So I just started building demos, playing with their buggy software, saying it has to have this interface, do these things. And I started doing that more and then moved into the computer science side. It came from a curiosity about how technology could be used as a tool for understanding and making art in new ways. Here at Dartmouth, I came into the Computer Science Department and started teaching modeling and animation classes. From there we created the digital arts program, and now we have a graduate program in computer science with a concentration in digital arts. 

Asmaa Abdallah: When you work on these interdisciplinary collaborations, how are you able to achieve a balance between the technological and artistic aspects to where one doesn't overpower the other, or become inaccessible? 

Lorie Loeb: Finding that balance can be a challenge, and there are always limitations to what you can do. For example, in film, you have the elements of camera, sound and lighting, and everybody wants their thing to be the best, and you're trading off one element for another to get the best of everything. When you introduce technology into the picture, it's really easy to get lost in that technology and forget that the technology has to be driven by the art and the story. The technology needs to be as integral and as organic to the story as every other element within that performance. That can be a big challenge. You don't want people saying, oh, it was a VR piece, rather you want them to say, it was this great story, and the VR really helped me feel I was part of it.

Jack Lowe: There was a time when we were presenting Frogman in the UK and we were thinking of not mentioning virtual reality when marketing the show. VR is a tool, and it's really required because it's a time travel device. But in the early days of this production, it was extraordinary that people would come with these expectations of what VR is to them. I feel a responsibility to delicately balance these storytelling tools in the same way I feel responsibility when we're working with the real-life emotions of actors and artists who are in that space. So I've also got to be brutally honest; you don't want to use this technology and then do a really bad job. 

Lorie Loeb: Yes, and when you spend a lot of time on it, then you want to use it because you work so hard on it, and it just starts to take over. And so finding that way, to say no, let's pull back, or let's simplify, gets harder and harder the more you get invested, or the more money you spend.

Asmaa Abdallah: Rather than start with a story, do you ever start with the technology and the story grows from there?

Lorie Loeb: Sometimes I do. Sometimes we're trying to push what technology can do or how we interact with technology in new ways. And that can be a starting point for a project. I'm working with a student now who's doing a sculptural piece with AR [Augmented Reality] so she's really interested in the question of art, and which is the art? Is it the sculptures or the AR or the mix of both? And so yes, I do, but I'll often start with a quandary of how do we understand this and that and how do they combine together? Or how do we use digital technologies to understand this intersection between art and science? 

Jack Lowe: Yeah. I'm a super fan of certain types of digital tech, such as wearable AR. You're aware of your physicality, of yourself, when you're in a headset. Then, as a storyteller I am definitely intrigued by how a story and our lives spiral to talk to each other.

Asmaa Abdallah: Jack, you're spending a week in residence at Dartmouth. What do you hope to get out of this time? And do you already have a seed for a new work? 

Jack Lowe: I'm so excited to physically be in a space with people and meet a lot of researchers and thinkers who are hyper specialists. Because I'm obviously not. I'm a specialist in a very different way. But I really pride myself on respecting those specialists and then creating a work of theater. With regards to a new work, we're looking at a project about epigenetics that looks at the potential for the environment to adjust your genetic code. But I would be totally psyched to spend time with specialists and hear about why I'm totally wrong about everything. 

And we'll have Science Night on October 10th at 6:30 pm at Ramunto's, which is where we have a scientist talk for half an hour about what they're working on. Then we essentially come up with a treatment or a pitch for a theater production or experience around that area of science while the audience has pizza and a drink in an informal space, and hears about the superpower that is theater-making in the world of science. And there's quite a lot of pressure on me to come up with something interesting. But that's ok. 

Asmaa Abdallah: What about you, Lorie?

Lorie Loeb: I think it's just very exciting to blend the more traditional arts with certain new technology and see what's possible. And so to have someone here who is a master of that, and who can really open all of our eyes to what is possible, and a way of thinking about art and technology in a new way is very exciting. I always feel like my job as a teacher is to kind of blow students' minds so they never think about things the same again after they've taken a class. I think that that's exactly what Jack's residency is going to do in a week. He's going to do in a week what it takes me years to do.