"THERE IS STILL TIME .. BROTHER", a panoramic anti-war film

"THERE IS STILL TIME... BROTHER" is an interactive panoramic 360° film by the American theatre and performance group The Wooster Group. It revolves around the motif of war and the behaviour of people in war in multi-centric and simultaneous play actions. The installation interweaves quotes and set pieces from media culture, thus offering a multi-layered web of events and narratives that invite interactive, individual exploration.

A visitor, representing other viewers, navigates as a "director" through the 18-minute film. Sitting on a revolving chair, one moves a viewing window across the panoramic screen, thus linking different narratives about the war.

In the viewing window the film shown appears sharp, the surrounding areas are blurred. This installation setup transfers physiological aspects of the human visual system, especially peripheral vision, to the projection environment: peripheral vision provides only rough blurred visual impressions outside a fixed fixation point.

The 16-channel surround sound recorded in Ambisonic technology behaves analogously to the image: sound events and spoken text that are heard inside the viewing window are played back at a higher volume; outside the window, the sound is muffled. Exceptions such as ambient noise or sound events are deliberately used to draw the user's attention to an event outside the window.

Since never all actions take place at the same time, the film experience can take up many times the pure film length. Each "activating spectator" creates her own version of the piece and constantly discovers new details.

Produnktion:
EMPAC - The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, US-NY

Institutions involved
EMPAC - The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, US-NY
UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, Sydney, AU
ZKM | Institute for Visual Media, Karlsruhe, DE

Production staff
producers: Johannes Goebel, Kathleen Forde (EMPAC)
Concept, artistic direction, book and performance: The Wooster Group
(Geoff Abbas, Aron Deyo, Joby Emmons, Ari Fliakos, Teresa Hartmann, Bozkurt Karasu, Ken Kobland, Elizabeth LeCompte, Gabe Maxson, Jamie Poskin, Matt Schloss, Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk, Judson Williams)

Production team EMPAC:
Jonas Braasch, Kathleen Forde, Kimberly Gardner, Johannes Goebel, Shannon Johnson, CathyJo Kile, Jason Steven Murphy, Todd Vos

Production team iCinema Centre:
Jarred Berghold, Volker Kuchelmeister, Damian Leonard, Sue Midgley, Jeffrey Shaw

Production team The Wooster Group:
Joel Bassin, Yvan Greenberg, Clay Hapaz, Cynthia Hedstrom, Kaneza Schaal

Production Team ZKM | Institute for Visual Media:
Jan Gerigk, Arne Graesser, Manfred Hauffen, Petra Kaiser, Bernd Lintermann, Silke Sutter

SPHERECAM
Camera, production preview system and post production:
Volker Kuchelmeister (iCinema Centre)

Real-time image processing and projection system for complex surfaces:
Bernd Lintermann (ZKM | Institute for Visual Media)

Creation of panoramic projection environment and rotating chair:
Huib Nelissen Decor en Constructiewerken, Haarlem, NL

Sound recording, editing and processing:
Todd Vos (EMPAC), Geoff Abbas, Matt Tierney (The Wooster Group)

Sound system for locating and recording moving sound sources and virtual microphone control for projection system:
Jonas Braasch, Communication Acoustics Research Lab, EMPAC

Extracts from the following sources were used for the work: transcripts of various conversations between Jeffrey Shaw, Johannes Goebel and The Wooster Group; Pioneer Dogs (screenplay by Adam Edwards); On the Beach (film by Stanley Kramer, 1959); Rosie O'Donnell's blog (www.rosie.com)

Special thanks to Kell Condon, Chris Loar, Reid Farrington, Zach Stinnett and Haowen Wang (The Wooster Group).

The production was supported by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts at EMPAC - The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.