The travelling garden of life

Description of the work The Travelling Garden of Life is a collaboration between interactive visual design, robotics, dance, and music. A dancer and a musician perform alongside three robots and an aerial drone, with the robots and drone controlled via a combination of remote control and IR tracking. The narrative is set in the near future, where a band of concerned scientists have created an orbiting space station containing a seed bank and a preservation garden, maintained by robots. They dream that once Earth is ready for them, they will fly down to the land and replant. But the future of the garden is threatened. An unseen intruder has been plotting, and is now attempting to hack into the space station and take control. The dancer and musician converse with the ship’s computer through movement and sound, and must teach the robot guards to tend to the garden. Research Background The Travelling Garden of Life features predominantly the same creative team that developed the 2016 CreateX ‘Garden of Minuscule Delights’ show, and builds on concepts first introduced in that iteration of the show. As a family show, the project situates dance, music, and robotics in a theatrical performance context, whilst drawing attention to current issues around climate change. The musical component of the project builds on the work of live music code developers such as Sam Aaron, whose work on the sonic Pi project aims to breakdown the ‘exclusivity as a barrier’, where live coding exists “as an exclusive performance practice only accessible to professional programmers” (Aaron, 2016). As a performing musician with a very limited background in coding, the practice-led component of my research on the Travelling Garden of Life aimed to present live electronic music as an accessible entry point to creative coding. Research Contribution As the composer and performing electronic musician, my work on the project involved research around the intersection of live music and live coding. To investigate ways in which the live coding of electronic music can be untethered from traditional laptop or desktop computers, I employed a Monome Teletype Eurorack module (1) to input real-time, text based commands. This project contributed to the field of performance research by examining how live coding can be used in a performance context, specifically targeting how live coding can be made accessible and presented as an entry point to creative coding for a younger audience. To support the narrative, my electronic instrument station was designed to look like a series of abstracted space station controls, and text-based code commands to the Teletype module were projected via a GoPro camera on a screen in front of the music station. Anecdotal feedback from many younger members of the audience in the Q&A sessions that took place after each show was positive, with a number of audience members asking for more information or clarification around how the music was being generated live. Research Significance The Travelling Garden of Life was performed seven times as a part of QUT’s 2017 Robotronica event, an event that attracted over 20,000 visitors throughout the day. A video documenting the development of the project was presented to Cal Poly Arts by the project’s co-producer and QUT Emeritus Professor Any Arthurs, to investigate international touring possibilities. Overall, the work highlights several areas for further enquiry within both discipline specific and transdisciplinary contexts, with a personal focus on how to further develop engaging performances of electronic music based around live coding. References Aaron, Sam. 2016. Sonic Pi – performance in education, technology and art. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 12:2, 171-178.