Toni Dove is an artist/independent producer who works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality and interactive video installations, performance and DVD-ROMs that engage viewers in responsive and immersive narrative environments. Dove has received numerous grants for her work, including support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Langlois Foundation.
For more information on Toni Dove, please visit her site: www.tonidove.com
Excerpt from: Outside the Box: New Cinematic Experiences (2005).
Transcript
NARRATOR
While most movie-goers enjoy sitting back and watching a good film, artist Toni Dove wants the viewer to be an active participant in the assembly of her movies.
Dove’s interactive video environment disrupts traditional cinematic structure (beginning, middle and end), empowering viewers to assemble their own version of the story.
Her 1997 piece , “Artificial Changelings”, is an interactive narrative installation that uses video motion sensing to track the location and movement of the viewer.
TONI DOVE
I think what interests me most about interactivity is not the idea of interactivities as much as the idea of creating responsive environments.
“Artificial Changelings” is an installation—an interactive movie—that shows at film festivals or in museums or other public spaces either as an installation for general users or as a performance piece.
It’s a story about a kleptomaniac in 19th century Paris during the rise of the department store who is dreaming about an encryptian hacker in the future.
And physical motion alters what you hear and see and creates a relationship with the character. And I created a system of zones or an architecture of response and interactive structure for that piece that where when you are closest to the screen you were inside a characters head and when you stepped away you were in relationship to them like a conversational mode. And when you stepped away again you were in a trance or dream space. And when you stepped away again you were in a time tunnel that took you to another century. So, there was this metaphor for closeness and farness and then physical motion…basically… your body movement would move a characters body or generate speech or alter the soundtrack.
In this section, if I don’t move at all she will stop moving and then as I start to move she moves and speaks.
NARRATOR
Toni Dove finds genre fiction such as romance and science fiction useful in developing her interactive narratives.
TONI DOVE
I like the accessibility of genre fiction and I like the possibility for stylization that happens and metaphor that happens within genre fiction especially within the kinds of fusions that I work with like science fiction and romance thriller that these things can be mixed together. You can create—a kind of—you can make up your own reality and create a very stylized reality and that interests me a lot and I will continue to to that.
NARRATOR
Dove is currently in production on the interactive movie, “Spectropia”, a time travel drama set in the future and in 1931 after the stock market crash.
TONI DOVE
I think of it as cinematic bunraku, I would call the interactivity of it, because Japanese bunraku puppet theater is a theater in which puppet masters dressed entirely in black are on stage with three quarter life size puppets and manipulate them in view of the audience. And the audience ignores them as part of the convention…And I like that idea. I like the idea of creating a movie instrument that would be played by these puppeteers, which I think of the shadows of agency rather than puppeteers per se. And so it ‘s like a scratchable movie or a movie instrument that is performed for an audience with some audience participation.
NARRATOR
In 2002, Dove completed the interactive video installation, “Sally or the Bubble Burst.” The project uses speech recognition and synthesis to allow viewers to interact with Sally, a responsive virtual character who is based on the 1930’s fan and bubble dancer Sally Rand.
SALLY
I am Sally Rand. Please speak clearly. How are you?
INTERACTOR
Awful Sally! Awful!
Sally
What makes you feel bad?
Interactor
No Money. I Make Documentaries on Artists.
Sally
Huh! You call that bad? (pause) Ask me a question. Any question at all.
INTERACTOR
Will my Documentary be Successful?
SALLY
My sources say, “no”. (PAUSE) Did you think I would
really know?