Artists’ stAtements Free PlAy meets GAmePlAy: iGotBand is an experimental video tumultuous and spontaneous, although iGotBAnd, A Video GAme game produced in collaboration with readily carried to unruly excess [2]. For imProVisers four undergraduate Worcester Poly- This is an equally apt definition for free technic Institute students [1]. The improvisation. The essential view of play Joshua Pablo Rosenstock, Department basic mechanic---the game’s system as freedom is important to improvisers, of Humanities and Arts, Worcester Poly- of player actions, causal relationships who associate the act with unfettering technic Institute, 100 Institute Road, and feedback---consists of a series of not only musical but also social and Worcester, MA 01609, U.S.A. E-mail: animated avatars, each of which is political boundaries. Ludus is the <[email protected]>. accompanied by a row of floating col- contrasting impulse of ordered rules, ABSTRACT ored blocks, representing suggested manifest in improvisation within estab- note sequences and corresponding to lished genre boundaries and in the The author presents an experimental musical the game controller’s colored buttons 20th-century literature of instruction- video game called iGotBand. Fans are central to the (Fig. 1). If a player plays the series of based or indeterminate compositions. game’s narrative, capturing a feedback loop in which notes “requested” by a particular avatar, Paradoxically, ludus constraints grant the audience shares responsibility for performance. that avatar is “captured” and becomes a the player agency, allowing choice- Recently, musical video games like “fan.” A fan has a finite attention span making to occur. Guitar Hero have burgeoned in the and will periodically request its own As a formal game, iGotBand typifies pop-cultural zeitgeist. Although these notes. If a fan’s demands are not met, ludus, although its graphic-notation simulations democratize the experience it will lose interest and wander away. As scheme balances freedom with con- of performing music, they enshrine the avatars proliferate, the players must straint. These pre-composed sequences the songs upon which they are based increasingly choose between the com- of colored blocks form a skeletal struc- as immutable “classics”; participants’ peting demands of capturing new fans ture that the player freely ornaments, actions are limited to mimicry. I pro- or maintaining existing fans. The player as a bebop improviser would interpret pose an alternative path for musical can play a requested sequence of notes a standard. video games, extending these exhilarat- in any rhythm or may intersperse other ing play experiences into the equally notes of her own choosing. Audience thrilling creative realm of improvisa- The competing fans in iGotBand drama- tion. My projects refocus music games Play as Freedom, tize a musician’s fundamental choice be- from specific musical outcomes to Games as Rules tween predictability and novelty. “When open-ended processes that attempt Roger Caillois divides play into oppos- . musicians note a positive reaction to balance the goals of gameplay and ing forces, ludus and paidia. Paidia from the public, they are tempted to creative musical play. denotes childlike free play---exuberant, reproduce the effect which provoked Fig. 1. iGotBand screen- shot, 2009. Players per- form sequences of notes to win fans. (© Joshua Pablo Rosenstock) ©2010 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 20, pp. 11–15, 2010 11 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00004 by guest on 30 September 2021 this reaction” [3]. By making the fans analog, digital and craft techniques to create Rather than mimicking the autonomy central figures in the game’s narrative, dynamic intermedia works that incorporate of humans, then, we aim to use tech- iGotBand acknowledges this feedback moving images, sound, sculptural installa- nology to support and facilitate. Our loop, wherein the audience shares tion and interactive performance. He earned approach resonates with the prevailing responsibility for the performance. a B.A. in Visual Art & Semiotics from Brown ideology at STEIM [2], which seems to University and an M.F.A. in Art & Technol- focus on the remapping of touch and ogy from the School of the Art Institute of Chi- Winning cago and is currently an assistant professor of physical exertion, as well as on conjur- Of all the conceptual issues we grap- Interactive Media and Game Development at ing a phantom auditory presence that is pled with in creating iGotBand, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. at once very real and yet also imagined. most contentious was the question of This might be summed up as “fantas- winning. As a formal game, it by defini- tic,” the etymological root of which can tion needed a win condition, but we Whistle PiG sAloon: be traced to fantasy or “illusory appear- struggled to find a technological means PerForminG technoloGies ance” [3]. for quantifying a player’s performance. John Robert Ferguson (musician), During embodied activity, illusion My frustrated students fell back on the Kingston University, Coombehurst and interpretative legibilities frequently Guitar Hero paradigm, incorporating a House, Kingston upon Thames, KT2 collide. For example, when one is scoring system that tracked percentages 7LB, U.K. E-mail: <john@johnrobert cycling along a narrow and uneven of “correct” notes played, a decision ferguson.com>. Web site: <johnrobert track, a rough surface texture might that obviously fails to account for the ferguson.com>. redirect the flow of the bike, yet it is improviser’s novel contributions. possible to remove one’s hands and Is winning and losing relevant to Robert van Heumen (musician), steer around corners or navigate rela- improvisation? Certainly an element STEIM, Achtergracht 19, 1017 WL tively large obstacles, negotiating veloc- of competition exists, such as between Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: ity via balance, accrued momentum and “battling” soloists. Much of the frisson <[email protected]>. Web site: <hard flow. These notions resonate strongly of watching an improvisation comes hatarea.com>. with technologically mediated impro- from its uncertainty---“the risk of failure, vised music making. Koestler suggests abstract or complete collapse, is everywhere that “most of our thinking, planning present” [4]. However, one of the pre- and creating operates in imaginary The authors discuss their practice of technologically requisites of improvisation is to accept mediated improvisation while exploring questions environments,” and because the posi- unwanted outcomes. about the relationship of performers to technology. tion at which perception lies between the real and the imagined is a “matter Conclusion Among the multitude of connotations of degree,” all our perceptions are Although iGotBand effectively marries of the notion “performing technolo- “coloured by imagination” [4]. While improvisation to the formal aspects of a gies,” we would like to focus on the not claiming a spirit lurking within, guitar game, there remain differences following: Are we performing the tech- Whistle Pig Saloon searches for life- between game-playing and improvised- nology or is it performing us? As the like resonances with which to interact, playing, most notably in the issues asso- duo Whistle Pig Saloon, we compose therefore fantasy and folklore may ciated with winning. One direction for systems and situations from which a provide a useful metaphor, and we sug- future experimentation would expand creative work can emerge. The work is gest “dragon-slaying” as an appropriate the role of audiences, leveraging social improvised, but to what extent are we metaphor for performing technologies. networking technologies [5]. Overtly accountable for it? Figure 2 was taken by Thor Brø- competitive models of improvisation When artistic materials are recog- dreskift in the moment of near-silence such as Theatresports remind us that nized as potential controllers of a at which the ending of the concert improvised performance thrives in a situation, and conditions for collabora- emerged. This photograph immediately variety of different contexts, even if the tive creative emergence are fostered, followed a loud and intense improvisa- win/lose binary is not easily reconciled notions of negotiating inertias, setting tion, which might well have continued with the musical improv tradition. processes in motion and intervening without the audible camera click that within established trajectories are fore- occurred in a short moment of silence. References and Notes grounded. For Whistle Pig Saloon, in With the camera click, that was it, done, querying the role of non-linearity, insta- no question that we could play any 1. Shelli Clifford, Tim Cushman, Brian Hettrick and Alex Schwartz. bility and unpredictability, the facilita- more. tion of cracking and fracture (both real 2. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1962) pp. 13, 27. and metaphoric) is a productive and The improviser has to be like a man essential process in the pursuit of cre- walking backwards. He sees where he 3. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in has been, but he pays no attention to Music (New York: Da Capo, 1992) p. 44. ative orientation. Thus, in exploring the the future. Very often an audience dialectical relations between precision 4. John Corbett, “Writing around Free Improvisa- will applaud when earlier material is tion,” in Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz among the