Imaginary Media Artists Bring Transhumanism To The Theater

It’s a busy time for Imaginary Media Artists, a design firm specializing in the creation and integration of film, animation, and live video in theater. Kate Freer just opened Around the World in 80 Days, a play adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, for which her designs received rave reviews. Alex Koch is loading out Pinkolandia by Andrea Thome at Intar Theatre in New York, where it also received wonderful notices. David Tennent is in their Bushwick studio, preparing to load in the next show they’re designing.

"We just celebrated our one year anniversary," Koch says, with a bit of amazement, when I catch him at the studio to chat about the future of theater, video design, and the special kind of love we have for machines.

Over this past year, IMA has been on a mission to shift people’s perception of theater. When most people think about going to the theater, they imagine watching live actors dancing, singing or acting out a scene. But Imaginary Media Artists challenges the audience to ask, “What is live performance?” They use new technology that allows actors to manipulate video in real time, thereby treating video projections like another performer.

To achieve their goal, this company of video designers recently became theater producers, mounting Love Machine, an examination of our relationship with technology in three parts, at Incubator Arts Project in NYC. It uses Microsoft Kinect to capture performers movements and re-frame the audience's relationship to live performance.

Imaginary Media Artists: Kate Freer, Alex Koch and David Tennent in their natural environment: glowing screens in a darkened theater.

Freer and Tennent have known each other since college when Tennent was at NYU studying directing for theater at Tisch. The couple became more involved with the New York video design community, and they met Koch, who hired Tennent to program a production he was designing.

“He had the side of the brain that I didn’t really have,” Koch says about Tennent. “That was visualizing computer code and seeing projections more from an interest in how they were generated, rather than how they were landing with the audience.”

Each founding member has a special focus that makes sense when you look at their individual backgrounds. Tennent, who heads programming, comes from scientists; his father is an engineer, and both grandfathers are PhD doctorates. Freer’s mother is a film editor and her father is a director of photography, which pushes her penchant toward tight editing and illustrations. Koch’s parents are film and theater critics – he has a habit of asking questions an audience/critic might ask. Together, they complement and challenge each other.

“We have a lot of fights,” says Koch. “Really, really healthy battles about what’s effective. But I think we have a unified aesthetic.”

“Depending on the show,” Tennent gently differs.

“Depending on the show,” Koch agrees, with a smile.

In 2011, The Woodshed Collective mounted The Tenant in NYC. They hired all three of the designers separately for this massive, immersive adaptation of Polanski’s film. Though they’d worked together on previous productions, it was during this process the individuals decided to form a unit. At first, they imagined designing productions as a team, but it quickly became clear that each member should work as project lead with the other two supporting the primary designer.

As a company, they have designed for several notable productions, including Invisible Man at Huntington Theatre in Boston and P.S. Jones and the Frozen City for terraNOVA Collective. They celebrated their anniversary in a fitting fashion when IMA partnered with director Andrew Scoville, a rising star in the devised theater world, to create Love Machine. Devised theater is a collaborative way of working in which the script emerges from group improvisation. They workshopped the piece last year at Ars Nova in New York City, made the festival rounds, and, last month, Love Machine landed its first run at the Incubator Arts Project.

Part one examines the 1974 launch and abandonment of the space station Skylab, in which Cindy, a high school girl with no prom date has a “long distance relationship” with the space station. The second part is a TED-esque lecture on Transhumanism given in the year 2050. Based on the real life story of Dr. Martine Rothblat, the talk is led by Maxine31, the robotically preserved consciousness of a transgender scientist. The final portion offers a dance piece that interacts with a Microsoft Kinect sensor to ask: How does a disembodied consciousness find love?

Tennent wrote code that created a sphere of particles; the average sphere had about 500 to 1000 particles. Each had randomized rotational speeds, circling around a center point. He used the sensor of the Kinect to map the radius of the particles to the distance between the actor’s hands. As the actor moved his hands apart, the particles got bigger. As he moved them closer, the particles got smaller and faster. Freer and Koch created the atmospheres/backdrops through which the sphere moved.

Moving video programmed by David Tennent and controlled by an actors on and offstage during Love Machine. 

“It calls into question the idea of liveness,” Tennent suggests. “And the idea of liveness in theater. You know, how far can you actually push that? If you have a cue that is literally being controlled by an actor but you’re not seeing that actor, you know…Is that still live, or are you watching somebody play a video game? That’s the question we want to pose to the audience.”

With notable producers and theater institutions showing interest in Love Machine, IMA is navigating the waters for future performances in New York and abroad.

“I think the definition of theater is changing,” David suggested.

“Widening,” Alex interjected.

“Widening,” David agreed. “Significantly. Theater is not just taking place in theaters anymore. As a company, we’re really interested in taking theatrical ideas and applying them to new media.”