Enactive Avatar
A shared drama entangles you and Enactive Avatar into non-verbal experience of co-presence in life and death. On-going…
Video scenarios in medical education
The project analyses video scenarios used in medical education, and develops new scenarios for medical schools. On-going…
Life as an Image
An art & science project explores cultural phenomenas of alienation by means of image making and 3d sensing. On-going…
Play Me
An interactive roleplay with smartphones, where one minute is one year and every spectator plays the life of another one. On-going…
NeuroCine
Research on intersubjectively shared, embodied underpinnings of the human mind engaged with drama.
On-going…
Enactive Cinema
Interactive cinema format based on viewers’ unconscious psychophysiological responses (enaction).
On-going…
Antikythera
Digital poetry application for iPad based on the Antikythera mechanism and Saila Susiluoto’s poems.
City Noises
The EU Culture artistic research project experiments with different creative practices to explore local and global urban identities.
The installation explores coincidence in figurative narrative that consists of orientalist G. A. Wallin’s (1811–1852) portraits made during his journeys in the Middle East.
An experimental installation and tools investigation inspired by Ooppera Skaala’s Great Conspiracy – The Opera.
A new breed of audiovisual performance best described by the term multimedia opera.
A research, education and media art project exploring visual & multimodal urban identities, as well as spatial, multilinear and associative narratives in cities.
A concept development project dealing with interface design, data narration and visualization using semantic ontologies in the context of cultural information.
At Hand
At Hand is an interactive piece designed for touch screens in public space. The project is about urban gestures, micro spaces of the street and the possibility of encountering otherness.
The interactive video installation in public space investigates (online) prejudice towards minorities.
DIMEKE Narrative Product Development
DIMEKE – Content Development for Digital Media 2009–2011 is a Finnish national initiative, supported by the European Social Fund.
Alan01
The second edition of Alan01 engages the user in a dialogue with a fictional Alan, as if his consciousness had been coded into a machine at the time of his death.
The Turing Machine Cross Media Experimental Production investigates associational storytelling and interaction structures, demonstrating human-machine communication.
New Media for a New Millenium – NM2
Want a romantic version of Star Wars? Or your own cut of Big Brother? A new EU project aims to personalise our viewing and create a new media genre.
Hybrid of mobile phone messaging chat and black comedy series for television and broadband media
Lecture presentations introducing industry case histories, providing contextual, historical and cultural background for deeper understanding in game design.
SALERO aims at making cross media-production for games, movies and broadcast faster, better and cheaper.
INiCS
Interactive Narratives in Cross-media Systems explores interactive narrative concepts for digital media, including computer games, cinema, internet, digital TV and soundscapes.
Artistic research production and study project in the Crucible Studio and Media Lab.
RuneDance / RuneDrum is conceived as a chance-based multimedia work based on Finnish mythology and the traditional Singing of Tales.
Cross-media programme consisting of a TV-show, Internet and mobile media site that all utilize a common database.
As part of the IntelCities research and technological development project, the Crucible has developed the “Arkkikone” web application in collaboration with the City of Tampere.
Dance on Demand / Myths for the Day
Dance on Demand features a new content format and genre for interactive television and mobile devices.
IntelCities was a research and development project to pool knowledge of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe.
I became a lion wearing a crown! – IN THE HOOD researches city planning by the means of storytelling.
Bot Alchemy is Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman’s experiment to see what semi-random generated speech can do for interactive database narratives.
Dance on Demand / Myths for the Day

Aki Suzuki as Buddha. Image by Egon Randlepp and Juhani Tenhunen.
The audiovisual material created for “Myths for One” (Shift, 2001) will be readjusted and developed into a multiple media program service “Myth for the Day / Dance on Demand,” through which user communities can order mythological aphorisms to be sent to each other via PDAs and Internet, while the messages also construct dances (on-demand) of various lengths to digital television. The aphorisms are spoken in the TV-program by two characters and their subtitles are withdrawn from the same database than the mobile phone sent aphorisms to experiment with flexible content units in multiple media. The Buddha video character may also be danced with through a gesture recognising system in physical space to foresee the future of interactive characters on city-spaces, for example, as billboards or guides.
Dance on Demand features a new content format and genre for interactive television and mobile devices, also introducing interactive video characters for domestic and public spaces as entertainers and guides.
Synopsis
Myths for One connoisseur:
Start with a 6 hours interview session with the mythologist Joseph Campbell and a 12 hours seminar discussion about the significance of myths in today’s world. Sort out the videotaped conversations and write them into 316 statements and questions. Recognize the points of view in the preceding material and adapt them into lines for two characters. Record the lines and let a computer present them continuously in sessions of about 2-5 minutes. Add ten musical interludes in between the spoken sessions. Both the sentences and the music are presented in random order and emanate from an iron box. Construct a tent of felt around the box and project the real-time computer edited video of a dancing Buddha on a vertical surface in the tent. Decide the first and last video clip out of 26 and let the others continuously arrange them in between so that during a dialogue session the likelihood of close-ups is 80%, while during music only 20%. The opening and closing of the iron box define the length of each viewing session and always create a new audiovisual work out of the same database material. The number of possible works created is, as they say, infinite. Thus constructed experimental research production demonstrates the possibilities of algorithmically directed databases, associative and metaphorical script writing and the chance, for example, for creating more complex computer-generated characters and for making the generally mechanical behaviour of computers more invisible and unexpected. Apply particularly into computer games.
Credits
Myths for the Day / Dance on Demand (2003)
based on the original production Shift (2001)
Helsinki University of Art and Design &
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
research production
produced by Crucible Studio
Shot in the Media Centre Lume TV studio
Sound recorded and edited in the Sibelius Academy Centre for Music and Technology
Presented in the OtaDigi network
Aki Suzuki – Dancing Buddha, Woman’s head, Man’s head
Hanna Harris – Woman’s voice
Mika Tuomola – Man’s voice
script by Ville Eerikäinen, Hanna Harris & Kari Kanto
script-edit by Hanna Harris & Mika Tuomola
video-edit by Sami Haartemo & Minna Nurminen
sound-edit and music by Niina Saarelainen
computer programming by Markus Norrena & Ville Ollikainen
choreography by Aki Suzuki
cinematography by Sari Aaltonen
lights by Arttu Peltomaa
Aki Suzuki’s style by Mika Tarvainen
produced by Juhani Tenhunen
conceived and directed by Mika Tuomola
inspired by
Joseph Campbell and Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri, Samuel Beckett, Björk, The Beatles (George Harrison), Buddha, William Blake, Guiraut de Borneilh, Jesus Christ, René Descartes, The Doors, Ecclesiastes, Albert Einstein, T.S.Eliot, Walter Kaufmann, Petri Kola, Stanislaw Jerszy Lec, Lucretius, Karl Marx, The Moody Blues, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sami Pekkola, Plato, Riikka Puustinen, The Ramones, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Maureen Thomas, Mark Twain, Vala
thanks to
Paavo Ahvo/Stoa, Mångad Oy, Trevor Harris, Pekka Salonen