Carol McGrath has written a great blog about her day out at London’s National Theatre and her experience on the Talkaoke table.
Click here to read the blog
We are on every Friday and Saturday night at The Shed, National Theatre.
Click here for dates and performances we are covering
Chatting on the Talkaoke table is free.
From Friday 19 April 2013, we kick off our Talkaoke residency at The Shed – a striking new pop-up performance space on the Southbank, created by the National Theatre.
Aptly enough, the Shed’s inaugural production is called ‘Table,’ and we will be bringing our own table of chat to the Shed’s cafe-bar every Friday and Saturday night for the rest of April and most of May. We’ll be there from 6:45pm, so come down, grab a drink and get involved in the discussion.
The Shed will be showcasing a year long programme of experimental theatre and performance. We popped in the other night to see the play and sample the atmosphere. The Shed is a gorgeous structure, the bar has a great ambiance, and is attracting a different crowd than usually found at the National Theatre. The play ain’t bad either. No seriously, Table is receiving some cracking reviews (see: Independent) and at £20 a pop, the tickets for the show won’t break the bank. Click here for booking info and tickets.
We like cheaper seats at the theatre and are looking forward to getting stuck in this weekend. But remember, Talkaoke is only as good as the people involved and best of all, our seats are free.
We look forward to seeing you there.
We had a great evening at Urban Dialogues ‘Festival Night’ and a fantastic Talkaoke session. Here’s a snippet of the conversation we had with visitors to the exhibition. The subject on the table is privacy and social media, in particular Facebook.
This event took place at Red Gallery, Old Street, November 2012 and was organised by the Three Faiths Forum
To watch the video in its entirety Click Here
Participants voting in Who Wants to Be…?
Over the past year or so we have been working with Artem Baguinski at the V2 Centre in Rotterdam to improve our Who Wants to Be… ? voting system. This I consider to be a very important requirement for our show. In Who Wants to Be… ? as in all of our events, the speed of response to members of the audience’s ideas, half thoughts, proposals is crucial. One of the many problems with democracy, especially the voting part is that it doesn’t fit temporally with our thinking process, and this inhibits collective creativity. If the voting is instant and visual, then more ideas can be tested and revised in a very quick process. With this in mind we have been trying to create a robust system that can be used in various circumstances.
Our system right now uses a DSLR camera to capture votes from cards of three different colours. This allows you to vote between a maximum of three different options, which is not many, but if you have more options, it is difficult to determine what people really want. Even with three votes, it’s not that easy to know what the majority of people want as the winning vote could win with support from just 34% of the crowd. However 3 is more interesting and more technically challenging than a binary vote.
Screenshot of votecounter selecting coloured cards.
The system learns to interpret what is a vote in the particular light balance of the event you are at. This was a massive problem for our previous vote counting app, where we would have to spend hours calibrating colour sensitivities and deselecting red seat colours, for example. Then it would all go wrong when an audience member came in with a green coat.
The DSLR camera is linked to a studio flash which flashes when the vote is taken. This helps to maintain a cotinuous colour balance and tells the audience the moment the vote is taken. It also helps with the “legality” of the vote because you have a definite visual record of a definite moment that could also be analysed manually. In fact Artem’s system also allows the count to be done manually and be displayed on the projection screen if challenged.
We use this system with Who Wants to Be…? and our Unlecture format. Just like everything in Who Wants to Be…? its effectiveness and methodology is informed by the audience, so the way the system works develops every time. What we are hoping is that it becomes simple enough to use that it can be deployed anywhere for any of our events that use the Heckle visualisation system, as just another tool in The People Speak’s cabinet.
More detailed notes about our last trial of Artem’s vote counting software at the Article Biennial of Electronic and Unstable Art can be found here.
On November 6 we collaborated with the Antenna gallery of London’s Science Museum. It was part of a series of events that examine the legacy of mathematician and computing pioneer, Alan Turing. Alan Turing is perhaps most famous for the Turing Test. At the time it was conceived, it was a theoretical test of artificial intelligence. The test asked a human operator to make a judgment regarding who was a human and machine respondent behind a physical barrier. The test was based on a Victorian parlour game that Turing was fond of called the imitation game, where players had to guess whether they were corresponding with a man or woman in another room. The People Speak are known for seeing things through a game show lens and Rohan from the Science Museum suggested that this bore a resemblance with the ’80s game show Blind Date.
So we created Blind Update, which is the next step on from the Turing test- what became known during the show as the Cilla test. If you are not able to discriminate between a computer and a human to the extent you want to go on date with your correspondent- now that’s a sexy computer! Unfortunately, Artificial intelligence isn’t quite there yet, with the most sophisticated chat bots still standing awkwardly on their own next to the pot plant. Our experiment went a little awry, but it did provoke a lively discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. Would machines ever take over the world, the dancefloor or the bedroom? Would we want to stay in contact with an uploaded version of a lost loved one? Will machines ever get humour?
Alan Turing meets Cilla Black
However, much to the disappointment of certain human beings, Mevan, one of our contestants chose SAM, the Sardonic Aphorism Machine, despite his obvious incompleteness. We documented the romantic, but ultimately unsuccessful date, some pictures below.
Mevan is feeling a lack of chemistry from SAM
