Message in a Bauble

Last weekend, “Message in a Bauble” was a free experience offered at the WOW festival hosted at University of California, San Diego.

Enemies of Time builds immersive stories that are accessible, sustainable and meaningful. They use immersive techniques to make the audience the center of the story. Should engagement be required? Or simply rewarded with play. As humans, we are all vulnerable; so why not make experiences that let everyone enjoy themselves at the level they choose.

We are storytellers first. Realtime narrative drives our work, through a mix of exploratory improvisation, interactivity technology and theater. We strive to bring experiences to border audiences lowering barriers of participation. 10zebra empowers audiences to add to stories visualization and lore, increasing participatory engagement, and allowing for evolving curated community narratives.

We embrace community and curiosity. With a team of magic, neuroscience, interaction theory, theatre, and technology. With a sprinkle of AI fairy dust. Theatre in your pocket? Interactive neocinema? Street roleplaying? We guide everyday participants to engage in this new emerging medium that doesn’t have a clear label yet.

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Efficiency is the enemy of curiosity. Time is a metric of thought removed. As automation increases the ease of production and disingenuous communication, we lean into play, iteration and repetition. We celebrate technology as an element in participatory theatre. We activate a robotic character EDIN, as an interactive character who sends text messages to participants, engaging them to find objects and continue the narrative. We curate fleeting moments, and string them together, refined with repetition and intentions. This layered cultural interaction serves as the scaffolding for meaning, a psychological town square, where playful moments align for a larger story that you belong to.

How is AI incorporated?

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Our documentation process included verite-style video capture of participants discovering the Bauble machine, and exploring their first interactions with EDIN. These video clips were transformed with Gemini and Runway’s Aleph to create an artistically curated montage of “printed moments” when humans encounter a foreign intelligence in need.

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To break down the process: a video clip is filmed on a cell phone using a narrative storyboard by 10zebra. The community-contributed base media is transformed with a particular look to emulate a custom printmaking ink style from a printmaker who has turned to generative video production. This documentary captures the experience of the audience as they interact with our new media story at the WOW festival at UCSD. Text messages sent to participants are determined by responsive cloud software that responds to the user’s messages and advances the narrative, engaging them to participate.

Much like Waking Life by Richard Linklater or Aaron Koblin’s participatory drawing project celebrating the life of Johnny Cash, we celebrate how a creative community can collectively build fragments of a larger vision. With the advent of new AI technology, production becomes more accessible- even for a disparate group of people - to express creative moments under a unified style. All while being fast enough to be spontaneous and true to life.

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Message in a Bauble

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