Live Improvisation in a Video Game!

The ILL Clan, a group of four actors from New York, will be coming to perform live improvisation in a modified video game environment for the public. This is a the west coast premiere of the emerging art form known as machinima.

What is machinima? Machinima is filmmaking performed and captured within real-time, 3D virtual environments, most often in existing video game engines. It is at the convergence of traditional filmmaking, digital animation, game development,hacker culture, and play. These digital films distinguish themselves from traditional animation in that they use real-time performances rather than painstakingly scripted and rendered scenes. It is an emerging art form fostered by the Internet and the burgeoning ubiquity of development kits that are included with contemporary computer games.

The Clan will give a brief tutorial on what machinima is, show us some of their previous work, and finish improvisationally with live digital puppetry in their show called "Tra5h Ta1k with Ill Will."

Join us the following day for a scholarly panel on Monday, December 5th, in Annenberg Auditorium, from 3-5 pm. The ILL Clan will be joined by Henrik Bennetsen and Matteo Bittanti, two visiting scholars in the Stanford Humanities Lab, and Michael Nitsche, a Communications professor at Georgia tech who has written extensively about machinima. The moderator is Henry Lowood, faculty in the Introduction to the Humanities and Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and for Germanic Collections.

We hope to see you there!