http://spiritsmeltedintoair.com
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
The Tempest, Act IV, Scene i
Spirits Melted Into Air is a project exploring the motion of actors on stage. Shakespeare is frequently understood - especially by those studying it - as a text first and foremost. But the RSC's work is about interpreting, performing, and presenting that text. Drama is not static: it is physical, it is energetic. The words come to life in the context of a performance. And that performance takes place across a huge stage: though it may look small from a distance, it's a large space for an actor to cover, and many great performances take in all of it.
Spirits attempts to show the performance beyond the words: the work of Actors, Directors, and Choreographers. It does that in two phases: first, capturing that performance; then, illustrating and interpreting it.
It's not expected that you'll be able to immediately get Spirits running out of the box; its open-source nature is mainly for illustration. However:
spirits_rec.pdeandplaybackare Processing sketches, designed for Processing 1.5. They will not work in Processing 2.0 without modification.- You'll need the following Processing libraries to run them: GSVideo, Keystone, ControlP5.
No sample video is included; you'll have to source that yourself. No sample data is included; you'll have to generate that yourself. Consider this a software release without any data - much of the data used in the original artwork is copyright the RSC. This code is the only open-source element of the project.
Spirits Melted Into Air is open source under the MIT License:
Copyright (C) 2012 Tom Armitage.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.