Alex Oliszewski is an assistant professor at Ohio State University, specializing in theatrical media design and media devising. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Theatre from Arizona State University, including coursework from The Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts School of Film, Dance and Theatre, and The School of Arts, Media, + Engineering. At LDI this year, he will be teaching hands-on courses that provide a foundation in the fundamental concepts, skills, and tools at the heart of a media designer’s practice.
1. How did you get involved in the digital media side of theatre technology?
I made a slow transition from performance to design. I began acting on stage when I was growing up in Denver. As a theatre student at Fort Lewis College, I had an opportunity to work as an editing and audio engineer, and later as the host of a weekly live audio theatre show for the campus radio station KDUR. This experience prepared me to throw my hat in the ring when the FLC campus theatre needed an audio designer. I met Richard Fish and Sue Zizza at annual National Audio Theatre Festivals and later interned for a semester with Richard at LodesTone Audio in Bloomington, Indiana, and the following semester with Sue at Sue Media in Hempstead, New York. Somewhere in there I had the good fortune to get my hands on a copy of Sony Vegas Video 3.0, which I initially loved for its control of audio. However, once I realized I now had a video track available, I bought my first digital camera, a Sony VX2000, and my focus began to shift from audio theatre to video production and desktop non-linear editing.
While I constantly maintained a presence in the theatre, primarily as a deck electrician and sound board operator, I strayed from the creative side for a few years, as I turned my interest in digital video production into a reasonably successful wedding videography business. While this helped pay the bills, my artistic soul craved the excitement and creativity of working in live theatre.
This led to the creation of a small theatre company, through which I produced several original plays featuring live performance integrated with the video and audio design techniques I had been learning on my own since graduating from FLC in 2002. As I struggled with how to create the theatrical effects I envisioned with the tools I could afford, I put together a system using an Apple computer loaded with Photoshop software, a Sony Vegas Video 6 camera, and two DVD players. With this relatively inexpensive system, I was able to create effects similar to what I had seen others do with expensive media servers.
After maxing out my credit cards five times in a row, each time happily paying them off in the process of producing a new show, I realized I wanted to more closely focus on authorship and design. This led me back to school, this time as a graduate student in the Media Design Program in the Theatre Department at Arizona State University. ASU stood out to me because it offers a hybrid design degree that includes course work with ASU’s school of Arts, Media, + Engineering. This allowed me to spend time both with my sisters and brothers in the theatre and also really delve into a new community of advanced computer users and engineers. It was there that I integrated an awareness of fundamental computer science, human cognition, and experiential media design into my theatre design practice. Since graduating, I have had the extremely good fortune to secure a position at Ohio State University, where I am currently an assistant professor with a joint appointment between the Department of Theatre and the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Design.
2. What are you teaching at Ohio State, and how extensive is the media program there?
I have a joint appointment at OSU. For the Theatre Department, I teach the history of computer and media design technologies in the performing arts, as well as introductory and advanced classes in media and projection design for theatre. This includes a strong focus on video production, animation, and content manipulation.
For Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD), I teach classes in experiential media design and environmental systems design. My ACCAD appointment also allows me time and resources to pursue my own research interests which, until now, have been focused on the development of virtual and augmented reality systems and motion capture and animation for live performance.
3. What are you teaching at LDI this year, and why should anyone interested in projection or digital media take these courses?
I will teach three classes at LDI: Photoshop for basic content creation; Isadora, a hybrid media server/programming language; and fundamentals of projection mapping. Each of these courses provides a foundation in the fundamental concepts, skills, and tools at the heart of a media designer’s practice. Taken together, the three classes will prepare anyone interested in incorporating projection and other digital media in theatrical or commercial settings to tackle their first design.
In the basic content creation class, participants learn the core tools of Photoshop, including the universal terms and content manipulation skills beneath the digital image files in all software and hardware platforms. Participants will learn how to use these basic tools—alpha channels, compositing, color, space, and image file formatting—to transform content into a form suited for its final destination.
In the second class, participants will learn to program media content for playback and interaction using Isadora, a relatively affordable—under $600—yet extremely powerful software with a very friendly learning curve, developed by Mark Coniglio. Isadora facilitates the merger of properly formatted image, video, audio, and 3D files into a dynamic system that allows for quick changes during design and rehearsal. I will demonstrate how to streamline the system to conform to theatrical conventions by allowing even an unskilled operator to run the entire design from a single “go” button.
I will also address how Isadora can be used to network your media design into DMX-controlled lighting systems and explain how the skills honed using Isadora provide a foundation for using other media serving software programs, including but not limited to Figure 53 QLab, coolux Pandoras Box, and d3.
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4. What do you think will be the next big thing in experiential design? What is trending?
At this point, there is not a field in theatre that has not in some way been digitized. I specifically call myself a “media designer,” rather than “projection designer,” because I recognize that what I create is not limited by or reducible to video projection. I create interactive displays that incorporate the sensing of human performers acting in realtime. I shoot, produce, and animate my content, either from scratch or by remixing found materials. When the majority of the work will be projected, I work in close concert with lighting designers to ensure a balance of equipment placement and co-illumination. I work with scenic designers to ensure that there is a surface or volume of some sort on which the images can be projected or otherwise take form. Today, sound files are almost exclusively digital, and, quite often, media designers are dealing with material that includes a soundtrack, which requires that we work closely with sound designers. I see the boundaries between the tools I use in media design and the tools my collaborators use in lighting, set, and sound design falling farther away with every update and new system release.
As far as “devising” goes, I often feel like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. People keep using this word, but it does not actually mean what they think it means. I understand devising is a defined process of creation. It is not, in my estimation, as simple as a group of people coming into a room without so much as a loose plan for trying to make the show, nor is devising necessarily an “everyone in the room is an equal contributor” enterprise.
In the buzz-word world of “devising,” it seems to me that a lot of what I see people doing is actually attempting to author new work while also devising a devising process. For strong examples of established devising processes, I often direct my graduate students toward Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints system or Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s The RSVP Cycles. In my own creative authorship, I utilize a modified form of The RSVP Cycles informed heavily from my research into the devising methods of Robert Lepage.
5. What advice would you give a student looking to do graduate work in digital media?
Understand why you want to go to graduate school. Do you want to teach? Are you trying to advance from being a technician in the theatre to being recognized as a designer? I believe that, without a clear understanding of what your goals are, heading into graduate school is setting yourself up for a very expensive experiment. In my estimation, the ideal graduate students are those who walk in the door with a clear understanding of how the degree they are working for will prepare them for the career they are seeking and a well thought-out concept of the work they hope to create as their thesis project.
In actuality, what graduate school provides is the opportunity to apply skills once you have acquired them. As a graduate student, it is your responsibility to make the institution work for you and provide you with the resources you’re going to need. You will be given support but only if you know how to ask for it and only if you are willing to do the nitty-gritty to hone your skills on your own so you can meet your mentors at their level. There truly are no stupid questions. However, the three years you have to ask those questions go by quickly so you have to think, work, and ask fast.
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