(Session 2)Peter Flaherty
The brash, young founder of an ultra-hot tech company invites eight strangers to an island mansion for an exclusive weekend. The guests were early investors in his wellness wearable, Empathy™. He promised to divvy up the final shares of the company before the impending IPO as a bonus for their loyalty. Although introduced as strangers, their dark, intertwined pasts are revealed. Before dinner is over, the first of them turns up dead. Before the weekend is over, all but one will follow.
This AI-interactive hybrid of film and game is the participatory entertainment that the next generation craves. With variable interactivity that adjusts based on the engagement of the participant, ranging from first-person agency to Friday night couch potato passivity, the high production value cinematic storytelling allows you to watch and live the movie simultaneously. In this murder mystery, you can’t tell where the film ends and the game begins.
In this session we will explore first-person character interactivity and will invite the audience to play with our AI characters. Our story begins with the participant in an interactive environment, but with no direct interaction with other characters. However, as the story evolves, the character interaction increases, culminating in an exciting multi-character finale.
From the Artist
Peter Flaherty is an artist and director whose work has shown in over a hundred international venues, including theaters, galleries, and museums. His work interrogates emotional, interpersonal dramas through the lens of emerging technologies. Leveraging a combination of intuitive interactivity, contemporary social topics, and engrossing human narratives, his work places the viewer in unfamiliar experiential territory through the use of cutting-edge technology, but draws them down an emotionally compelling narrative path to supplant the veneer of gameplay with meaningful immersion. He challenges the dominant uses of interactivity by subverting and concealing the technical mechanisms of choice-making in participatory storytelling, instead placing the conceptual and narrative experience in the forefront, rather than tempting the gee-whiz button-pushing that can often trump the emotional and narrative content.
He is currently completing Empire At Sea, a Solarpunk AR drama about a group of climate scientists who colonize an oil rig after an environmental catastrophe, which was commissioned by Lincoln Center and will premiere in 2026. He previously conceived and directed The Dial, an interactive narrative combining augmented reality & projection mapping, which premiered at Sundance in 2019. He created and directed The Surrogate, a groundbreaking Virtual Reality narrative that melds 360 video with a computer-generated explorable environment, which was a SXSW Interactive Innovation Award Finalist in 2016. He was Creative Director for Marvel Studios and Disney’s Eternals AR, a companion piece to Chloé Zhao’s feature film, which was released in November 2021. He created three productions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York that are still in their active repertory: Lohengrin, which premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 2022 and at the Met in 2023, an interactive version of The Flying Dutchman in 2020 featuring a live motion-captured virtual character, and a massive, 5-hour video projection for Parsifal in 2012. On Broadway, he created the Video and Projection Design for Roundabout Theatre’s Sondheim on Sondheim, which was later adapted for HBO's documentary film, Six by Sondheim. His large-scale video installation, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He has designed video projections and interactive art for installations, performances, and concerts that have toured the world with The Builders Association, Complicite, Big Dance Theater, Basil Twist, and many others. His video art has been shown at such venues as the MIT Media Lab and the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA). He has received grants from agog, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, The New York State Council on the Arts, Doris Duke Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. He is a Professor in the Interactive Media for Performance MFA Program at CalArts.
Credits
Eli Horowitz, Paul Kyle, Shar Simpson
Eli Horowitz, Paul Kyle, Shar Simpson
Content Warning
Murder
Murder
Return to all sessions