game

 

screen cap from nino game



installation at Tanzhaus nrw


nino game exhibitions:

2026 
rbo/shift - royal opera house, london      
temps d’images - festival for dance and technologies, tanzhaus nrw, düsseldorf

modina showcase sõltumatu tantsu lava, tallin, estonia

2025 
cofestival - kino siska, centre for urban culture, ljubljana, slovenia

game version


'nino' becomes a single or dual-player, interactive installation, expanding the creative possibilities for dance performance by transposing to a different domain - into a game world. due to the cost and difficulties of touring with five dancers to venues in three different countries for short durations, we decided to work on converting the 45min live performance into a game-like experience after the residency.  in the game version, the user becomes, at once, the author and the viewer of the artwork in this speculative simulation.  developing the original scenes from the live performance into full 360 environments from a cinematic fixed-camera viewpoint. to make the experience have a longer ‘playablility’, we port over scenes developed from our precursor project, wow + flutter.  we use motion capture of our dancers to animate the avatars, turning them into collectable characters. players have a third-person viewpoint, controlling one avatar that can roam freely through thirteen worlds, ‘collecting’ both avatars and dance material from other figures in the landscapes. the player can then inhabit those avatars and replay the dance phrases. Each world features two alternating soundtracks from both our new musician, marcus villaca, and our wow + flutter musician, nic nell.




setup


we use 2.4 ghz wireless game controllers for familiarity, running the project on a massive tv in a relaxed environment. we also test the ai mocap system on another large screen, letting a 'performing' player animate avatars. however, radical, the software company, does not implement compilation of their unreal plugin, making gallery setup somewhat clunky and unoptimized. despite this, the system performs well and we use it for the short modina runs.