collective embodiment
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Image theater is the most popular and accessible Theater of the Oppressed technique. It consists of telling an oppression story through a static body image. The spect-actors stand in postures that, altogether, suggest an oppressive action. There is no voice, explanation or movement in the image, although that can be added later for further inquiries […] - Sep 20, 2023 -
Assembling collective bodies to take care of the commons
As part of the Participatory Design Conference 2022, I joined P.D. Commoners, a self-managed collective of researchers working at the boundaries of commoning and designing, to organize a workshop on Relationality, Commoning, and Designing. After the workshop, we recorded a podcast with Joanna Sad-Sulonen and Giacomo Poderi to summarize and share the workshop experience with […] - Jan 11, 2023 -
Forum Theater provides a forum to test and rehearse actions and responses to oppressive situations in the form of an interactive play. What differentiates Forum Theatre from other interactive theatre techniques is precisely its political goal of human and social emancipation. By stimulating the spectator’s effective intervention, Forum Theatre seeks to provoke reflections about the forms of […] - Apr 17, 2022 -
Reaction to computer-mediated oppression can be rehearsed in a Theater of the Techno-Oppressed session. When using the image theater technique, it is possible to capture every attempt to react to oppression and compare their efficacy in still photos. In addition to the spect-actors who stage the play, two persons are required: a photographer and a […] - Mar 27, 2022 -
Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education (2021)
Instead of delivering an invited talk in the UTFPR’s Informatics student week of 2021, Rodrigo Fresse Gonzatto, Claudia Bordin Rodrigues, and Frederick van Amstel performed an invisible theater on artificial intelligence in higher education. In this kind of performance, actors stage the play without telling the audience that they are acting. They pretend to be […] - Oct 4, 2021 -
Design and Precarious Work in Digital Platforms (2020)
The Design & Oppression network produced a remote forum theater play on platform work and precarity in the USP design academic week of 2020. Young design students joined the forum to discuss the dystopian future of their profession while considering the dystopian present of other professions. Following the remote forum theater method, the spect-actors wore augmented reality […] - Dec 3, 2020 -
Theater of the Techno-Oppressed
Despite all the hype and hope around it, technology is not inherently good. Historically, technology has often intensified oppressions such as xenophobia, sexism, and racism. Social movements, activist groups, and oppressed people need to be aware of how technology does that and, especially, how it uncovers that under the pretext of neutrality. Theater of the […] - Apr 6, 2020 -
Improvised Videos are short films recorded with smartphones to support a codesign process. They represent everyday scenarios where the design object plays a protagonist role. The interaction with the design object is depicted through variegated film and theater techniques such as enactment, role playing, props, puppets, cuts, and transitions. The main advantage of using video […] - Nov 1, 2018 -
Interaction design, like theater, depends on the performances of human actors to realize its aesthetic expression. Interaction designers create software code much like theater scripts, while users often ignore them and improvise. Drawing from the analogy of Computer as Theater proposed by Brenda Laurel and the Theater of the Oppressed developed by Augusto Boal, this […] - Oct 31, 2018 -
The Conceal and Show Game (2015)
The way Facebook conceals or shows up messages in the news feed is a mystery to most users. Facebook gives the impression that if a user posts a status update, all of her friends receive it in the timeline, but that is not always true. The Edgerank algorithm decides what is shown in the timeline based on three variables: This abstract […] - Jul 31, 2015 -
The uses of the human body in CAD
Yesterday I was in Germany for a collaborative meeting with some researchers working with computing and spation reasoning. I presented a poster outlining the challenges of my PhD research. Schloss Etelsen, the venue, couldn’t be better for reflecting about space abstract modeling. Look at the site: Coincidence or not, the 19th century castle had been […] - Jul 1, 2011