Shadow arts-communication: System supporting communicability for encounter among remote groups

The present authors have developed a communication system WSCS (Waseda Shadow Communication System), with which your remote communicating partner (or you) can be positioned and appeared 3dimensionally in your (or your partner's) real space, by exchanging body shadows each other. With this WSCS, we have reported previously that cooperative work and conversation can be achieved with your remote partner while taking the spatial distance ("Maai" in Japanese) between you and his shadow appeared in your space. For further development of the WSCS as Arts Communication System being supportive to a generation of co-creative "Encounter Ba", a creative expression technique has been investigated in the present study. With this technique, a relationship between you and your remote partner at the encounter occasion can be strengthened from the following two points of view. The first point is related to a supportive method to a selforganization of "Ba" at the encountering "Now, we are here", by enriching the co-existing feeling between remote participants. For this specific aim, the application software was developed with which remote participants can perform embodied interaction between remote groups using a virtual shadow ball. The second point relates to a method by which scene of the past time was reproduced across the time scale and the bodily expression of the concerned person can be trace-experienced. For this point, a co-experiencing type archive software was developed with which one can put himself at the past scene by processing of shadow images of recorded person(s), so that one can share experiences with concerned person(s) while entering the past scene across the time scale. After installing these software programs into WSCS, several communication experiments were conducted. It was found that (i), with the first software, a similar effect as an ice-breaking activities occurred at a workshop was recognized, and the software was found effective to develop a workshop which shares a mutual context among groups, and (ii), with the second program, since participants and the concerned person can be present at the same scene, changes in feeling/emotion of the concerned person can be conveyed directly via the embodiment.