Preserving shadows: Engaging digital-material in shadow play

• Main Author: Arabit, Maysa Salonga
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Shadow shows; Computer art; Art and computers
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5547
• Institution: De La Salle University

This study explores the variable ways the shadow re-invents and re-orients itself today as it plays with both traditional and emerging digital techniques and sensibilities. This study is conducted with ANINO Shadowplay Collective, a local collective of multimedia artists seeking to bring the art of shadow play out of the shadows. Using their shadow repertoire, Arkipelago 2: A Story of Intima-Sea as a model for analysis, the study looks into the artistic, theoretical, and practical means and methods in the process of developing a digital archive of shadow play. Crucial to this process is the need to understand the intersections of art, performance, and the digital in the archiving of shadow plays and in examining what constitutes archiving in digital form. The study engages in digital ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, examining how shadow players imagine and integrate the digital material in the process of shadow-playing and how the lived and experienced digital-material shape their performance. A digital archive of shadow play is created using documentation of the creative processes engaged in producing and performing Arkipelago 2: A Story of Intima-Sea. The process of digitallyarchiving performing shadows emphasize shadow-playing as a particular form of knowledge, a meaningful resource for understanding human engagement with art, technologies, and systems of interaction. The digital archive employs the multimedia and multilinear potential of hypermedia to enable viewers to experience the multi-layered contexts and processes of shadow-playing by providing them multiple access points to engage the archive to explore and participate in re-weaving and recreating the many aspects of the performance, opening possibilities for new ways of engaging with the art form.