Interactive Futures – 2007

Interactive Futures 2007 ( November 15 – 17 ) Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

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Leena Saarinen

Accidental Lovers

Accidental Lovers is an interactive musical TV-comedy that explores variations of a deadly love relationship between 61-year-old cabaret singer Juulia and 30 years younger pop star Roope. Viewers can affect the unfolding drama, its turns and outcomes of the plot, by sending mobile messages to the broadcast. Each message is scanned for keywords that can cause particular types of thoughts (voiceover audio clips) in the main characters. As the keyword data cumulates, the characters’ relationship will start to change according to the text message chat.

This new genre demonstrates that there is a good potential to develop engaging interactive content for a TV-audience. The viewers’ willingness to discuss the drama, themes and fictional characters’ destinies was so well connected to the drama characters, and themes that it encourages further design for interactive stories on television where user generated content is an important part of the whole narrative.

(Sydän Kierroksella, Dir. Tuomola M., script and original idea Saarinen L. & Tuomola M. 2006, FIN)

Bio

Leena Saarinen (Ma in New Media) is practitioner and researcher of digital media with special focus on interactive storytelling, cross-media.

Leena is one of the creators of Accidental Lovers, a participatory black comedy for television and mobile phones. She has participated in several collaborative media art productions including award winning concept Villa Mirdia chat world and numerous other community and collaboration concepts on the Internet. As a founding member of virtual theatre group Avatar Body Collision she is exploring new forms of participatory drama, using on-line platforms to produce a new kind of converged live performance form.

Links

Homepage: http://mlab.uiah.fi/~lsaarine

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