What is: “ REDUX – Seeking Charlie Russell”?
A Staged Reading, With AR Adventures
The self-taught ‘Western Painter’ Charlie Russell spent his life deeply embedded in the West’s nature and the people, white Europeans and First Nation, of the ‘old West’ and the environmental movements that flowed out of that over a hundred years ago.
Writer, Director, actor Bill Pullman, Theater producer-director Jennifer Mckray Rincon, and the AR maestros of Jump into the Light, for a solo performance experiment with a combination of new technologies and immersions.
His message was you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone.
There are several key technology elements used in this piece. We wanted viewers to feel what it was like in Chalie Russell’s cabin located in Montana, and so we 3D scanned the cabin as it was left preserved after his final moment. His final artwork left unfinished in the cabin, and even the sting latch he used for visitors to open his door was there. Spectators could view the cabin through a projection mapped room staged to fit precisely the dimensions of his actual cabin, and a VR exhibit was also built to match the environment. This was a unique way for spectators to view the cabin without a headset, but also allow viewers to put a headset on for added immersion. Both the VR space and projection mapped space were calibrated to match and this allowed us to use vive trackers as a flashlight so Bill Pullman could shine light on different objects as he spoke about them.
Bill seeks through the essence of Charlie Russell to find what are authentic answers for artists witnessing the catastrophic loss of a natural environment. This piece asks who we are, and why an artist’s life and work is necessary as we find our way to go on living meaningfully in this time of accelerating change.
Using a performance by an actor, 3D scanning technology, augmented reality programming, and a tracked augmented reality projector as a ‘reality flashlight,’ Jump Into The Light Studio creates immersive storytelling components that are used as a means of dramatic storytelling.
The loss of key components of the West’s natural world decimated an environment that formally had sustained a vibrant Native American culture.
REDUX echoes (using AR) the very unexpected, very jaw-dropping NYC Gallery exhibit of 1913 that captured America’s ache for what-was-no-longer through the haunting Western imagery of Russell’s artistry.
We believe this production is a groundbreaking intersection of storytelling and immersive technology.
