Process

We originally approached the exercise with the idea of a telephone/bad translator game, but we didn't know how to approach it.  We didn't think a game of telephone would be feasible given the large number of people in the class and the quiet nature of the game except at the end.  If we chose a subset of people, it would limit participation options and not be very fun to watch.  We also weren't very sure how to incorporate the technology/media aspect of the performance.

Upon talking to Daragh during the first cut critique sessions, we decided that a better way to go to achieve our comedic situation and incorporate technology would be to build a translation and have a computer voice read it out loud.  Simply translating a piece from English to other languages and back through an automatic translation service created a very similar effect to the telephone game with a garbled outcome that was often humorous just to read, and the extra layer of the computer voice gave it more character.

However, we now needed a way to involve the audience because we wanted participation and play to be part of our performance to emphasize the connection between human and computers.  What better way to achieve that than a game?  Our original intent was to do a live translation through a randomly generated set of languages, but we soon found that funny results were only produced under certain situations that weren't able to be replicated with pure randomness, so we decided to create translations for a few select songs and have the audience try to guess what they were originally.  Through this interaction, we hoped that we could involve people organically through a voting system.  We also needed a way to delve into the game and give the computer voice more of a character, so we decided to make a small script to lead in and introduce the audience to the voice so it didn't seem disconnected from the rest of the performance.