The Iliad Project is a multi-year research collaboration at the HyperMedia Studio in UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television.

Its goal is to develop the architecture for a new performance work inspired by Homer's Iliad and drawing its context dynamically from the audience and the surrounding city, wherever it is performed.

We are currently developing a production for public performance in March, 2003. For more information, please contact us by email.

The research explores the simultaneous evolution of an original text and corresponding new technology, both of which influence the design approach and performance technique necessary to stage the piece. In this way, the project continues the HyperMedia Studio's research in the impact of new technology on the creative process of media production and live performance.

In addition to the core team of five investigators, the project involves collaborators from the UCLA Departments of Computer Science, Theater, Film and Television, and Design|Media Arts, as well as alumni from these departments and guests from other campuses.

Through discussion, writing, coding, experimentation, and rehearsal, this research project will culminate in a new work merging an online exploration of the world of the piece with an actual event combining interactive galleries and performance spaces.

By careful integration of a database of audience information, sensing and image capture technology, and dynamic processing of media and text, the piece will engage its audience-participants by modifying its own text and design elements based on the groups of people who visit the website and attend a particular performance. (More...)

The research component of the project is already underway and has received significant funding from the UCLA Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA Graduate Division, and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Recently, the project's technological research component was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation.