3rd Ring Out
3rd Ring Out is a performance installation which enables participants to experience the imagined consequences of climate change in the year 2050, and will take place in two converted shipping containers situated in busy public spaces.
“3rd Ring Out is a cross between an emergency planning rehearsal, a video game and a disaster movie, the project explores heroism, democracy, survival, and how we might collectively imagine our future.”
Zoe Svenson, Artistic Director, Metis Arts
During the summer of 2010, 3rd Ring Out will premiere at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and then tour to Newcastle-on-Tyne in conjunction with Northern Stage, Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Environment Festival, Ipswich as part of Pulse Festival, in London as part of the Greenwich Docklands International Festival and in Southend-on-Sea in partnership with Metal.
Metis is unusual in its primary focus on the research process, and they have not taken lightly the need for academic and scientific rigour when dealing with the topic of climate change. To ensure that the research behind the project is entirely sound, Metis has spent considerable time engaging with climate change experts and organisations.
The show uses a voting system for audience members to make decisions on different disaster scenarios presented throughout the performance that affect the city they live. The Arduino computer records the votes which are then uploaded to the website and used to generate HTML 5 Pie Charts using the High Charts API. Better than Google Charts we can display the data using the latest browser standards and create a fully interactive website without Flash (well we used flash for video but thats whats its good for).
Second Variety are proud to have part sponsored the build of the website. As company that prides itself on innovation and ethical standards we like the idea of bringing home the possibilities of a chaotic and dystopian future through a new type of show and jumped at the chance to build the website to highlight such an important issue. We also wanted to show what was possible using only HTML and JQuery for the interface. In the future we intend to make more use of JQuery to build dynamic database driven animated interfaces and use the canvas element and the MP4 video container format to completely banish Flash from our websites.