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                    Melinda Hetzel

                    Test Sites: Round 2

                    Phone held up to street showing image from past
                    Melinda Hetzel and Co. is a new collective of multi-disciplinary artists who collaborate with director Melinda Hetzel to create augmented realities.

                    ​Melinda Hetzel has directed and devised a wide range of original, image-based performance works nationally, as well as in Singapore and Germany. Her extensive body of work features visually stunning, site-specific works and dynamic, ensemble-based theatre.

                    The work of Melinda Hetzel & Co. builds on this experience and in particular Hetzel’s decade of work as artistic director of award-winning visual theatre company, Peepshow Inc. Hetzel's recent site-responsive work, Fly By Night, designed for the foyer spaces of Melbourne's Hamer Hall premiered as part of Nite Art and Open House Melbourne, July 2015. Fly By Night was nominated for a 2015 Green Room Award for Design in Contemporary Performance (Visual and Digital App Design). The project also showcased at the Australian Performing Arts Market 2016, Brisbane.

                    Once Was Here - virtual street art for Melbourne's city streets and laneways

                    This test allowed key collaborators Melinda Hetzel and Steph O'Hara to experiment with purpose-built smartphone software in and around Melbourne's City Square. Testing included: interrogation of the creative concept, researching historical images of site, on-site photography/ filming of test material, testing the suitability of site during day-time hours, assessing different modes of interaction for a high-traffic outdoors location and testing of panoramic photography.

                    The findings included: the significance of recognisable architectural features in audience navigating a highly populated site, that 'portrait' orientation provides more essential information for navigation on this site than the usual 'landscape' configuration of the device, that filmed content needs to be more sparsely populated with iconic, mid-field features to support the 'augmented illusion' and that images with action on several planes within a large depth of field do not work.

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