The Gathering at the Poet's Shack written by students in the IMS 440 ETBD Practicum.

The Gathering at The Poet’s Shack took place on November 16, 2020, from 7:30 - 10 pm in Bishop Woods on the Miami University campus in Oxford, OH. Our goal was to promote the democratization of the arts creating a more open and vibrant public discourse through the use of technology allowing all voices to be heard and to celebrate poetry and creativity throughout time. We began by recreating the Poet’s Shack, Percy Mackaye’s home at Miami University during his artist’s residency. We wanted to create an almost magical environment where the boundaries of time thinned and the past, in the form of the Poet’s Shack and the land’s Myaamia roots merged with the future.

At the event, we invited people to enter into an enchanted forest where portraits hang on trees brought to life with lights and projections even though the leaves have all fallen to the ground. Our event leaned heavily on projection mapping and interactivity through our web app encouraging participants to join in at every step along the way. Technology was our medium for perpetuating and encouraging the arts through the lens of the spoken word in poetry. The web app invited participants to share their own poems and have them projected on Upham hall and allowed people to interact with a gallery of Augmented Reality Frames with visuals powered by Machine Learning and audio recorded by members of our campus community. You can add your voice to the chorus at https://poetshack.com.

This project was a collaboration between the Emerging Technology in Business and Design (ETBD) and the Department of Theatre at Miami University and was organized by Artie Kuhn, Ben Nicholson, and concept by Gion DeFrancesco. Our team consisted of students across several disciplines and leveraged bleeding edge and emerging technologies such as projection mapping, augmented reality, virtual reality, and a multiplatform data pipeline to create an interactive, socially distanced, experience on the campus of Miami University in association with MU Theatre's Digital Fringe Festival.

The Poet's Shack can be viewed online on the MU Theatre webpage at MiamiOH.edu/MUTFringe or the College of Creative Arts youtube channel at https://youtu.be/N0Ppc25ImIY.