Augmenting Expectation in Playful Arena Performances with Ubiquitous Intimate Technologies (original) (raw)
Related papers
A place to play - Experimentation and Interactions Between Technology and Performance.(2006)
The Potentials of Spaces : International Scenography and Performance for the 21st Century, 2006
This chapter explores issues associated with the use of technology in performance. Why is the use of technology seen by many as a threat to the liveness of the performance event? Does the use of technology necessarily distract the audience and detract from the art? Can there be a seamless integration within the performance event? What are the implications for designing for performance in and for, an increasingly technologically oriented world? Drawing on the work of key practitioners (including Robert Wilson, Josef Svoboda, and Robert Lepage), I aim to investigate the links between the use of technology and the creation of scenographic statements on stage. Whilst concentrating primarily on the convergence of digital and projection technologies, the article will advocate new ways of working if such technology is to be integrated successfully into performance work. An account of an exploratory project involving dance, digital media and projection is provided as part of an argument that attempts to counter suggestions that performance and technology, art and science are fundamentally incompatible.
Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014
The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.
The expansion of theatrical space and the role of the spectator
One of the theatre and performance conventions that has been challenged by the application of technology is that of space. Theatrical space has been “expanded” through the application of technology and its artefacts. However, it is not really clear what is meant by “expansion”, as it means different things according to different authors and these divergent meanings often lead to misunderstandings. In this article, I will demonstrate the need for a more nuanced understanding of what the expansion of theatrical space means and its impact on the concept of spectatorship. The analysis will be based on three distinct forms of digital performance where spatial expansion has been an issue; these are three categories that also mark the heterogeneity and dynamism of the convergence of performance and technology: multimedia performance, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Through an analysis of specific cases across the categories, I aim to show how the expansion of space implies a more participatory stance in the role of the spectator.
Playful Technology-Mediated Audience Participation in a Live Music Event
Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
This paper presents the evaluation of playful technologymediated audience participation (TMAP) during three music performances in a recent music event. It captures preliminary impressions from a wide range of perspectives and includes critical reflections of music artists, video analysis and qualitative interviews with audience members to cover hypotheses designed to capture both the artists' and the audience's point of view. Results indicate a willingness from both sides to engage in playful TMAP, and a high potential for exploration and playful collaboration within the audience, but the experience is restricted by the need to retain control on the side of artists and the need for clear instructions, feedback and reliable technical systems on the side of the audience.
The (St)Age of Participation: audience involvement in interactive performances
Digital Creativity, 2013
In today's Age of Participation, co-creation, user-generated content and social networking have become part of a mass-appeal digital lifestyle. This paper discusses potential implications for contemporary and future media art in the context of the stage. It reflects on why and how interactive performances could give consideration to this Zeitgeist of empowered spectatorship and, moreover, proposes principles for participatory stage pieces that incorporate practice-based experience as well as findings from (Social) Flow theory, a psychological framework for optimal creative experience that we found to be valuable for fostering audience engagement in interactive dramaturgies.
2020
I had the pleasure to present this paper at the II Conferencia científica internacional "Teatralidad - Antiteatralidad: estudios transdisciplinares y escenológicos del teatro contemporáneo" - 2nd International Scientific Conference "Theatricality - Antitheatricality: Transdisciplinary and Scenological Studies on Contemporary Theater" - The body of the spectator (16-18 December 2020). Organised by: Instytut Neofilologii / Universidad de Bielsko-Biała - University of Bielsko-Biała (POLONIA) & Instituto de Artes del Espectáculo “Dr. Raúl H. Castagnino”. ABSTRACT: The agency of the audience members develops into what I call the audience-audience relationship, which I discuss in this paper. This refers to the way in which audience members influence each other within the time-space framework of a performance, resulting in actions that affect the performer, and thus, shape and direct the development of the work. The artist's body becomes the receiver/spectator while the audience's body, as a collective body made of individual bodies, performs. I explore how the spectators, once they take agency in the performance, may direct its process and overpower the artist by acting independently from them and the initial format of the work. The presence-authority of the artist in relation to the work becomes secondary or is overshadowed. The audience-audience relationship highlights the relationality and mutuality intrinsic in the performance ecosystem, as well as the agency of the inanimate elements of space, time, and documentation in acting upon bodies, and vice versa.
Performativity, performance studies and digital cultures
Performing the Digital, 2016
Performing the Digital seeks to map and reflect registers of performance and techno-social layers of performativity in today's digital cultures. The book's basic proposition is that the ubiquity and pervasiveness of digital media and their networked infrastructures profoundly influence the ways and styles in which performativity appears and is enacted. Contemporary technological apparatuses and media provoke new forms of 'intra-action' between what is usually considered to be either human or machinic agency, to use Barad's terminology of posthumanist performativity (Barad 2003). In this sense, digital cultures are performative cultures. They condition and are shaped by techno-social processes and agencies, and they afford new possibilities for performative practices and interventions. It follows that the study of performativity in its heterogeneous dimensions cannot afford to ignore the agential forces and effects of digital technologies and their entanglements with human bodies. Accordingly, investigations of social, economic and political processes conducted in and across other disciplines have to reckon with the performativity of digital devices and algorithmic organizing. The book's genesis and development-and, we hope, the discussions it will instigate-were therefore informed by two guiding questions: How is performativity shaped by contemporary technological conditions? And how do performative practices reflect and alter techno-social formations? In proposing answers to these questions, Performing the Digital offers a double contribution. First, we see the book as part of the wider 'performative turn' in the cultural and social sciences (Bachmann-Medick 2016; Thrift 2008), contributing to an understanding of how techno-social performativity-or perhaps a regime of digital performativity-effects the world we live in. More specifically, this collection seeks to map and thus make visible the relations between
Audience-Oriented Forms of Performance in the 21st Century
Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2015
The use of space in the mainstream performing arts is based on the division of the acting and performing spaces with an imaginary wall. The sharp division of the space by this invisible conventional border, also called the fourth wall, originated from the fundamentally distinct role definitions assigned to the audience and the actors. On the other hand, especially since midtwentieth century, due to the fast improvement in mass media technologies audiencing has widely shifted from the public space to the private space. Because of this shift the staging forms appropriate to the traditional space order became unresponsive to the needs of new acting and audiencing, and caused a search for alternative ways. In this respect, especially since the 1960's there have been many experiments examining both the acting and the audiencing activity from every aspect. These experiments invited the audience again into the public space, in search of new ways in which the audience could take an active role in a dynamic audience field. In these forms of performance, passive audience positions are completely abandoned and the role of the audience is reconstructed as an active element of the work itself. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a new trend in the Western performing arts, which is based on a participatory, interactive and immersive performance approach. Especially in the immersive performance approach, the audience is invited to a multi-sensory experience. To the extent that they actively participate in the experience, they gain the freedom of creating different audiencing forms and even reconstructing the plot. In these kinds of forms, the audience is invited to almost a realistic experience in spaces constructed to create this realistic feeling. Providing a holistic perception and participation, this experience goes beyond the conventional audiencing forms based on the audio and visual senses, by addressing and stimulating the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses. It also allows the audience to participate in the movements of the performers as well as follow them in the almost realistically constructed performance spaces. As today's audience is accustomed to being active players on the internet and creating worlds at their fingertips on virtual games, new narratives that bring together the audience and the performing arts are thus constructed.