Three years of research prompted by a nagging doubt that built and built over a decade of digital media and performance.
The concept of liveness is fundamental to our understanding of what makes performance engaging but there is little consensus about what it is. This thesis explores the issue by focussing on the role of interaction in liveness, and from this asks how such interactions can be exploited in a co-present, co-temporal performer-audience situation.
June’11
Nine months in, the start of a thesis. But most importantly, in the abstract is a clear distillation of what I’ve been flailing about trying to pin down. The review presented is very much a hurdle passing exercise, it is missing the whole discourse on liveness to start with, and nobody is under any illusion that whats there will be what is finally submitted. And don’t get me started on Papers2’s oh-so-very-beta metadata and bibtex.
The concept of liveness is fundamental to our understanding of what makes performance engaging but there is little consensus about what it is. This thesis will explore the issue by focussing on the role of interaction in liveness.
A review of technological interventions in these interactions has shown novel instrumentation, new modalities, and aspirations of immersion in dialog, yet overall the picture is one of clickers and twitter backchannels: little has been informed by any attempt to understand and design for the fine-grained interactional organisation of performer, audience and audience-member. To address this a clear and appropriate problem has been identified, against which ideas of amplifying and augmenting interactional signals, behaviours and organisational features will be explored. In short: there is no point in a lecture continuing if the delivery is incomprehensible to the students, so how does the lecturer find out, how do the students let the lecturer know? Moreover, how do they do this while maintaining the shared focus of attention that is their very reason for being there? Pervasive media will be the means, and a iterative cycle of development, deployment and formative evaluation the process.
Leveraging human-computer interaction, this research shifts the analysis from crowd com- puting and active spectating to the performer-audience interaction required for informed performance.
September’11
One year in, the conspiculous-by-its-absence liveness chapter is finally out of draft and ready to be seen.
November’11
Pending the inevitable re-write to more clearly disentangle the lines of reasoning and empiricism I’ve now got, I’ve had a quick tidy up and am re-posting the document here.
Postscript — Related is About the live in live cinema, which is many ways is everything I had to cut out of the PhD.
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| tobyharris-phd-oneyearreview.pdf | 197.63 KB |