liveness

happy to report the festival of ideas has won a business to arts award. it was a really satisfying project to be part of, and i’m really proud of how it responds to the ‘liveness’ of that kind of live event.

interestingly, it won the ‘staff engagement’ category. my research on liveness has led to audiences and interaction, so ‘staff engagement’ is a good fit there. what i find interesting is that in having recently talked about my ‘engagement with liveness’ agenda in entrepreneurial circles, it’s the ‘organisation innovation’ consequence of this that really hit home to them… and here we have that reinforced. there were plenty of other categories the festival of ideas could have won in, and plenty of other aspects of the event they could have chosen for that accompanying photo.

to oxford for the ‘Inaugural RCUK Digital Econmy Theme CDT Student Research Symposium’, ie. gather the guinea-pigs and see what they’re up to. happy to regain the overview of my research though, and working on a presentation is so much more enjoyable a process than writing for me.

given my research is on liveness and lecturing comes into it, there had to be a punchline or some way for the act of presentation to be reflexive of its subject. so the slides ended up looking like tweets, and they sent themselves out hashtagged up as parcels of backchannel fodder. unfortunately i didn’t realise the script i found wasn’t clever enough to parse multiple tweets per slide until afterwards, so all the links and asides that went with each slide didn’t get out, which was kinda the magic i wanted to happen - as if i was talking on two levels with two modalities at once. brushing off my applescript, that is now fixed and available for all.

to dublin, to save ireland. 50 social entrepreneurs had been flown in from around the world to kickstart the adoption of their ‘proven solutions’ in ireland: the three day event was called change nation, and that really was its aim. ashoka have that kind of clout, and aren’t afraid to use it.

working again with event mastermind boz temple-morris and digital maestro stef lewandowski, their agenda was clear: stop three days of networking from being just a talking-shop. action and accountability needed to come out of it. for me, it was a opportunity to be at the heart of event conceived around audience-audience interaction, where facilitation and legacy were conceived hand-in-hand. stef has an excellent write-up on his site.

i arrived the day before to find stef explaining his digital strategy to ashoka. tip: if you want to impress somebody, draw the diagram upside down across the table…

the best thing you can be asked to after spending a year getting to grips with a phd and producing a document of goodness knows how many words is to take that and boil it down to two sides. thanks to newcastle’s culture lab (any surprise?)for cornering me into this by proposing a workshop on liveness at the premier conference on human factors in computing. and best of all: my position paper has been accepted.

In the literature on liveness there is a surprising paucity of studies that look directly at the character of interactions between audience members. Partly as a consequence of this, technological interventions in the live experience have focussed primarily on enhancing the performers’ ability to project aspects of their ’act’ or on enriching the ‘generic’ audience experience. We argue that the dynamics of the interactions amongst audience members is key to the experience of a live event and that if we attend to this directly new opportunities for technological intervention open up.

This is the Brain.

We are using experimental thought-casting technology to display in real-time the ideas and thoughts are emerging at this moment, inside the Hexayurts and elsewhere. Come join our artists and coders in drawing it all together: talk to us, doodle with us as we find the emergent themes, trends and stories.

an early saturday start to attend the ‘audience through time’ conference organised by the drama department at queen mary. it was a good effort, and my chairing of the ‘technology and liveness’ panel seemed to go down well — phew. i especially enjoyed martin barker’s talk, which was spot-on topic for me and presented with gusto: motivated by the issue of ‘liveness’ it started by asking how do audiences make sense of and respond to the near-live quality of streamed performances in cinemas, but soon progressed to an empirically backed provocation of a ‘scandal to theory’ that really showed the value of crossing disciplines.

its interesting seeing the different conventions of the disciplines at play, and i still cannot reconcile my love of the debate in drama seminars i have attended with the seeming pointlessness of reading out densely worded performance theory papers verbatim to a darkened hall (ref. my aside about auslander). something to ponder more, for i am one of the organisers of another conference on audience coming this may…

it might have been finished on the plane out to holiday, but i and it got there.

[Supervisor] Of course, I think you do still need to do significant work to disentangle some of the different threads of reasoning that are now in the introduction. In fact, I recommend a complete re-write in which you try to do some more careful exposition of the different postitions people have taken.

…ah, the phd process. just when you’re happy you’ve got somewhere and achieved something, its back to square one: if better armed, and more skilled (the writing is getting better).

[reattached a slightly tidied up version, dated nov 30th]

thankfully the viva was like a good supervision session rather than a critical demolition. if only i had actually pressed the record button on the dictaphone app like i thought i had. possibly the best insight came right at the end, almost as an afterthought from my drama supervisor: its really all about attention.

in the written feedback:
The committee were impressed by the amount of work done and the quality of the literature review. This draws together some very interesting material and combines it well and shows good critical powers.

yay! ah - but these things always seem to have some kind of “subject to the usual corrections” clause. and, lo, mine does:
The committee requested that a revised submission should be made for a second review. No new reading is required, it is much more about refining the way the research issues are presented and giving a clear, coherent and tractable focus. There’s a lot of good work already done here but it would benefit from being sharpened. Specifically:
1. Produce a new section that provides a clearer definition of the research
questions and, in particular, a significant narrowing of the background concept
of ‘liveness’ to a more conceptually and empirically tractable, and thus more
focussed, issue (see below).
2. Provide a new section that explains the methodological approach and, in
particular how the initial system requirements / design will be motivated.
3. Provide some discussion of how the work will link coherently - in terms of
both key concepts and methodological strategies - between potentially diverse
field environments.

Three years of research prompted by a nagging doubt that built and built over a decade of digital media and performance. As a performer hid behind a laptop, have my peers and I missed the point about liveness? Pressing buttons isn’t whats interesting, its that mass of people in front of you. Its the audience, it’s what you can do with one…

The current overview of my research would be —

Part One: Enter the audience
* To better understand liveness, we need to enter the audience.
* Performance Theory is coming to a framing of liveness where the audience and interaction are central.
* Performance Theory is coming to a framing of liveness where technological interventions can be embraced.
* To explore interaction’s role in liveness, we need to go beyond a generic, undifferentiated treatment of audience
Experiments in audiencing
* Question: is my experience, in an audience, effected by my interaction with others?
* Question: what modalities can we identify or invent; what are their characteristics?

Part Two: Embrace the audience
* To design for liveness, we need to embrace the audience.
* By staging interventions in audience interaction, not only can audience experience be enhanced, but quality of performance can follow
* What around the existing interactions could we filter or amplify; what are the observable phenomena we can concretely work with?
“Are we on the same page?”
* A formative study that starts with this colloquial phrase and finds itself in the classroom.
* Classrooms are live situations, and trends such as podcasting lectures are bringing their live quality into sharp relief.
* On the Same Page is mesh networking iPad software to experiment with mediated human-human interaction in the classroom.
* Consider what can be done just by visualising what pages lecturer and students have open: moving in sync together; half the class a few slides back.
* Without imposing any new overhead on the live situation, the performer can be paced better, the social stigma of asking questions in the audience can be flipped to reward of speaking up for many.

To read further, the timeline of my developing thesis is here —

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.

http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/2011/06/nine-month-review-title-and-10… (inc. pdf)
http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/2011/06/nine-month-review-viva

September’11

One year in, the working document is getting to be a rounded thesis, if still a many complete re-writes away from a final submission (let alone the studies themselves). This is the nine-month review with the criticisms taken to heart and notably including the conspiculous-by-its-absence liveness chapter.

http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/2011/09/one-year-review-rounded-repres… (inc. pdf)

November’11

The one-year review tidied up slightly, download as attachment on this page.

February’12

My research reworked to put the argument up-front and condensed into the few sides of a short paper. A good process, and a document I’m very happy with.

http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/2012/02/designing-liveness-position-paper (inc. pdf)

July’12

A presentation on my research, effectively the position paper condensed further and updated.

http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/2012/07/twelve-minutes-all-my-phd (inc. slides and tweets)

Postscript

Related is About the live in live cinema, which is many ways is everything I had to cut out in the early days of the PhD. There’s an academic essay as part of it.

three things you don’t want together: wedding organisation, alt-wedding organisation, and writing the first-year dry-run of your PhD thesis. all so important in life; all epic on the deadline front, all with just a week between them.

first to pass: the PhD nine-month review. 10+k words, finally a title i’m happy with, and most importantly, in it a coherent research programme that articulates both the bigger picture of why i got into this in the first place and the concrete in what i am going to study. liveness is a nebulous topic, and it has been quite the journey to get to this point.

the abstract is possibly the worst thing to put here, as it was the last thing to be re-written and i was beat by that point, but it gives the flavour. and in archiving this here, when the PhD is further along i can look back an wince…

Liveness: Exploiting the here and now of us together

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 computing and active spectating to the performer-audience interaction required for informed performance.