Liveness: an interactional account

given my phd research centred around liveness and media based performance, off to berlin for the as-if-it-were-made-for-me symposium of club transmediale:

this year’s festival theme #live!? puts the spotlight on the practice of media-based audio/visual live performance. […] in considering what ‘liveness’ entails in the age of media technology, two major aspects may be identified: on the one hand, audiovisual recordings (and reproductions thereof) were what first made it possible to experience a “live” situation in an atemporal and non-site specific manner and, particulary in the context of mass media broadcasts, brought the term “live” into existence as a differentiator that had previously never been needed; and, on the other hand, media artists have experimented with the performative potential of technological media in live settings ever since these were invented, i.e. they tested the limits of film and records, video, tape and the computer. at the same time, the growth in interactive applications of media technologies has lead to new forms of socio-cultural participation and much discussed manifestations of augmented experience. the question as to whether, in terms of their aesthetic and everyday cultural impact certain media technologies are genuinely suited to “liveness” or to its diametric opposite seems to have not yet been conclusively answered.

having said this was made for me, there’s a lot of verbiage there, and i’m less interested in a lot of the thrust of it – the ‘what’ – and a lot more interested in the ‘why’ and ‘how could we’.

http://www.clubtransmediale.de/ctm-festival/day-program/what-is-live.html

in one-liners rather than the fuller descriptions I intended, here are the speakers I found interesting. it took a long time for the symposium to get beyond the ‘what’ and start to touch the ‘why’ or ‘what could be’, but there was gold when it did.

Session 2: Medium or Instrument – Emergence and Intention
Artist’s Presentation: Ei Wada “Braun Tube Jazz Band”
Lectures & Discussion: John Croft / Shintaro Myazaki / Rolf Großmann
Chair: Daniel Gethmann

ei wada makes dead media performable, and is definitely worth checking out.

jon croft, photo’d above, addressed what we might like as live rather than what live is – introducing an ‘aesthetic liveness’ – and had a practitioner’s perspective as well as an academic which was good. the criticism would be that it seemed like his opinions as a practitioner written up as fact, but in such a short presentation thats impossible to know.

Session 3: Spectator or Participant?
Artist’s Presentation: Ali Demirel / Rob Fischer
Lectures & Discussion: Steve Dixon / Katja Kwastek / Regine Buschauer
Chair: Frauke Behrendt

ali demirel is somebody i already know, his work with bringing audience interactivity as a central component of the big-budget richie hawtin techno tours is a case study i really want to make as part of my research. while the actual interactions they have produced so far are quite simplistic, the massively important thing they have done is built and tested an infrastructure for this, and still having a ‘client’ that wants to push it, they are now in a (as i see it) unique position to deliver on the potential of audiences and performance enmeshed with technology.

12:00 › Session 4: Immersion and Self Experience
Artist’s presentation: Greg Pope
Artist’s presentation: Yutaka Makino
Lectures & discussion: Gabriele Klein / Werner Jauk / Beate Peter
Chair: Marie-Luise Angerer

beate peter is the surprise hero of the symposium for me, delivering a talk straight from clubland that went to the heart of the live experience vs. the home media version schism. more than any other talks, it foregrounded the experience, the audience.

14:30 › Session 5: Media Performance or Peformance Media?
Artist’s presentation: Naut Humon – Recombinant Media Labs
Lectures & discussion: Malcolm LeGrice / Yvonne Spielmann / Mick Grierson
Chair: Axel Volmar

malcolm legrice needs little introduction, a true pioneer with legacy and wisdom. what caught me specifically was his discussion around what the audience can want from a performer, where it can hinge on surprise as opposed to my thinking of exposing the live process, trivial example could be as a dj might build up the drop.

mick grierson is pushing in all the right directions in terms of digital media and liveness, and at the same time puts the algorithm, something that is unrelated to my take on these things, at the centre of his practice. so there’s something kinda funny for me here, but his laying out of the territory is very seriously worthwhile.

The Transmediale / CTM joint keynote was Philip Auslander talking on liveness, and there was no way I wasn’t going to be there. He pretty much owns the field of liveness by virtue of writing the book ‘Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture’. It’s a great book that firmly moves performance theory beyond the aura of the body on stage to something that I can reconcile myself with as a media based performer. Having got over the history of mediatisation, the second edition is a lot more contemporary than the first, and CTM was to hear to my understanding his first progression from the position of that second edition.

The standing critique at my research group Interaction, Media and Communication at Queen Mary is that his conclusions smack of technological determinism and largely ignore the audience, and in so doing discount a phenomenological approach (oversimplified as the liveness comes from how the audience receive) and the human-human interaction (oversimplified as the liveness comes from the transition of a group of individuals into a self-identified audience). So it was nice to hear him pretty much flag these criticisms in his opening remarks and change his argument quite significantly. For my research, I needed to absorb his new discourse as a text, and so transcribed my audio recording of it, which I’ve copied below in the full post entry.

As an aside, I found it crazy that somebody whose research is about liveness and is steeped in performance theory could deliver a keynote in such an impenetrable manner. Everybody I asked about it pretty much said they didn’t get anything from it, they didn’t understand a word he said. Or rather, they heard the words, but couldn’t put the sentences together under barrage from the constant delivery. Such dense academic language read verbatim just wasn’t effective communication as a lecture, yet as transcribed I find it near enough perfect for that form. What I’m about to say is clearly psycho-babble, but it felt as it because he wasn’t actually thinking the construction and arguments in his head, that meaning wasn’t somehow imbued in his delivery of the content, and as such the words were just sounds alone.

Photo: Katrina James http://www.flickr.com/photos/transmediale/5415023473/
Update: Transmediale’s live stream of the keynote is now archived: http://www.vimeo.com/20473967

Phillip Auslander - Digital Liveness in a historico-philosophical perspective.

First part is a mildly adapted set of materials adapted from the book. Second part is brand new and written specially for this presentation.

[First part not transcribed: go read the book! The conclusion is largely…]

It is clear from this history that the word live is not used to define intrinsic ontological properties of performance that set it apart from mediatised forms, but is actually a historically contingent term. The default definition of live performance is that it is the kind of performance in which the performers and audience are both physically and temporally co-present to one another. But over time we have come to use the word live to describe performance situations that don’t meet these basic conditions.

[…this is now new…]

The British communications scholar Nick Couldry proposes what he calls two new forms of liveness: online liveness and group liveness. His definitions are:

• online liveness: social co-presence on a variety of scales from very small groups in chatrooms to huge international audiences for breaking news on major websites all made possible by the Internet as an underlying infrastructure.
• group liveness: the “liveness” of a group of friends who are in continuous contact via their mobile phones through calls and texting.

Understood in this way, the experience of liveness is not just limited to specific performer-audience interactions but refers to a sense of always being connected to other people, of continuous technologically mediated co-presence with others known and unknown.

[…and so this is now the new conclusion, before specifically addressing what a ‘digital liveness’ may be]

The emerging definition of liveness may be built primarily around the audience’s affective experience. To the extent that websites and other virtual entities respond to us in real time, they feel live to us. And this may the kind of ‘liveness’ that we now value.

Part Two: Towards a Phenomenology of Digital Liveness

It is this last sentence i wish to revisit. To the extent that websites and other virtual entities respond to us in real time they feel live to us and this may be the kind of liveness we now value. I continue to believe that this statement points to the right direction by nominating the audiences’ experience as the locus of liveness. But I now find that my emphasis on feedback in realtime operations slips into technological determinism by implying that technologies rather than people are the causal agents in the construction of liveness. The need for another way of approaching the question is clear, simply from the fact that while realtime operations and the initiation of a feedback loop may be necessary conditions for the creation of the effect of liveness in our interactions with computers and virtual entities - digital liveness, in short - they are not sufficient conditions. I do not experience all of the realtime operations that my computer performs as live events. For instance the letters appear on my screen as i type but i do not apprehend this phenomenon as live performance by the computer any more than I did when used a typewriter. When I engage in conversation with a chatbot however, I do experience it as a live interaction. This not because what the hardware, software, networks and so on are doing, in the former case are significantly different from what they do in the later case, it’s all ones and zeros after all. Nor does it have simply have to do with the chatbot’s greater anthropomorphism. In keeping with phenomenology’s presence that our experience of the things of the world begins with their disclosing themselves to us, I will suggest that different representations make different claims on us. I am using the word ‘claim’ in the way that the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer uses it in his discussion of aesthetics, and truth and method, a text that will serve as my guide here. I must emphasise however that I am not applying Gadamer’s ideas to the question of digital liveness. For one thing I have no interest in arguing that the interactions I am discussing are necessarily aesthetic in nature, though some of them certainly are. Rather, I aim to construct an argument concerning our engagement with machines and virtual and virtual entities as live that is analogous to Gadamer’s argument that we engage with works of art as contemporaneous rather than an application of it. An analogy rather than application. Gottamer argues that the way a work of art presents itself to it’s audience consitutes a claim, concretiser in a demand that is fulfilled only when the audience accepts it. Broadly speaking I am suggesting that some realtime operations of digital technology make a claim upon us to engage with them as live events and others do not. I repeat that this does not mean that the former is unneccesarily aesthetic in nature. It is crucially important to note that it is up to the audience whether or not to respect the claim and respond to it. In the case of interactive technologies the claim to liveness can be concretised in a variety of demands. Clifford Nass, communications scholar at Stanford University, spearheads a group of researchers who advocate what they call ‘the computer as social actor paradigm’. Doesn’t make a good acronym. Their basic claim is that to interact with our computers in ways that parallel social interactions with other human beings. Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon point to three cues that may encourage social responses to the computer:
1: words for output
2: interactivity, that is responses based on multiple prior input
3: the filling of roles traditionally filled by humans
Nass and his colleagues do not argue that computers are social actors, rather they argue that we behave towards them as if they were. In the terms I’m using here these three cues can be construed as demands in Gottamer’s sense, for example the demand to be perceived as verbal that concretise a claim to liveness. The work of this group also suggests a straightforward reason why we might respond to such a demand: in order to engage in an activity we can interpret as a social interaction or performance, the kinds of activity to which we attach great value. Got tamer argues not only that the work of art makes a claim upon us, but also that in order for a work to be meaningful we must experience it as contemporaneous, a term borrowed from kierkergaard that Gadamer construes as meaning ‘this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves full presence however remote it’s origin may be’. Contemporaneity in this sense is not a characteristic of the work itself, so when Gadamer is speaking of contemporaneity he is not speaking of contemporary art. Contemporaneity is not a characteristic of the work it is a description of how we choose to engage with it. The work of art must be ‘experienced and taken seriously as present and not as something in the distant past’. Got tamer is speaking here of what he calls the temporality of the aesthetic, the way that works of art from a historical context very different from ours may still make claims upon us. I appeal to Gadamer not to frame an argument about digital liveness in relation to historical time rather I am focussing on as aspect of Gottamer’s schema that has to do with bridging a gap between self and other, by rendering the other familiar. A work of art from a past of which we have no direct experience becomes fully present to us when we grasp it as contemporaneous. I suggest that in order to experience interactive technologies as live we similarly must be willing to experience and take seriously their claims to liveness and presence. An entity we know to be technological that makes a claim to be live becomes fully present to us when we grasp it as live. In both cases we must take seriously the claim made by the object for the effect to take place. The crucial point is that the effect of full presence that Gadamer describes does not simply happen, and is not caused by the artwork, or in my analogy the technology. ‘contemporaneity is not a mode of of givenness in consciousness but a task for consciousness and an adjustment that is demanded of it.’ In other words, presence or liveness does not appear in the thing it results from our engagement with the thing and our willingness to bring it into full presence. We do not receive interactive technologies as live because they respond to us in real time as my earlier statement suggested. Rather realtime reaction is a demand that concretises a claim to liveness, a claim that we the audience must accept as binding upon us in order to be fulfilled. Just as artworks from the past do not simply disclose themselves to us as contemporaneous but become us only as a conscious achievement on our part interactive technologies do not disclose themselves to us as live but become so only as a conscious achievement on our part. In Gottamer’s terms an achievement in the case of an artwork ‘consists in holding on to the thing in such a way that it becomes contemporaneous’. The expression ‘holding on’ is important here in the way it suggests both conscious activity and precariousness. It is through a willed act of consciousness that we construe works of art from the past as contemporaneous, or interactive technologies as live, an act that must be actively sustained to maintain the engagement on those terms. Gottamer’s idea that our engagement with works of art takes the form of achievement demanded of consciousness is consistent with this characterisation of the audience position as necessarily active rather than passive. To be part of an audience means to participate rather than simply to be there. His insistence is that it is the audience’s act of consciousness that allows him to experience the work of art as contemporaneous, which I have extended by analogy to the act of consciousness that allows the audience to experience the virtual as live, points the way beyond the technological determinism into which discussions of which these matters, including my own, often fall. Although I am in many ways sympathetic to the computer as social actor paradigm it does not avoid the pitfall of technological determinism. Massey and moon? suggest that mindlessness accounts for our tendency to interact with machines in the ways we interact with human beings despite our knowing that machines are not human. In their account mindlessness is not exactly equivalent to stupidity, rather they define mindlessness as ‘conscious attention to a subset of contextual cues in a situation that results in responding mindlessly, prematurely committing to over simplistic scripts drawn in the past’. Since they offer no account of why we act mindlessly we are thrown back to a technological determinism in which the computer use of words as output for instance causes us to act mindlessly toward it, as if it were a human being. Steve Dixon in his discussion of liveness in the book ‘Digital Performance’ similarly does not steer clear of technological determinism in his suggestion that different modes of presentation, for example live and recorded, trigger different modes of attention from the audience, although he makes a gesture towards the possibility that there is a social dimension to these differences, he concludes by favouring ontological distinctions among media as causing different responses. It is fortuitous that both Nass+moon’s and Dixon’s discussions centre on the matter of audience attention, for Gottamer defines spectatorship in terms of ‘devoting one’s full attention to the matter at hand… The spectator’s own positive accomplishment’. In his account, how we direct our attention is not cued or dictated by the characteristics of the object of our attention as it is for Dixon. Rather it is an accomplishment on our part that is also our part in the interaction through which liveness and co-presence emerges.
To summarise my argument, some technological object - a computer, website, network, a virtual entity - makes a claim on us its audience to be considered as live, a claim that is concretised as a demand in some aspect of the way it presents itself to us: realtime response and interaction or an ongoing connection to others could be examined. In order for liveness to occur the audience must accept the claim as binding upon us to take it seriously and hold on to the object in our consciousness of it in such a way that it becomes live for us. In this analysis liveness is neither a characteristic of the object nor an effect caused by a characteristic of the object, for example it’s medium. Rather liveness is produced through our engagement with the object and our willingness to accept it’s claim. In a footnote to the passage on spectatorship i cited which also has to do with ecstatic experience and loosing oneself by giving oneself over to such experience Gadamer argues against distinctions between ‘the kind of rapture in which it is mans power to produce and the experience of superior power which simply overwhelms us on the grounds that these distinctions of control over oneself and of being overwhelmed are themselves conceived in terms of power and therefore do not do justice to the interpenetration of being outside oneself and being involved in something’. Seen in this light, an encounter of digital liveness that rejects technological determinism in favour of a constructivist argument that technological entities are live only in as much as we see them that way would similarly miss the mark because it would simply shift the balance of power from the technology to the spectator, from technological determinism to spectatorial determinism, so to speak. It is far better to understand that digital liveness derives neither from the intrinsic properties of virtual entities nor simply from the audience’s perceiving them as live. Rather, digital liveness emerges as a specific relation between self and other. The experience of liveness results from our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims they make on us.

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.

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.

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).

[removed document, as academic web services kept on trying to attribute to me, which while correct is a mis-representation given later development]

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.

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.

Come and see some free stand-up comedy, in the name of science!

For my PhD, I’m staging a comedy gig. The comedian is booked, I need an audience of volunteers. You won’t hear me trying to make jokes out of performance theory or the theatrical wrangling I’ve had to do to pull this together, rather real stand-up from professional comics. Doing their thing will be Tiernan Douieb and Stuart Goldsmith. You’ll have a fun time, I’ll be able to analyse – putting it in broad strokes – what makes a good performance.

Tuesday 4th June, shows at 3pm and 5pm, at Queen Mary University of London. It’s critical we get the right numbers, so please sign up here. You’ll get an confirmation email the attendance details.

Again: http://tobyz.net/comedylab

it happened! performers performed, audiences audienced, and now i have a lot of data to organise and analyse.

thanks to all who took part, and apologies to all whose hair the motion capture hats might have messed with. can’t show too much of the experiment for various reasons, but pictured is main act stuart goldsmith who, yep, left with hair somewhat flatter than when he arrived.

it’s a strange feeling doing an ambitious experiment like this, partly because so much rides on such a short lived, one-off thing. more though, that it doesn’t represent the goal you started with – ie. a designed, informed instance of a live event that exploits it’s liveness – but rather aims to make things worse in the existing status-quo. there’s noble reasoning in that, for you really only get to see whats going on when you start prodding with a stick and what once worked nicely starts to break up. doesn’t stop weird feelings lingering for days afterwards though.

Come and see some more stand-up comedy, in the name of science – and this time, there’s a robot headlining!

What makes a good performance? By pitting stand-up comics Tiernan Douieb and Andrew O’Neill against a life size robot in a battle for laughs, researchers at Queen Mary, University of London hope to find out more — and are inviting you along.
A collaboration between the labs of Queen Mary’s Cognitive Science Research Group, RoboThespian’s creators Engineered Arts, and the open-access spaces of Hack The Barbican, the researchers are staging a stand-up gig where the headline act is a robot as a live experiment into performer-audience interaction.
This research is part of work on audience interaction being pioneered by the Cognitive Science Group. It is looking at the ways in which performers and audiences interact with each other and how this affects the experience of ‘liveness’. The experiment with Robothespian is testing ideas about how comedians deliver their material to maximize comic effect.

Shows at 6pm, Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th August, Barbican Centre. Part of Hack the Barbican.

Poster attached. Aside from the science, the designer in me is quite content with how that little task turned out.

“good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the barbican centre. “comedy lab: human vs robot” will be starting shortly in level minus one. part of hack the barbican, it is a free stand-up gig with robot headlining.”

so said i, on the public address system across all the spaces of the barbican centre. didn’t see that coming when i went to find out how to request an announcement.

the gig started, people came – this photo makes it look a bit thin, you can’t see all the seated people – and tiernan did his warm-up thing. and most brilliantly, didn’t run a mile when we brought up the idea of another comedy lab, and getting a robot to tell jokes.

first act proper: andrew o’neill. go watch the opening of this show, it’s perfect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGjbmywaKMI

highlight of this show had to be turning to the many kids who had appeared at the front, and singing his bumface song. to be clear, the bumface song is far from his funniest gag, not even anything much beyond the antics of a school playground. but what is so interesting is how that content is transformed in that moment of live performance and audience state into a bubble of joy. thats what we’re after. he had lots of techniques for eliciting response from a slightly wary audience.

it’s why we’ve chosen the genre for these live experiments, but it bears repeating: stand-up comedy really is so much more than the jokes.

“I never know how to start, which is probably because I run off windows 8” – and there were more laughs than groans!

as part of the media and arts technology phd you spend six months embedded somewhere interesting, working on something interesting. i did a deep dive into web adaptations and the semantic mark-up of stories at the bbc. klemomenis katevas has spent five months at engineered arts working on realtime interaction with their robothespian, and what better test could be a re-staging of comedy lab.

beyond tiernan’s script and kleomenis’s programming of the robot, what was most exciting was to see a robot did colombine gardair’s ‘woooo’ gesture, and the audience responded exactly as they do in covent garden. that’s our first trying out of something we’ve learnt about performance from doing this line of research… and it worked.

robothespian’s first gig was straight delivery of the script and ‘press play’ stagecraft. it went surprisingly well - it really did get laughs and carried the audience to a fair degree. tomorrow, we turn on the interactivity…

getting a robot to tell jokes is no simple feat. programming and polishing a script for the robot to deliver is challenge enough, but trying to get that delivery to be responsive to the audience, to incorporate stagecraft that isn’t simply a linear recording… now that is hard. of course, in the research world, we like hard, so reading the audience and tailoring the delivery appropriate to that is exactly what we set out to do.

having robothespian deliver what was essentially a linear script for his first night performance, for his second performance we turned on the interactivity. we had a camera and microphone giving us an audio-visual feed of the audience, and processed this to give us information to make decisions about robothespian’s delivery. a simple example is waiting until any audience audio – laughing, you hope – dies down before proceeding to the next section of the routine. more interesting to us is what having an humanoid robot allows us to do, as eye contact, body orientation, gesture and so on form so much of co-present human-human interaction. for that you need more than a single audio feed measuring the audience as a whole, you need to know exactly where people are and what they’re doing. in the photo you can see our first iteration of solving this, using the amazingly robust fraunhofer SHORE software, which detects faces and provides a number of metrics for each recognised face, such as male/female, eyes open/closed, and most usefully for instrumenting a comedy gig: a happiness score, which is effectively a smileometer. from this, robothespian delivered specific parts of the routine to the audience member judged most receptive at that point, was able to interject encouragement and admonitions, gestured scanning across the audience, and so on.

research being hard, it seems turning the interacion on backfired, as the gross effect was to slow down the delivery, taking too long between jokes. but this is a learning process, and tweaking those parameters is something we’ll be working on. and – big point i’ve learnt about research, you often learn more when things go wrong, or by deliberately breaking things, than when things work or go as expected. so there’ll be lots to pore over in the recordings here, comparing performer-audience-audience interaction between human and robot.

nice article in the london evening standard on comedy lab, link below and photo of it in the paper attached:
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/scientists-create-robot-to-take-on-comedians-in-standup-challenge-8753779.html

here’s the q & a behind the article, our answers channeled by pat healey

What does using robots tell us about the science behind stand-up comedy?
Using robots allows us to experiment with the gestures, movements and expressions that stand-up comedians use and test their effects on audience responses.

What’s the aim of the experiment? Is it to design more sophisticated robots and replace humans?
We want to understand what makes live performance exciting, how performers ‘work’ an audience; the delivery vs. the content.

Is this the first time an experiment of this kind has been carried out? How long is the research project?
Robot comedy is an emerging genre. Our performance experiment is the first to focus on how comedians work their audiences.

Tell me more about RoboThespian. Does he just say the comedy script or is he (and how) more sophisticated? Does he walk around the stage/make hand movements/laugh etc?
This research is really about what’s not in the script - we’re looking at the performance; the gestures, gaze, movement and responsiveness that make live comedy so much more than reading out jokes.

How does his software work?
We use computer vision and audio processing to detect how each person in the audience is responding. The robot uses this to tailor who it talks to and how it delivers each joke - making each performance unique.

What have you learned already from the show? Does the robot get more laughs? Does he get heckled? What has been the feedback from the audience afterwards?
I think Robothespian had a great opening night.

Do you see robots performing stand-up in future?
It will take some time to emerge but yes, I think this will come. Interactive technology is used increasingly in all forms of live performance.

“Hello, weak-skinned pathetic perishable humans!” begins the stand-up comic. “I am here with the intent of making you laugh.”
A curiously direct beginning for most comics, but not for Robothespian. This humanoid robot, made by British company Engineered Arts, has the size and basic form of a tall, athletic man but is very obviously a machine: its glossy white face and torso taper into a wiry waist and legs, its eyes are square video screens and its cheeks glow with artificial light.
Robothespian’s first joke plays on its mechanical nature and goes down a storm with the audience at the Barbican Centre in London. “I never really know how to start,” it says in a robotic male voice. “Which is probably because I run off Windows 8.”
The performance last week was the brainchild of Pat Healey and Kleomenis Katevas at Queen Mary University of London, who meant it not only to entertain but also to investigate what makes live events compelling.
As we watched, cameras tracked our facial expressions, gaze and head movements. The researchers will use this information to quantify our reactions to Robothespian’s performance and to compare them with our responses to two seasoned human comics – Andrew O’Neill and Tiernan Douieb – who performed before the robot. […]

full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24050-robot-comedian-stands-up-well-against-human-rivals.html

bit miffed that the brainchild line has been re-written to sound definitively like it’s pat and minos only, but hey. in the context of that sentence, it should be my name: comedy lab is my programme, prodding what makes performance and the liveness of live events compelling is my phd topic.

a major part of the analysis for comedy lab is manually labelling what is happening when in the recordings. for instance, whether an audience member is laughing or not – for each audience member, throughout the performance. all in all, this adds up to a lot of work.

for this labelling to be accurate, let alone simply to get through it all, the interface of the video annotation software needs to be responsive - you are playing with time, in realtime. i was having such a bad time with elan^[1] that the least bad option got to be writing my own simple annotator: all it need be is a responsive video player and a bag of keyboard shortcuts that generates a text document of annotations and times. luckily, there was an open-source objective-c / cocoa annotator out there, and so instead i’ve forked the code and hacked in the features i needed. never have i been so glad to be able to write native os x applications.

if you need features such as annotations coming from a controlled vocabulary and are continuous, ie. non-overlapping over time or workflow such as annotation can be done in one-pass with one hand on keyboard and one on scroll-gesture mouse/trackpad, the application is zipped and attached to this post (tested on 10.8, should work on earlier).

if you are a cocoa developer with similar needs, the code is now on github and i can give some pointers if needed.

hacked some lua, got software logging what I needed; learnt python, parsed many text files; forked a cocoa app, classified laugh state for fifteen minutes times 16 audience members times two performances; and so on. eventually, a dataset of meascollect audience response for every tenth of a second. and with that: results. statistics. exciting.

a teaser of that is above, peer review needs to go it’s course before announcements can be made. as a little fun, though, here is the introduction of the paper the first results are published in – at some point before it got re-written to fit house style. this has… more flavour.

Live performance is important. We can talk of it “lifting audiences slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” \cite{Dolan:2006hv}. We can also talk about bums on seats and economic impact — 14,000,000 and £500,000,000 for London theatres alone in recent years \cite{Anonymous:2013us}. Perhaps more importantly, it functions as a laboratory of human experience and exploration of interaction \cite{FischerLichte:2008wo}. As designers of media technologies and interactive systems this is our interest, noting the impact of live performance on technology \cite{Schnadelbach:2008ii, Benford:2013ia, Reeves:2005uw, Sheridan:2007wc, Hook:2013vp} and how technology transforms the cultural status of live performance \cite{Auslander:2008te, Barker:2012iq}. However, as technology transforms the practice of live performance, the experiential impact of this on audiences is surprisingly under-researched. Here, we set out to compare this at its most fundamental: audience responses to live and recorded performance.

thanks to this shot, science outreach, and a national competition, i have a new camera. first prize! huzzah!

the full story is here — http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/se/126324.html

screenshot above from — http://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2014/mar/31/national-science-photography-competition-in-pictures

happy few days bringing-up a visualiser app for my PhD. integrating the different data sources of my live performance experiment had brought up some quirks that didn’t seem right. i needed to be confident that everything was actually in sync and spatially correct, and, well, it got the point where i decided to damn well visualise the whole thing.

i hoped to find a nice python framework to do this in, which would neatly extend the python work already doing most of the processing on the raw data. however i didn’t find anything that could easily combine video with a 3D scene. but i do know how to write native mac apps, and there’s a new 3D scene framework there called SceneKit…

so behold Comedy Lab Dataset Viewer. it’s not finished, but it lives!

• NSDocument based application, so i can have multiple performances simultaneously
• A data importer that reads the motion capture data and constructs the 3D scene and its animation
• A stack of CoreAnimation layers compositing 3D scene over video
• 3D scene animation synced to the video playback position

getting a robot to perform stand-up comedy was a great thing. we were also proud that we could stage the gig at the barbican arts centre. prestigious, yes, but also giving some credibility to it being a “real gig”, rather than an experiment in a lab.

however, it wasn’t as representative of a comedy gig as we’d hoped. while our ‘robot stand-up at the barbican’ promotion did recruit a viably sized audience (huzzah!), the (human) comics said it was a really weird crowd. in short, we got journalists and robo-fetishists, not comedy club punters. which on reflection is not so surprising. but how to fix?

we needed ‘real’ audiences at ‘real’ gigs, without any recruitment prejudiced by there being a robot in the line-up. we needed to go to established comedy nights and be a surprise guest. thanks to oxford brookes university’s kind loan, we were able to load up artie with our software and take him on a three day tour of london comedy clubs.

and so, the first gig: the alternative comedy memorial society at soho theatre. a comedian’s comedy club, we were told; a knowledgeable audience expecting acts to be pushing the form. well, fair to say we’re doing something like that.

the second gig of our tour investigating robo-standup in front of ‘real’ audiences: gits and shiggles at the half moon, putney. a regular night there, we were booked amongst established comedians for their third birthday special. was very happy to see the headline act was katherine ryan, whose attitude gets me every time.

shown previously was artie on-stage being introduced. he (it, really) has to be on stage throughout, so we needed to cover him up for a surprise reveal. aside from the many serious set-up issues, i’m pleased i managed to fashion the ‘?’ in a spare moment. to my eye, makes the difference.

artie has to be on stage throughout as we need to position him precisely in advance. that, and he can’t walk. the precise positioning is because we need to be able to point and gesture at audience members: short of having a full kinematic model of artie and the three dimensional position of each audience member identified, we manually set the articulations required to point and look at every audience seat within view, while noting where each audience seat appears in the computer vision’s view. the view is actually a superpower we grant to artie, the ability to have see from way above his head, and do that in the dark. we position a small near-infrared gig-e vision camera in the venue’s rigging along with a pair of discreet infra-red floodlights. this view is shown above, a frame grabbed during setup that has hung around since.

third gig: angel comedy. again, an established comedy club and again a different proposition. a nightly, free venue, known to be packed. wednesdays was newcomers night which, again, was somewhat appropriate.

what i remember most vividly has not to do with our role in it, but was rather the compère warming up the crowd after the interval. it was a masterclass in rallying a crowd into an audience (probably particularly warranted given the recruitment message of ‘free’ combined with inexperienced acts). i rue to this day not recording it.

visualising head pose, light state, laugh state, computer vision happiness, breathing belt. and, teh pretty. huzzah.

if only writing up the phd was always like this. beautiful room, good friends, excellent facilitation by thinkingwriting.

the head pose arrows look like they’re pointing in the right direction… right? well, of course, it’s not that simple.

the dataset processing script vicon exporter applies an offset to the raw angle-axis fixture pose, to account for the hat not being straight. the quick and dirty way to get these offsets is to say at a certain time everybody is looking directly forward. that might have been ok if i’d thought to make it part of the experiment procedure, but i didn’t, and even if i had i’ve got my doubts. but we have a visualiser! it is interactive! it can be hacked to nudge things around!

except that the visualiser just points an arrow at a gaze vector, and that’s doesn’t give you a definitive orientation to nudge around. this opens up a can of worms where everything that could have thwarted it working, did.

“The interpretation of a rotation matrix can be subject to many ambiguities.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix#Ambiguities

hard-won code –

DATASET VISUALISER

// Now write MATLAB code to console which will generate correct offsets from this viewer's modelling with SceneKit
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < [self.subjectNodes count]; ++i)
{
	// Vicon Exporter calculates gaze vector as
	// gaze = [1 0 0] * rm * subjectOffsets{subjectIndex};
	// rm = Rotation matrix from World to Mocap = Rwm
	// subjectOffsets = rotation matrix from Mocap to Offset (ie Gaze) = Rmo

	// In this viewer, we model a hierarchy of
	// Origin Node -> Audience Node -> Mocap Node -> Offset Node, rendered as axes.
	// The Mocap node is rotated with Rmw (ie. rm') to comply with reality.
	// Aha. This is because in this viewer we are rotating the coordinate space not a point as per exporter

	// By manually rotating the offset node so it's axes register with the head pose in video, we should be able to export a rotation matrix
	// We need to get Rmo as rotation of point
	// Rmo as rotation of point = Rom as rotation of coordinate space

	// In this viewer, we have
	// Note i. these are rotations of coordinate space
	// Note ii. we're doing this by taking 3x3 rotation matrix out of 4x4 translation matrix
	// [mocapNode worldTransform] = Rwm
	// [offsetNode transform] = Rmo
	// [offsetNode worldTransform] = Rwo

	// We want Rom as rotation of coordinate space
	// Therefore Offset = Rom = Rmo' = [offsetNode transform]'

	// CATransform3D is however transposed from rotation matrix in MATLAB.
	// Therefore Offset = [offsetNode transform]

	SCNNode* node = self.subjectNodes[i][@"node"];
	SCNNode* mocapNode = [node childNodeWithName:@"mocap" recursively:YES];
	SCNNode* offsetNode = [mocapNode childNodeWithName:@"axes" recursively:YES];

	// mocapNode has rotation animation applied to it. Use presentation node to get rendered position.
	mocapNode = [mocapNode presentationNode];

	CATransform3D Rom = [offsetNode transform];

	printf("offsets{%lu} = [%f, %f, %f; %f, %f, %f; %f, %f, %f];\n",
		   (unsigned long)i+1,
		   Rom.m11, Rom.m12, Rom.m13,
		   Rom.m21, Rom.m22, Rom.m23,
		   Rom.m31, Rom.m32, Rom.m33
		   );

	// BUT! For this to actually work, this requires Vicon Exporter to be
	// [1 0 0] * subjectOffsets{subjectIndex} * rm;
	// note matrix multiplication order

	// Isn't 3D maths fun.
	// "The interpretation of a rotation matrix can be subject to many ambiguities."
	// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix#Ambiguities
}

VICON EXPORTER

poseData = [];
for frame=1:stopAt
	poseline = [frameToTime(frame, dataStartTime, dataSampleRate)];
	frameData = reshape(data(frame,:), entriesPerSubject, []);
	for subjectIndex = 1:subjectCount

		%% POSITION
		position = frameData(4:6,subjectIndex)';

		%% ORIENTATION
		% Vicon V-File uses axis-angle represented in three datum, the axis is the xyz vector and the angle is the magnitude of the vector
		% [x y z, |xyz| ]
		ax = frameData(1:3,:);
		ax = [ax; sqrt(sum(ax'.^2,2))'];
		rotation = ax(:,subjectIndex)';

		%% ORIENTATION CORRECTED FOR OFF-AXIS ORIENTATION OF MARKER STRUCTURE
		rm = vrrotvec2mat(rotation);

		%% if generating offsets via calcOffset then use this
		% rotation = vrrotmat2vec(rm * offsets{subjectIndex});
		% gazeDirection = subjectForwards{subjectIndex} * rm * offsets{subjectIndex};

		%% if generating offsets via Comedy Lab Dataset Viewer then use this
		% rotation = vrrotmat2vec(offsets{subjectIndex} * rm); %actually, don't do this as it creates some axis-angle with imaginary components.
		gazeDirection = [1 0 0] * offsets{subjectIndex} * rm;

		poseline = [poseline position rotation gazeDirection];
	end
	poseData = [poseData; poseline];
end

minos gave a seminar on his engineering efforts for robot stand-up, we back-and-forthed on the wider framing of the work, and a bit of that is published here. his write-up.

workshop paper presented at humanoid robots and creativity, a workshop at humanoids 2014.

pdf download

with the visualiser established, it was trivial to attach the free view camera to the head pose node and boom!: first-person perspective. to be able to see through the eyes of anyone present is such a big thing.

need a hit-test for people orienting to others. akin to gaze, but the interest here is what it looks like you’re attending to. but what should that hit-test be? visualisation and parameter tweaking to the rescue…

the robot stand-up work got a proper write-up. well, part of it got a proper write-up, but so it goes.

This paper demonstrates how humanoid robots can be used to probe the complex social signals that contribute to the experience of live performance. Using qualitative, ethnographic work as a starting point we can generate specific hypotheses about the use of social signals in performance and use a robot to operationalize and test them. […] Moreover, this paper provides insight into the nature of live performance. We showed that audiences have to be treated as heterogeneous, with individual responses differentiated in part by the interaction they are having with the performer. Equally, performances should be further understood in terms of these interactions. Successful performance manages the dynamics of these interactions to the performer’s- and audiences’-benefit.

pdf download

‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ spoken paper accepted at ISPS 2017, the international symposium on performance science. this is doubly good, as i’ve long been keen to visit reykjavík and explore iceland.

…finally.

at some point in my PhD, i found out the phrase i started out with – “the here and now of us together” – had some cultural richness i can’t deny some pleasure over. in there is the imperative motto for the satisfaction of desire. “I need it, Here and Now”

so here is a little indulgence for my talk at ISPS2017 in the making. while it amuses me, i have to face up to the fact that wearing a slogan t-shirt in latin is clearly a dick move.

had a lot of fun with my talk ‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ at ISPS 2017. with a title like that, some play with the ‘spoken paper’ format had to be had.

pleasingly, people were coming up to me to say how much they enjoyed it for the rest of the conference. huzzah!

i recorded it, and have stitched it together with the slides. the video is here, on the project page.

the dissertation had done the talking, and the viva was good conversation about it wrapped up with a “dr. harris” handshake. phew, and woah. having been in a death-grip with the dissertation draft for so long, nothing in the whole experience could touch the wholesomeness of simply hearing “i read it all, and it’s good”.

supervisor –

Dear All,

I’m delighted to report that Toby Harris successfully defended his thesis "Liveness: An Interactional Account” this morning.
The external said: “that was a sheer pleasure”. (very) minor corrections.

Pat.

–
Pat Healey,
Professor of Human Interaction,
Head of the Cognitive Science Research Group,
Queen Mary University of London

external examiner –

This is a richly intriguing study of the processes of interaction between performers, audiences and environments in stand-up comedy – a nice topic to choose since it is one where, even more than in straight theatrical contexts, ‘liveness’ is intuitively felt to be crucial. But as Matthew Harris says, what constitutes ‘liveness’ and how precisely it operates and matters, remains elusive – if pugnaciously clung to!

The conclusions reached and offered – which more than anything insist on the value and necessity of seeing all audience contexts as socially structured situations – both rings right, and seems to be based well in the details of the data presented. And the cautions at the end, about the risks with moving to higher levels of abstraction (wherein ‘the audience’ might become increasingly massified, rather than understood processually) looks good and valuable.

The specific claims made – that the ‘liveness’ of the performer matters little (e.g. by replacing him/her with a robot, or with a recording) – will nicely infuriate those with an over-investment in the concept, and will need careful presentation when this work is published. The subsequent experiment on the role of spotlighting or darkness on the kinds and levels of interaction audiences have with each other, and with the performer are also nicely counter-intuitive.

internal examiner –

I greatly enjoyed reading this thesis. It strikes a good balance between theory and experiment and makes several well-defined contributions. The literature reviews show a keen insight and a good synthesis of ideas, and the motivation for each of the experiments is made clear. The writing is polished and engaging, and the order of ideas in each chapter is easy to follow.

dressed up as a renaissance italian, doffed my hat, and got handed a certificate… that was a placeholder, saying the real one will be in the post. truly a doctor, but yet still one little thing!

best of all, is that first-born is no longer my totem of not having got this done; the bigger and better she got, the more egregious the not-being-a-doctor was.

it’s a funny thing, handing in a thesis, submitting corrections and so on, but not being able to link anyone to the work. finally, so long after may, but at least not so long after the viva, here it is. all 169 pages of it.

https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/30624

an email comes in from a performance studies phd candidate asking if they could watch the whole robot routine from comedy lab: human vs. robot. damn right. i’d love to see someone write about that performance as a performance.

but, better than that staging and its weird audiences (given the advertised title, robo-fetishists and journalists?) there is comedy lab #4: on tour, unannounced. the premise: robot stand-up, to unsuspecting audiences, at established comedy nights. that came a year later with the opportunity to use another robothespian (thanks oxford brookes!). it addressed the ecological validity issues, and should simply be more fun to watch.

for on tour, unannounced we kept the performance the same – or rather, each performance used the same audience responsive system to tailor the delivery in realtime. there’s a surprising paucity in the literature about how audiences respond differently to the same production; the idea was this should be interesting data. so i’ve taken the opportunity to extract from the data set the camera footage of the stage from each night of the tour. and now that is public, at the links below.

the alternative comedy memorial society

• diary: http://tobyz.net/diary/2014/06/comedylab-acms
• video: https://vimeo.com/333863504

gits and shiggles

• diary: http://tobyz.net/diary/2014/06/comedylab-gitsandshiggles
• video: https://vimeo.com/333928083

angel comedy

• diary: http://tobyz.net/diary/2014/06/comedylab-angel
• video: https://vimeo.com/333956159

the robot comedy lab experiments form chapter 4 of my phd thesis ‘liveness: an interactional account’

Four: Experimenting with performance

The literature reviewed in chapter three also motivates an experimental programme. Chapter four presents the first, establishing Comedy Lab. A live performance experiment is staged that tests audience responses to a robot performer’s gaze and gesture. This chapter provides the first direct evidence of individual performer–audience dynamics within an audience, and establishes the viability of live performance experiments.

http://tobyz.net/project/phd

there are currently two published papers –

• robot stand-up: engineering a comic performance
  http://tobyz.net/diary/2014/11/robot-standup-workshop-paper

• robot comedy lab: experimenting with the dynamics of live performance
  http://tobyz.net/diary/2015/08/robot-standup-journal-paper

and finally, on ‘there is a surprising paucity…’, i’d recommend starting with gardair’s mention of mervant-roux.

• c. gardair, assembling audiences. queen mary university of london, 2013.
  http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/8486