Three live performance experiments researching performer-audience-audience interaction. They are the empirical contribution of my PhD on ‘liveness’, and required the visualising performer–audience dynamics work.

Comedy Lab: Human vs. Robot

An experiment that tests audience responses to a robot performer’s gaze and gesture. In collaboration with Kleomenis Katevas and part of Hack the Barbican. For my PhD, it provides the first direct evidence of individual performer–audience dynamics within an audience, and establishes the viability of live performance experiments.

Comedy Lab: Live vs. recorded

The experiment contrasts live and recorded performance – directly addressing a topic that animates so much of the debate around ‘liveness’. The data provides good evidence for social dynamics within the audience, but little evidence for performer–audience interaction. While these audiences were indifferent to live vs. mediated performance, the results affirm that events are social-spatial environments with heterogeneous audiences. The results emphasise that both conditions are live events, as even though the recorded condition is ostensibly not live, a live audience is present regardless and it is this that matters.

Comedy Lab: Lit vs. all lit

The experiment contrasts being lit and being in the dark, when all around are lit or not. The data provides strong evidence for social dynamics within the audience, and limited evidence for performer–audience dynamics. Spotlighting individuals reduces their responses, while everyone being lit increases their responses: it is the effect of being picked out not being lit \emph{per se} that matters. The results affirm that live events are social-spatial environments with heterogeneous audiences.

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Ashoka Ireland had identified ’50 proven solutions to change our nation’; Ireland had been going through a challenging time, the ‘celtic tiger’ economy having crashed. But how to make that happen?

Working with Boz Temple-Morris, they arrived at a format based on one-on-one conversations between the social entrepreneurs behind these solutions with locals. Like the Accenture ‘Festival of Ideas’, the central conceit was conversation. And like that event, the risk was the cliché of a talking-shop, where it’s all hot air. No follow-through. So, reprising the team, Stef, Carolyn and I wrangled a team and digital infrastructure to make the talk accountable.

Each of the fifty entrepreneurs had a young, up-and-coming volunteer assigned to them who, amongst other facilitation things, acted as a kind of journalist. We gave these volunteers big cards and thick marker pens, and onto these promises that came out of the one-on-one conversations were recorded – so much of what happened was “oh I know just the person you need to speak to about that”. These ‘actions’ were then promptly digitised and published in-venue and on-line.

With this growing public archive, the outcomes of the conversations could be tracked and followed-up upon. But more interesting to me, is that anecdotally within the three days our accountability work created a atmosphere that things-are-happening-and-my-contributions-should-be-a-proper-part-of-that… a positive feedback loop of positive action.

project | 2012

Imagine you’re the CEO of a big consulting firm. The country you’re based in has had a chellenging few years. You need a plan. So you make that plan, gather the troops, and start reading from your powerpoint deck. But we all know this isn’t going to work, those people are asleep already.

Accenture Ireland’s ‘Festival of Ideas’ changed that script. 900 consultants related their own experience to the direction set by the executive team. Through an internal market, 200 topics had been decided on, topic leads and note-takers chosen, and as these focussed discussions played out over the day, we captured it all. Myself and a team of creatives visualised the parallel conversations in realtime, while surfacing trends and producing summaries.

The outcome? A better strategy, bought-into.

project | 2012

been working on audience interaction for volta, and this is a happy moment: our twitch extension in production, publicly available, working not just on desktop but mobile too.

just as an artist can link to up a midi controller to control their volta world, they can link to audience control. i.e. if you have a button in volta, you can give that button to your audience.

diary | 21 mar 2023 | tagged: volta · engaging audiences · code

to chartres to help katharine vega turn dreams into immersive video. what, years before, had started as sharing some drawings, had got stuck as powerpoint-and-pull-down-screen. kate wanted to ‘vj’ it live to a narration, and she was right. cue me getting onto eurostar with a resolume deck and luggage full of scrim and projector…

the work kate and her peers are doing is actually right up my street. putting the context aside, the basic idea of a feedback loop with those in the room is the crux of the more interesting work i’ve done: interpreting talk, reifying into media, re-presenting back.

diary | 07 jul 2018 | tagged: vj · video-out · resolume · engaging audiences

The conversational rollercoaster: Conversation analysis and the public science of talk

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives.

Albert, S., Albury, C., Alexander, M., Harris, M. T., Hofstetter, E., Holmes, E. J. B., & Stokoe, E. (2018). The conversational rollercoaster: Conversation analysis and the public science of talk. Discourse Studies, 20(3), 397–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445618754571

PDF available from Loughborough University Institutional Repository

diary | 16 may 2018 | tagged: conversational rollercoaster · engaging audiences · qmat · research

media and arts technology colleague saul albert put out a call for help for the conversational rollercoaster. happy to help as a last-hurrah for time in the same research group, but more significantly it’s an event conceived to take interaction and audiences seriously.

cribbed from an email, my quick take after was –
– I could show passers-by a scientific process happening live. A production line, almost.
– With the talkaoke table, not only did we have a source of conversation, but something that passers by had to navigate past.
– Watch enough people come past, you start to spot patterns
– Capture those moments, pore over the detail, and soon you can…
– Build a “theory of passing the talkaoke table without getting pulled in”
– Laws that clearly aren’t like the laws of physics, but for this specific situation do have similar predictive power.
– Why is it that they work?

diary | 23 sep 2016 | tagged: conversational rollercoaster · engaging audiences · qmat · research

more engaging audiences at events. this time an experiment to see what could be done as bolt-on after the event concept was set. so, “an appjam journalist may come ask you a question” became a thing, feeding that and more to a hub that could synthesise the different threads of the event back to all present.

(photo credit: tim mitchell)

diary | 21 apr 2016 | tagged: engaging audiences

the host organisation does app analytics. so we spun that around, took their visual language and made event analytics. this involved animating around an increasingly annotated timeline. data wrangler, designer, network drives and shared spreadsheets… and me pushing keynote harder than i had in a long time.

(photo credit: tim mitchell)

diary | 21 apr 2016 | tagged: engaging audiences

this is boz, and once more we’re in dublin working with a big corporation to help change their culture. a small, stripped down event, but still channelling the core ideas of festival of ideas and change nation.

(photo credit: event photographer tbc)

diary | 13 may 2015 | tagged: engaging audiences

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.

diary | 09 sep 2012 | tagged: liveness · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

having worked some magic to visualise the actions back into the venues in realtime, aiming for a positive feedback loop of commitment, my legacy contribution was a film to capture the activity and commitments of the event to show as part of the finale - a review as celebration and reward that developed over the phases of change nation.

here’s the final version capturing the full three days. i’m proud of it, and it shows how these posts have barely scratched the surface. http://vimeo.com/39511237

there’s also a download of the poster image made for this post below, at 5000px wide.

diary | 30 mar 2012 | tagged: video-out · vj · change nation · engaging audiences | downloads: ashoka_changenation_2012__tobyspark_poster.jpg

to the country estate in the heart of dublin: farmleigh house, for the public day of change nation. and not just to the grand house itself – state photos of obama and northern ireland peace process on side tables, first prints in the irish language in the library – but to a boutique festival site pitched specially on the lawn. it was a wonderful day opening out the process to the public, starting with the two hundred handwritten commitments to action from ministers and all sorts of power brokers lining the walls of the main tent, and finishing with many more commitments made as the ticket holders brought their skills and connections to bear.

diary | 24 mar 2012 | tagged: change nation · vj · engaging audiences

another day, another dublin landmark: dublin castle. a regal setting for an amazing day of action, as if day one were a dress rehearsal. the ‘live’ page we worked so hard on says it best, go take a look: http://changenation.org/live

this was also the day i was charged with disappearing for a few hours to produce the event-so-far look-what-we’ve-achieved video, quite the rabbit out out the hat. part video edit, but mostly keynote backed by a judicious music choice and the wonderful photos by sean and yvette. oh, do i love keynote.

diary | 23 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · engaging audiences

day one, and tourist location number one: the guniness storehouse. lots of briefing the facilitators, lots of wrangling screens, pipelines and all things digital that that weren’t the website, and far too much time trying to get posterous to work on everybody’s phones. but through it all, the website morphed from a brochure to a live account of the event, and the commitments to action were coming in and becoming part of the public record.

photo credit: http://www.seanandyvette.com/

diary | 22 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · engaging audiences

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…

diary | 21 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · liveness · engaging audiences

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all^[1]. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Amazing event. Loving the Brain! #festivalofideas
– Alice Murphy @almurph75
Thanks. We’re having a brilliant day too!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Over 2000 ideas have flown through ‘the brain’ @ @Accenture_Irl #festivalofideas.
– Andrew Hetherington @a_hetherington
Wow & we’ve still got the afternoon!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
– Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget
@TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time…
– Eithne Harley @EithneHarley

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

clockwise from top left

• ciaran lucas illustrating key ideas and playing with post-its and sharpies across the venue
• stef lewandowski live coding
• caroline beavon plugging the data into spreadsheets galore on the data-journalism tip
• carolyn jones wrangling everything and everybody together
• yours truly, at this moment dealing with the good problem of having so much data coming in, the visualisation needed re-scaling

the physicality doesn’t match up to kinetxt’s, but there are definite and deliberate echoes here. its not a big ‘visual rock band’ performing realtime story-telling from audience contributions, but perhaps released from the demands of that, we finally delivered on some of those original ideals of transforming a sea of contributed snippets into something meaningful and coherent.

photo credits matthew thompson

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences