Content

tagged: liveness

mixed reality lab

Title:
The liveness of live events, and how we might design for that

Abstract:
This talk will draw a line through Toby’s practice and research to argue for an interactional account of liveness, and where that might lead as we figure out new relationships between the digital and face-to-face; it’ll have to be a remote talk, after all. Topics will include why I really should have just read my email on stage, instrumenting auditoriums, teaching a humanoid robot stagecraft, visualising performer–audience dynamics, and why the HCI and privacy considerations of data-backed immersive theatre might be the crucible for our near future every day.

I’m interested in the MRL’s take on any or all of these topics, and am open to collaboration. More on my website at http://tobyz.net

Biography:
Toby’s practice spans art, design and engineering, “fascinated by the liveness of live events, and how we can design for that” (http://tobyz.net). He performs worldwide as part of the renown audio-visual collective D-Fuse (http://dfuse.com). He develops and sells hardware, software and design services for events (http://sparklive.net). His practice led to a PhD on liveness and performer–audience–audience interaction. He’s currently focussed on live data.

…and happily, the talk was super-well received. quite the relief, as it’s a storied lab (e.g. long-time blast theory collaborators) with an embarassment of ‘best of CHI’ papers.

diary | 05 feb 2021 | tagged: research · talk · liveness

simon munnery fylm

simon munnery once more stabs at the void between dead film and live theatre.

in these shows, simon never appears on stage. instead he sits in the audience behind a box of tricks that can display his face, the table or both. from here he contrives to make live films - or fylms - which are projected on a big screen at the front of the theatre.

given i have a thing or two to say about live cinema and research on live vs recorded stand-up is at the core of my phd, i kinda had to go. he even has interview-talk of inventing “live film”.

quotes from http://simonmunnery.com, but there are no links to the actual content so that’s all i can do.

diary | 20 mar 2014 | tagged: liveness

sensing festivals paper

a sense of satisfaction to see someone i’ve been helping get on the research ladder accepted to a workshop and the paper we co-wrote going into the acm archive.

In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it.

“Sensing Festivals as Cities”, a position paper for ‘SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city’ workshop, accepted for publication in UbiComp '13 conference proceedings.

diary | 30 jun 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

comedy lab'd

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.

diary | 04 jun 2013 | tagged: liveness · comedy lab · phd · research

comedy lab

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

diary | 01 jun 2013 | tagged: liveness · phd · comedy lab · research

cogsci crowd app » field day

thanks to the promoters and the media and arts dtc, we had seven people running the crowd app attending the field day music festival in victoria park, london. science! fun!

…the analysis, however, is going to be less fun.

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

cogsci crowd app » biosensing

of course, if you’ve just written a sensor logging smartphone app, and you have some bio-sensing data logging kit in the research group, you’re going to use it, right?

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

cogsci crowd app

the interactive-map-and-then-some app turned out to be a step too far for the organisation we hoped to make it their own, but there still was a festival and a need to determine just what smartphone sensors could tell you about the activity around a festival. and so another app was born, one to harvest any and all sensor data for real-time or subsequent analysis. the interaction, media and communication group i’m part of now being rebranded cognitive science, here is the cogsci crowd app, as it stands.

https://github.com/qmat/IMC-Crowd-App-Android
https://github.com/qmat/IMC-Crowd-Server

the UI presents a ‘crowd node’ toggle button, which corresponds to the app running a data logger and making a connection to a server conterpart. it’s called ‘crowd node’ because we hope this to be the beginning of a network of devices word amongst the crowd, from which crowd dynamics can be analysed in realtime, and interventions staged. being on android, this crowd node is a service running in the foreground, which means the app can come and go while the service runs. it maintains a notification, and while this is there, the phone won’t sleep until it powers down. the datalogger registers for updates from all the sensors available on that device, and constantly scans for wifi base stations and bluetooth devices. getting some kind of audio fingerprint should be a useful future addition to the sensing. the server connection mints session IDs that keep things anonymous while tracking instances of the app, and receives the 1000 line json formatted log files either in bulk afterwards or as they’re written. in time, this should be a streaming connection for realtime use, with eg. activity analysis and flocking algorithms running on the incoming data.

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · research · liveness · qmat

event app as research, shaping up

a little bit of a more compelling demo than last shown. development of this app has proved pretty painful, part of which is engaging with openFrameworks and c++ at a level beyond demo, and part of which has been the flakiness of the ofxAddons i’ve tried to use. the 3D model loader ofxAssimpModelLoader turned into the bane of this project; a core component of the app, the scope of its ill-effects was never clear until the debugging got truly brutal. i also had to ditch ofxTwitter, but at least can contribute back my working of the search functionality into the immeasurably better codebase of ofxTwitterStream.

diary | 29 nov 2012 | tagged: open frameworks · imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

business to arts award

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

event app as research

it doesn’t look like much at the moment, but this is the first step into my research group at university doing a study on real festival audiences at real festivals. i’m developing an interactive map / timetable app, which will have quite some interesting features and opt-ins by the time we’re done. the promoters we’ve been talking to already have an interactive map of sorts, i’ve already done some interesting things visualising live events, and of course there’s my phd on audiences and interaction.

diary | 10 aug 2012 | tagged: code · open frameworks · ios · imc at festivals · vj · liveness · research · qmat

twelve minutes on all my phd

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.

diary | 03 jul 2012 | tagged: liveness · phd · qmat · research · talk | downloads: tobyharris-livenessresearchpresentation-v01-tweets.pdf · tobyharris-livenessresearchpresentation-v01.pdf

change nation » day 0

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

designing for liveness position paper

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.

diary | 16 feb 2012 | tagged: liveness · phd · qmat · research | downloads: tobyharris-livenesshci.pdf

festival of ideas » all feeding into 'the brain'

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.

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

the audience through time

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

diary | 03 dec 2011 | tagged: liveness · research · qmat

one year review » a rounded representation

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]

diary | 21 sep 2011 | tagged: liveness · phd · research · qmat

nine month review » viva

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.

diary | 20 jun 2011 | tagged: liveness · phd · research · qmat

nine month review » a title and 10+k words

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.

diary | 17 jun 2011 | tagged: liveness · phd · research · qmat

the live in live cinema in 4,000 words

having just overhauled the ‘about the live in live cinema’ presentation for the IMAP seminar, i thought it should be quite straightforward to translate this into a 4,000 word essay – my penance for sitting in on a module from QMUL’s excellent drama department last semester. how wrong could i be, the structure to my argument turned out quite differently. all the better for it, however.

Three silhouettes, bodies poised above glowing buttons; a piercing light scanning light beams across the void of the image. ‘Rhythms + Visions: Expanded + Live’ says the text. Flipping the flyer over, the venue as School of Cinematic Arts, University of South California lends an air of authority, and finally in the body text a definition: ‘a live-cinema event’.
I was there — in fact, I am one of the silhouettes on the flyer — and the ‘live-cinema event’ shall frame the following discourse on liveness, media-based performance, and how the role of performance in a true live cinema needs to be rethought.
Walking into the School of Cinematic Arts, there was no being led into the dark of a cinema theatre, rather this would be an exploration through the outdoor spaces of the complex. Moving image works were aligned onto the architecture, and scrims echoed projections in space. Finally, a stage area. The first act starting: Scott Pagano accompanied by four musicians. For the unconventional setting thus far, this is a setup all will recognise: there is what could be termed a cinema-grade screen with performers in front, and rows of seating laid out beyond.
The musicians are playing, seemingly consumed by their instruments and keeping in check with each other. Pagano is standing, the only one twisted around to face to the screen rather than audience. In his hands, an iPad upon which — and with — he is furiously gesturing. On the screen an abstract composition unfolding, organic forms built out with photographic elements, a triumph of aesthetic. The music is instrumental and amplified, without naming a genre it’s accessible to the Los Angeles audience: guitars, keyboards, percussion. The audience seem receptive; there is a pleasing fidelity and sheen to the work.
But what here is live? But what here is cinema? These are the questions in my mind as I watch, and to which we will return.
Next a performance from the collective of which I am part, but not a piece with my direct involvement; I am still in the audience. Endless Cities by D-Fuse. It is a film in the Ruttman and Vertov tradition, a montage of urban scenes from around the world, and is accompanied by a live score: musique concrète performed from laptop with percussion accompaniment. Again it seems accessible, and in the photographic detail there is much to latch onto and be absorbed by.
It’s Live Cinema in the sense that I first heard the term: a musical accompaniment to a silent film. A montage from the kino-eye, it’s easier here to answer ‘what here is cinema’ than the Pegano piece. But I still wonder, what is really live here, and why bother?
The final performance is in many ways my creation, and so here I cannot report from the audience, but can offer my view as a performer. Which is one of immense frustration. Starting out, I am in a good position: we have an expanded staging that breaks the imagery out of the single frame, a developed aesthetic that abstracts footage in sync to the music, and the impressive shot bank of Endless Cities to pull from. It’s less the dérive and more the impressionism of a late night taxi ride. And we’ve performed it really well before. But that is precisely what is killing me by the end of this particular performance. We have performed it better before, so wouldn’t a recording of that performance have served us better? It’s a recognition that performance in this context translates entirely to the audio-visual output, for our actual performance is opaque to the audience, operating somewhere between obscure symbols on an obscured screen and twitching trackpad fingers. At which point, rather than taking the best performance so far to play back, I ask myself why not just create a master version in the studio and be done with it?
This is the terrain from which I argue. My motivation is not to categorise art or debate concepts, but to get to the heart of what a true live cinema could be.

The essay needs a revision – given the time constraints its really just a first draft – for which 'about the live in live cinema’s next outing should provide, whether that is website, journal, seminar or lecture.

diary | 03 may 2011 | tagged: live in live cinema · research · liveness · qmat · live cinema

ctm.11 » auslander on 'digital liveness'

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.

diary | 03 feb 2011 | tagged: phd · liveness

ctm.11 » 'what is live?' panels

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.

diary | 02 feb 2011 | tagged: phd · liveness

ctm.11 » 'what is live?' symposium

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

diary | 02 feb 2011 | tagged: phd · liveness

audience—screens

there is a big d-fuse production in the works, where the brief rather wonderfully was emphasising interaction with and within the audience. as briefs often do, things have changed a lot since the heady time of working on and winning the pitch, but the core of it is still generative graphics and punter control from the club floor. and so here, courtesy of dr.mo’s crack team of coders is an in-development iPad app talking over WiFi to a QC plugin, where my two fingers-as-proxies-for-collaborating-audience-members are sketching locally and that is being incorporated on the club’s screens.

diary | 06 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · liveness · dfuse · vj · code · ios · mac os · engaging audiences

in development: here+now

pixelnoizz, *spark, an empty media card and a glitch machine: when its here+now, you’ll be part of it. an experimental performance workshopped as part of visualberlin festival 2010.

tomorrow week, i’ll be in berlin crossing my fingers for a performance based on only semi-tested technology and a lot of custom development that will happen once i’m over there. collaborating with david aka pixelnoizz, who so impressed me with his performance serpendity at lpm last year, and has since gone on to develop a whole suite of quartz composer based glitch stuff. which is just what a project based on a stream of photographs coming in from a camera roving around the venue needs. its also a collaboration-in-absentia with vade, as his v002 plugins are a big part of this, and he was there at lpm where the spirit of collaborations took hold amongst our group. and if he could, i’d wager he’d be over doing this with us in a flash.

there’s also an interesting aside in that the poster image for this was created by quickly knocking something up in quartz composer, and pressing the ‘re-glitch’ buttons until a nice combination popped out. so really, rather than having the static image, that composition should be the poster, quietly evolving by itself, glitching through the embedded images and whatever it finds in the graphics memory of everybody’s individual machines. not that that would be a ‘safe’ composition that would be allowed to play in a osx browser, but hey.

http://festival.visualberlin.org/news/herenow-friday-june-11-tresor/

diary | 03 jun 2010 | tagged: herenow · *spark · vj · visual berlin · liveness

mat » instrumenting audiences - 4'33"...

as part of the media and arts technology programme, a group of us have been investigating live performance in terms of the audience. its an area i have great interest in, believing that the entertainment can be an emergent property of the audience rather than something that has to be received from a singular performance/performer: eg. kinetxt. this project is more subtle than that, instead trying to tease apart what exactly makes an audience an audience and play with that. the first step is to stop thinking of an audience as a single thing. its a collection of people who at some point, hopefully, come together and somehow an audience emerges. its the interactions between the individuals that create an unstable state we call an audience…?

as our experiment, we created a mini-cabaret event and tried a few things out with our technological twists. here is keir performing john cage’s 4’33", and for once not because we suddenly needed to fill five minutes, but because we had the whole venue decked out as an audience noise feedback matrix, gently developing and becoming more overt through the piece.

diary | 26 feb 2010 | tagged: qmat · research · liveness

live cinema interviews

my phd has this first year not doing phd stuff. which isn’t all bad: i have to make an “experimental documentary about a contemporary arts practice” to hone my media production skills. i think the brief was “make sure they know how to use a camera”, props to the film department at queen mary for challenging us with something a bit more interesting.

so here i am, mike’s EX3 in hand, spending a day or so running round london on a slightly gonzo mission to talk about live cinema with my practitioner peers. big thanks to chris, mike and paul for the interviews and sarah for the assistance and interested-outsider perspective. and this photo.

diary | 16 dec 2009 | tagged: live cinema documentary · vj · liveness · qmat · live cinema

secret cinema

part research, part curiosity, part embarrassment at just not having been before, i mounted a solo reconnaissance of secret cinema. and was impressed. if i’d known the film was going to be bugsy malone, i probably wouldn’t have bothered, but it was great: hundreds of hipsters in 1920’s chicago dress, and a moment of sheer audience electricity as they all realised there really was going to be a giant custard pie fight, and they were not just in the middle, but the only way through was to embrace it. that, and grab and put on a plastic poncho in the ten remaining seconds…

diary | 27 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · liveness

re-rite installation

second of two installations i’ve really enjoyed recently, re-rite is a multitrack recording of the philharmonia orchestra performing stravinsky’s the rite of spring, played out across 25 screens and the three floors and many rooms of the wonderfully dilapidated bargehouse. i’d have gone to see such a mediated-live-performance-with-lots-of-screens type thing anyway, and doubly so as the philharmonia partnered with friends yeast to make this (props, pulled it off to a really high standard/) but it really got under my skin: the experience was unique, beyond the goal of somehow giving the experience of being inside an orchestra on stage.

easy to explain would be the thrill of hearing a percussion crash somewhere else in the building come reverberating through while you were isolated with an entirely more delicate section of the orchestra. harder to convey would be as you explored the different rooms there was almost a touch of a haunted house rather than the known jigsaw you’d see on stage. at the heart of it is something that could only be delivered through such an installation, that wasn’t about the orchestral unit you see on stage, but was still very much about the orchestra, the music, the players. which is also why there is no photo from the installation above, just a production still i cullled from the website.

diary | 15 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · liveness · qmat