tagged: liveness

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

Innovations in technology are changing every part of the performance landscape […] We are interested in the concept of liveness and togetherness in the context of these changes in technology.

— https://bristolbathcreative.org/pathfinders/expanded-performance

crikey! i have something to say on the matter. no need to rehash that here, though. instead, see this artefact from the workshop. happily, some participants picked one of my contributions from the 100 questions session, and spent some time on it: “how do we move tech away from spectacle to… liveness?”

it took the calm of a day or two later to really realise what i was looking at. that was the question that, more or less, animated the start of my PhD. i spent years chasing that thread, the tech falling away to explore the underlying phenomena through study of human interaction, audiences and an appropriation of experimental psyschology; i have a fine-grained idea of where that question leads. and yet, here is a completely different take, from two completely different minds.

i bring this up because i don’t know how to reconcile the potential of that workshop room with the fixed number of fellowships they are eventually going to fund (and the necessarily constrained research that will result). but that session felt like the start of something good, the above a glimpse of a better way.

diary | 24 feb 2020 | tagged: pervasive media studio · research · liveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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