Liveness: an interactional account
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Live performances involve complex interactions between a large number of co-present
people. Performance has been defined in terms of these performer–audience dynamics, but
little is known about how they work. A series of live performance experiments investigate
these dynamics, through teaching a humanoid robot some stagecraft, contrasting live and
recorded performance, and spotlighting the audience. This requires the development of
methods capable of capturing the fleeting responses of people within an audience and
making sense of the resulting massed multi-modal data.
The results show that in live events interaction matters. Extending the idea that our
experience of performance is shaped by interactions with others, namely by talking with
people afterwards, analogous social patterns are identified within the event. Specifically,
some of the interactional dynamics well established for close, dyadic encounters extend to
performers and audience members, despite the somewhat anonymised nature of massed
audiences. While individual performer–audience effects were identified, the primary axis
of social interaction is shown to be between audience members. This emphasises how it
is being in an audience – common across diverse performance genres – that shapes the
experience of live events.
This work argues that the term liveness is ill-defined, but need not be. These
interactional dynamics have a functional basis and depend solely on what is externally
manifest. Understanding liveness in this way allows a perspicuous account – relating the
perceptual environment within the event to the social contingency of experience – and can
provide a systematic basis for design.
Authors
Harris, Matthew TobiasCollections
- Theses [4490]