‘Imagineering’ mixed reality (MR) immersive experiences in the postdigital revolution: innovation, collectivity, participation and ethics in staging experiments as performances

ABSTRACT

At the frontiers of our technoculture and experience economy, artist-researchers as catalytic agents become Imagineers and entrepreneurs of themselves. Arts are quantified in expectations of extending forms of communication with people and our environments, by creating humanistic ways of interfacing with machines. Within the experience economy the term ‘immersion’ is overused trending towards VR, which has troubled many researchers and practitioners across disciplines. Drawing on perspectives from performance studies, digital humanities, and human-computer interaction (HCI), this paper reviews the role of XR-enabling technologies, beyond VR, in designing immersive experiences, and their integration into performance practices. It discusses the shift of the artist’s role in imagineering new resources and new ways of working to immerse audiences, and it evaluates this in a postdigital context. It discusses how immersion operates, and critiques components necessary to create affective environments in terms of audience engagement, agency, participation, involvement, presence, embodiment and interaction. The article discusses how performance as a lab can act as a method of inquiry by bringing the anthropological, performative and theatrical perspectives; and the ethics of to testing immersive-enabling technologies and/or experiences within the context of live performances.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance studies
• performance practices
• human computer interaction
• augmented reality
• mixed reality
• digital humanities
• creative economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Yiota is a British-born Greek-speaking Cypriot interdisciplinary artist and academic. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher for Centre for Research in Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) at Bath Spa University; and Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Bristol’s Department of Theatre. Drawing on her research-led teaching, academic practice-based research and artistic work across performance studies and digital humanities, she has lectured across the fields of Theatre and Performance, Geography, Creative and Digital Writing, Museum Studies and Digital Curation, Digital Humanities, and Innovation. Demetriou is an artist-in-residence at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, an Editorial assistant of The Writing Platform, and board member for Performance Studies International’s (PSi) sub-group, the Future Advisory Board (FAB), for which she is co-editing the special issue of PSi’s Global Performance Studies (GPS) journal. Her research and artistic practice combine oral history and personal narrative, curation, ubiquitous technologies and interactive media, performance installation and sound art; and explore methods of exhibiting stories in settings beyond performance, breaking boundaries and hierarchies between creator, curator, writer, visitor, reader, user, and audience (through user-curation and user-generated content). Demetriou’s research interrogates the social, political, ethical, cultural and theoretical implications of a growing digital context, exploring how narrative, in a digital world, can be engaged both spatially and temporally. She is furthermore interested in performance documentation, archives, identity, the ethics of participation and representation, geographical and contested borders, female narratives of war, and artistic practices that emerge from such crisis. She holds a Diploma in 35 mm Filmmaking from New York Film Academy, a BA (Hons) in Theatre Studies from Queen Mary University of London, an MA by Research from the University of Hull in Performances Studies; a Ph.D. from University of Bristol’s Theatre Department, and has been awarded Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her performance project Love Letters invites audiences’ to delve into an installation of 350 love letters written by past audiences to their loved ones that have been collected whilst touring internationally over six years at renowned events and venues (Watershed, Latitude Festival, MIX, Museum of Broken Relationships, Tempting Failure, Performance and Live Art Platform, iDocs2016, Pervasive Media Studio, Arnolfini, CIPFA, Athens Biennale). Reviews of the piece have been published both online and print: Vice Live Art Almanac Vol. 4 and EXEUNT magazine . The project has been extended to three sub-projects: integrating wearable and digital technologies in the performance piece to enhance audience interaction; an artist book called, To You, that uses interactive ink and ubiquitous computing to explore narrative interaction and tactility within experience and conceptual design. The book invites the reader to encounter a series of love letters that can only be experienced by imbuing it with warmth. In this way, it responds to the reader’s body heat, and visibly, leaves temporal traces of the reader’s resonant particles (fingerprints) on its pages. Yiota has also shown other artistic works and commissions at Bath Kids Literary Festival, Wickham Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Somerset Gallery and Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Demetriou is moreover a Performance art photographer and the initiator/artistic director of Performance & Live Art Platform Cyprus.

ORCID

Panayiota A. Demetriou (Yiota) http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7708-1695

Notes

1 XR refers to cross reality or extended reality, where physical and virtual environments are combined, and human-machine interactions are generated by computing technologies and wearables, to deliver technology mediated experiences. XR is an umbrella term that covers all the various forms of computer-altered reality, including: Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR).

2 In line with scholars such as Benford et al. (2009), the term ‘experiences’ is used throughout this article to describe a shift in focus beyond conventional usability, to discuss faculties such as, affect, sensation, pleasure, aesthetics and fun, and their contribution to overall user experience in terms of immersivity (11, 21).

3 Imagineering combines the words ‘imagination’ and ‘engineering’, to describe the implementation of creative ideas that use discursive frameworks in practical form. The term was coined by an American industrial company in 1940. The first person to call themselves an imagineer was artist and industrial designer Arthur C. Radebaugh, who used the word to describe his futuristic civil engineering designs. It further appeared in publications across disciplines of urban design, economics, and politics, and it later on became a registered trademark of The Walt Disney Company (Kuiper and Smit 2014, 156).

4 This is a continuous scale developed by Milgram and Kishino in 1994, which ranges between the fully virtual, a virtuality, and the fully real, reality. The reality–virtuality continuum encompasses all possible variations of real and virtual objects (Milgram and Kishino 1994).

5 This is a theory in marketing and business strategy associated with customer/audience behaviour, or consumer decision making. It highlights a value chain uncovering underlying emotions, consequences, and personal values that drive consumer choices, linking a product attribute to its functional consequence, to emotional consequence, and to the underlying personal value (Anitsal and Cadotte 2014). Seeing its relevance to the experience economy, and more specifically to audience studies in performance it can be used to measure immersive experiences.

6 Ambient Literature was a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University, the University of Birmingham and development partners Calvium, Ltd., funded by the AHRC. It investigated emergent forms of literature that make use of pervasive or ubiquitous technologies, and social practices, to produce affective experiences for readers. https://ambientlit.com/index.php/about-the-project/.

7 Read and experience Breathe here: https://www.breathe-story.com/.

8 For instance, conductive textiles, interactive and conductive inks, and tattoo circuits that integrate unnoticeable wearable technology into daily life.