.:thePooch:. ­ HCI and Live Performance …

                    .:thePooch:. ­ HCI and Live Performance

        Jennifer G. Sheridan, Simon Lock                                  Alice Bayliss
             Computing Department                                      University of Leeds
               Lancaster University                       School of Performance and Cultural Industries
                 Lancashire, UK                               Bretton Hall Campus, West Bretton
                    LA1 4YR                                      Wakefield, West Yorkshire UK
           sheridaj@comp.lancs.ac.uk                                        WF4 4LG
             lock@comp.lancs.ac.uk                                   a.bayliss@leeds.ac.uk

Introduction
.:thePooch:. [.:thePooch:. 2004] is a group of individuals mainly from within the Department of
Computing at Lancaster University. We have come together through a shared interest in exploring the
boundaries that exist between art and technology with the intention of exploring the interplay between
technology, art and the environment via non-traditional user interfaces [Lock et al. 2004]. Our
background in interactive interface technology design has put us in an ideal position to develop some
interactive art installations and live performances (herein called live performance) which have the
objective of providing pure experience to the users. Our observation of the user experience informs our
future work by providing the raw material to create new models of interaction and ultimately tools to
support creativity towards the goal of removing the boundaries between art and science.

The aim of .:thePooch:. is to explore non task-based use of hi-technology in live performance. Our work
combines visual, conceptual and interactive aesthetics with aspects of interaction and entertainment.
We create live performances in playful arenas [Bayliss et al. 2004] ­ hyper-real social environments
such as bars, nightclubs, and performance parties as well as non-traditional spaces such as foyers,
gardens and castle grounds. In focusing on these spaces, we avoid the often rule-bound and predictable
environment of galleries and formal exhibition areas. Our purpose is to engage an audience using
technology as a bridge to improve accessibility of our art. We attempt to draw people into tripartite
interaction [Sheridan et al. 2004] with installations providing only limited description or instruction, with
the emphasis on exploration and discovery on the part of the audience. We examine how:
     ·    using hi-technology can allow for (re)imagining in playful arenas,
     ·    interactivity in playful arenas changes with the addition of computationally-augmented artefacts
          and performances,
     ·    to prod social situations with a technological stick,
     ·    to evaluate the suitability of particular interactions in given social contexts and
          physical environments,
     ·    to record and reuse data from these events.

The practical and technical issues arising from placing one's work in playful arenas are considerable
and yet remain the reason why we are drawn to it. Playful arenas are exciting, dynamic spaces where
performance and performative behaviour can and do collide. Licensed and unlicensed playful arenas,
incorporating the warehouse and festival aesthetic, now utilise state of the art equipment to transport
people each weekend into a performed fantasy wonderland, which has a relationship with the world and
the participants' sense of world making. Our interest lies not only in examining the performative
dynamics of these spaces and those who participate within them, but also in creating site-specific
interventions and installations using ubiquitous sensor technologies to expose the technical, conceptual
and aesthetic parameters associated with mobile performances which infiltrate unanticipated
performance spaces.

Modelling interaction
Traditional models and ideas of the human-computer interface become ineffective when we apply them
to computationally-augmented live performances in playful arenas and so there is a need to study the
use of these emerging technologies in an effort to create new models of interaction.
HCI is ripe with interaction models and paradigms, which discuss the interface between and through
users and the computer. However, in computationally augmented live performance, the observer or
audience becomes an essential aspect of the interactivity. In this sense, observers act as co-creators of
the artwork. We describe this paradigm as tripartite interaction ­ the fluid activity between participants,
performers and observers that manifests from a performance.

In order to better understand these interactions, we created the Performance Triad model (PT)
[Sheridan et al. 2004]. In the PT model, the observer, participant and performer are equal collaborators
in a performance, which lies at the heart of the triad. A performance is by definition as that which is
present between performer, participant and observer. The performance as a whole exists in a particular
context and the context occurs within and creates an environment.

We use the PT model in both the design and analysis process ­ to consider new possibilities and to
deconstruct existing performances and installations. We provide examples of this in the following
section.

Porfolio
Our website contains an up-to-date list of our previous, current and future activities however, we provide
a sample of our activities here.

 Interactive Installation

                     Bronwen
                     Bronwen is an interactive ethereal apparition trapped in a two dimensional reality.
                     Despite this, she still has a sensory perception of this world and reacts to proximity
                     and motion of objects and people. As participants move closer to Bronwen or there
                     motion becomes faster or more exaggerated, Bronwen reacts negatively to the
                     invasion of her personal space. Browen's response is created using a basic
                     webcam, projector and java code. She only appears in the evening, and has been
                     seen under trees in gardens during festivals, trapped behind iron gates outside
                     gallery exhibitions, and in the residence hallways during conferences.



                     Andrine
                     Andrine is a virtual personality who reacts to messages sent to via SMS. She uses
                     an array of facially expressions to portray her emotions when reacting to receive
                     messages. Andrine's underlying abstraction is based on the science of corpus
                     linguistics and centres on the parsing of messages for emotive content. However,
                     the participant never sees this complex code running in the background; they
                     simply see a huge projection emotively responding to their message. So affective is
                     this response that participants are often afraid to insult or anger the avatar [Lock et
                     al. 2003]. Andrine can be "reskinned" to anyone's face in about 5 minutes using a
                     basic webcam. She likes to hang out in cafes, restaurants and at performance
                     parties.

                     Kirlian Table
                     Inspired from the images found in Kirlian photography, Kirlian Table allows you to
                     view the psychic aura of the person/object interacting with objects on the table or
                     with the table itself. The longer an object is present on the table, the more psychic
                     energy is stored in the table and the more intense the psychic aura. Should you
                     remove the object, the psychic aura lingers and slowly dissipates - items that have
                     charged the table for longer take the longest to fade. Kirlian Table has found itself
                     many public social spaces, such as galleries, theatre foyers and community areas
                     in office buildings. Kirlian Table was designed in one day during the Scrapheap
                     Challenge, a three-day extreme prototyping competition [Scrapheap 2003].
 Performance Art

                     Schizophrenic Cyborg
                     In Schizophrenic Cyborg, a hidden participant is wirelessly linked to a performer
                     who interacts with observers in a shared space. The performer wears a display
                     "Teletubby-style" on their belly and the hidden participant uses their invisibility to
                     encourage interaction between participants and observers by sending provocative
                     and controversial messages and content to the performer's display. Since
                     observers are unaware of the hidden participant, they assume that the performer is
                     controlling the display. When Schizophrenic Cyborg was performed at a
                     performance art party, the hidden participants knew that they could not be held
                     immediately accountable for their actions, and so they tended to `misbehave'
                     [Sheridan et al. 2004]. The misrepresentation of control caused both participants
                     and performers to act subversively from within the performance parameters, to see
                     what kind of reactions they could get from observers. Schizophrenic Cyborg likes
                     busy public places best.

                     Hands of Fate & Film Jockey
                     In Hands of Fate a performer stands in front of a large projection screen and
                     through gestures controls the events happening on the screen, such as making a
                     building decay, or causing a volcano to erupt. Film Jockey is based on the same
                     technology is much like the "choose your own ending" book; a performer points at
                     various objects around the room a small sequences of film clips are played on a
                     projection screen behind the performer. If the performer changes the sequence of
                     objects they point at, then they change the order of the film clips. While Hands of
                     Fate has made many appearances, particularly at festivals and theatre foyers on
                     large-scale public displays, Film Jockey has mainly been used as a demonstration
                     tool at hands-on workshops.



International Conferences and Workshops

Performance Parties
In May 2002, we ran Art-Cels [Art-Cels 2002], an art and technology performance party and the last
event in a three-day celebration with performance artist Stelarc [Stelarc 2004]. The event challenged
artists and technologists to come together to discuss, display and perform the future of computing and
performance art in human-machine communication. Guerrilla performance was encouraged; artists were
asked to turn up on the night of the event and perform in any manner they wished.

Workshops & Seminars
To disseminate our work, we regularly conduct workshops with students, artists and technologists,
including Leeds University, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, Doncaster College and
Lancaster University and folly new media centre.

Conferences
We have attended and presented academic papers at several conferences, including the Computers
and Creativity, HCI International, PixelRaiders, Pervasive Computing and Mobile HCI. Currently, we are
organizing an international conference, which we describe in the future work section of this paper.

Future Work

In November 2004, Folly (UK) in partnership with .:thePooch:. (UK), Robert Saucier (Canada), KIT
collective (UK, Canada, France) will bring together 25 artists and 25 scientist for a week of explorative
activity and scientific inquiry to be co-hosted at folly and InfoLab21, the Northwest centre of Excellence
for ICT. Our two main themes explore the intimate spaces found in viral communities and self-replication
and, absent presence, virtual sensing and distant co-action.
Also, we are creating content for a large-scale ubiquitous display network which will be built on the
university campus in 2005. Several large-screen projections and small ubiquitous displays will be
strategically placed around the campus. This EU funded initiative will give us access to the largest
concentrated group of ubiquitous computer users in the world. We are collaborating with the School of
Performance and Cultural Industries, Bretton Campus at the University of Leeds, Nuffield Theatre at
Lancaster University, and international artists to create site-specific interactive performances and
installations for this project.

Finally, we are organizing several performance parties which will take place during the Liverpool
Biennial in September, October and November 2004. The event will mirror the ethos of Art-Cels, in that
the venue will be open to the public and will include several guerrilla performances.

References

Art-Cels [online]. Available: http://www.art-cels.com (Accessed: July 12, 2004).

Bayliss, A., Lock, S., Sheridan, J.G. (2004), Augmenting Expectation in Playful Arena Performances
with Ubiquitous Intimate Technologies. In Proceedings of PixelRaiders 2, April 6-8, Sheffield.

Lock, S., Rayson, P. and Allanson, J. (2003), Personality Engineering for Emotional Interactive Avatars,
                                                                                                      th
In Human Computer Interaction, Theory and practice (Part II), Volume 2 of the Proceedings of the 10
International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, June 22-27, Crete, pp. 503-507.

Lock, S., Sheridan, J.G., Lindsay, A. T., Kember, S., Phillips, P., Allanson, J. (2004), Interactive Art
Installations: A New Agenda for Interaction Design. In IEEE Journal on Pervasive Computing, Special
Issue on Art, Design, and Entertainment, 3(1), Jan-March, pp 37.

Sheridan, J.G., Dix, A., Bayliss, A., Lock, S., Phillips, P., Kember, S. (2004), Understanding Interaction
                                                                                     th
in Ubiquitous Guerrilla Performances in Playful Arenas. In Proceedings of the 18 British HCI Group
Annual Conference, September 6-10, Leeds.

.:thePooch:. [online]. Available: http://www.thepooch.com (Accessed: July 12, 2004).

Scrapheap Challenge [online]. Available at: http://polo.lancs.ac.uk/scrapheap/ (Accessed: July 12,
2004).

Stelarc [online]. Available: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au (Accessed: July 12, 2004).