 It's a double chair. That's a great way. Okay. We're all energized now. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Welcome back to the digital plus performance competing. It's hard when you're sitting in a circle to know where to where to where to talk. Just before we get started, I just wanted to kind of just talk a little bit about how the morning went and like some some things that the spider web show and how around teams saw from the morning and just how kind of disparate the two sessions were that we started this kind of conversation. We're bouncing ideas off of each other and when we were going in one direction and then the next session became kind of more of almost like a panel discussion, but across zoom with tough audio and like a lot of light and like a lot of just a lot to take in. And so just to acknowledge that that is where we are in this conversation today and that this afternoon we're trying to re-energize and bring back a lot of those values in the kind of the nature of the conversation of the first conversation that we had. I also just wanted to just talk about cell phones a little bit like this is the interactivity session we're about to start. And so I really want to give permission for people to use phones and hopefully use them in a way that's related to this discussion. So nobody's in trouble for having their phone out and you know, but also be cool if you tweeted something. The other thing that I wanted to say is a high to the Internet. It's good to remember that there is an online audience here with us. Welcome Internet to the Isabelle Bader Center for the Performing Arts and the Digital Plus Performance Convening run by HowlRound in collaboration with Spider Web Show. And if you have anything to say, please tweet something to hashtag Folda and I will look at this board maybe and see if I can't bring at least one or two of your comments into this conversation as well. The last thing I wanted to say is if you've signed up for the Electric Company's VR experience, Kyle's right there. Kyle will take you in at your time. So then you just go over to Kyle and that's how you go and do that experience today. Great. Okay, so here we are. Session 3, Artists and Audience Interactivity, aka from Monologue to Dialogue. And so I have with me here and you can just put up your hands so people know who you are. JD Derbyshire, Jen Stevenson, Kristen McWhorter, Whit McLaughlin, and Brenda Baker-Harger. Okay, welcome and thank you. So we all know how this works. I'm just going to check. Somebody's timing. Somebody's timing here. Anyone? Bueller. Bueller. Thank you, Adrienne. Yes, can we have the chimes? Thank you. I don't need to time anyone's talking but I just need to know when we're going to move the circle outwards. Maybe do some math on how much time we got left and let me know. Thanks. Okay, great. So this session, you know, we've, so we started by talking about strengths, weaknesses that we think is going on in the digital shift. Then we talked to Prague about what they've been thinking about at the Prague annual. And now this conversation is very specifically about interactivity. How has the interactive nature of digital tools changed, modified, not changed at all, the way that artistic practice manifests itself. And I'm going to start by throwing the gen, Stevenson, because her and I had a really interesting email back and forth just about participation and like the ethics and the assumptions of that. Hi, okay. So I'm Jen Stevenson and I am a what? I'm a scholar and a writer and I think the writing part is really important to me. So I try and see a lot of work and I try and think about what I've seen and then I try and communicate that in various formats. Some of them scholarly and some of them more popular. And the thing that I'm thinking about a lot at the moment is this word participation and thinking about some of the roots of participation. I think we're, I think we're living in a moment where we're seeing a flourishing of participation in lots and lots of ways. And I think some of that, I think there's two roots where that comes from. I think one of them has to do with a desire for authenticity. Desire for, I'm going to say unmediated connection. We can talk about what exactly that means to be unmediated, but we're interested in realness. We're interested in liveness. We're interested in things that are authentic, things that we know where they come from. And we see this in lots and lots of ways. We see this in desire for DIY. We see this in desire for organic vegetables and backyard chickens and vintage clothing, all this kind of thing. We want to know where stuff came comes from and we don't want to be connected to it really, really intimately. And I think we want to be involved. We like things that are custom and that are about us and for us. So I think that's one part of it, which leads to this sort of desire for participation to make the thing itself, to make the art, to make the story, to be involved, to have it be for me, by me, about me. There's some narcissistic element to that as well. And the other thing is maybe the technology aspect is I think some of it, this participation is enabled by thinking about Web 2.0, thinking about technologies that now become interactive. Thinking about being able to write back to self-produce, to write and have lots of people read it. We all have our own printing presses now. We all have our own personal publishing houses now. We can take photos and have millions and millions of people can see them. And so I think we expect to be artists. We expect to be authors. We all expect to be creators because technology has put that into our hands. Again, direct contact with a lot of people. So I think those two trends together are feeding participation in art. We're seeing more and more participatory art. So that's what I think about a lot. And then I have a bunch of questions. So some of the questions about ethics, about what does it mean from an ethical point of view to make, for me to labor, to produce my own art, to be a participant involves some of my, I become a laborer. I also think that my stuff is being used, my physical labor is being used, but my emotional labor is being used and my autobiographical data is being used. And I say used, but the paradox is I like it. I want to give all this stuff. I want to feel engaged. And so I'm really just in that tension between how, by participating, we are being commodified. We're being used. We're not being compensated. And then we're being, I'm not tricked, not tricked, but we're being pulled in. We're being caught to enjoy it and desire it. So I think there's something rich and complicated there. Yeah. I mean, that for me connects to some conversations that Witt and I had on the phone previous this conversation just about what the possible future of the internet could be. Like this, I think we talked about this phrase of like the walls disappearing. And I'm wondering if you could connect anything that we were talking about to what Jen said there. Witt McLaughlin. Yeah, I think early on there was a dream somehow that the internet could evaporate barriers between people. And I don't know where we are with that dream right now. In some ways, it's become partly about building walls between people. And in very sophisticated ways. But the idea was that somehow connectivity was going to take what happened in the darkened room of the theater with the moat around it and the ticket taker and explode open the walls. And we would suddenly like feel this transparency, this translucency and everybody could come, whether they were a ticket buyer or not. And somehow the internet was going to give us this boundaryless world. And I'm kind of wondering where we are with that. And so if we're talking about interactivity, what kind of interactivity are we wanting here? And that leads me to think about technology a lot. And wonder if we're building walls with technology or whether we're evaporating them. I feel like maybe what we're wondering is are we really going in the right direction when we're thinking about kind of content delivery, user interface, the sort of hard bubble of the technology gizmo that's in your hand or the thing that's pulling us down this path towards what I earlier called innovation inflation. And I'm not positive that's really a good term. Or are we looking for something a little more ephemeral? Is there some way that interactivity can get the screen out of the center of the experience? And I think of Elijah's cup at the Seder. Like there's a seat there empty. And the table is lined with people who are going to eat. And then there's one seat, maybe, not to go too far with that metaphor, but maybe that's where the digital apparatus sits. And it's not the center. And we're not all looking at it, but it's over there. Because I wonder if there's a way to use digital technology that actually enhances the possibility of serendipity. If it can enhance the kind of spaciousness of space. If there's some way that artists, and I wonder when you talk, where is the artist in this? Do we even need the artist? Or what's the value of artistry? And what can the artist do in an era where, and I have to say over time, I start to actually become suspicious that the outreach effort is really kind of just another way of saying, or engagement, another way of saying audience development. That we're sort of trying to monetize our relationships or the creative impulses of other people to harvest their data to get them to come see our thing. It's really an advertisement for ourselves. So to me serendipity, or is it possible to build true contingency into our performances using digital media? And contingency really means the fact that what is happening could at any point be something else for no reason at all. And is the decision tree kind of getting in our way here, this kind of content delivery? We're pushing some message out to people and they're going to respond. This makes me think about Brenda. We were talking about the difference between interactivity and immersion, and then as separate concepts. And I'm just wondering, I feel like a lot of what we just heard from Witt kind of is related to that distinction. Okay. So I have a lot of opinions about these things. And I have a lot of questions. So I'm starting, I start from an improvisational perspective, which is kind of like raising your own chickens, right? So it's at the very beginning. You have nothing but your mind, your body, and each other in order to create, and you're creating in real time. So when you start from that perspective, the question is, why are you doing it? What are you trying to create? And is technology the proper way to realize your vision? So what's your story? Everything is story. And what's the best way to tell that story? As far as immersion and interactivity go, I've done a lot of dabbling in interactivity because it's interesting. Immersion to me is a little bit easier because you can bring the audience into an experience and surround them with the experience without asking anything of them, right? Asking any participation that's going to affect the story or maybe they'll be emotionally affected. Interactivity in my definition requires some sort of agency on the part of the audience member. And when you have a collective audience in theater, what does that mean? What does it mean to give the audience agency and do they want it? And then furthermore, how does that affect the story you're trying to tell if you believe that story is something that is meant to change us and to affect us emotionally, to trigger our brains into changing our minds and changing our behavior? Then interactivity becomes very murky. And the interesting thing is that video games, which a lot of my students go into, have the same issue. It's just from a different perspective. They're all trying to tell really good stories, but that pesky interactivity kind of gets in the way because, well, if your hero keeps dying and you have save points, you just go back. How can you be emotionally connected to that? So I think we're all trying to look at interactivity from the same perspective. Is it possible to create interactive experiences that emotionally affect us? I think Kristen leads right into what we were talking about. So I'm not even going to preface it because I know you know where I'm going to go. Yes, I know where we're going. I just wanted to say really quickly an observation I had from this morning was it's probably very comfortable for me to use a lot of academic language to talk about what I do. So I just want to give an open invitation to anyone to interrupt me if you don't know what something means or whatever I was having a hard time following along with some of the language before. But what I think this really bleeds into is this idea of these immersive interactive technologies coming with this rhetoric that there's some sort of grand empathy machine that especially virtual reality which the lens that I view that history, which I'm not necessarily a reliable narrator, but the history of the stereoscopic image certainly dates back to the beginning of cinema and this idea of individualized immersive experience for one audience member that is like trying to catch on to reality has always been accompanied with some sort of promise that we can escape our subjectivity, that we can jump from one reality into another, that we can have a different body or we can temporarily have a different experience of this life. And while I don't think that that has ever been true of the technology, that promise is incredibly powerful and that promise has always kind of accompanied the technology as it's evolved. So when it comes to audience members having agency, I think another thing that we contend with is the expectations of our audience, what they're coming to the work expecting to experience and how much control we can have over that expectation. Jen, you and I were talking about just how some of these tools have, outside of VR and the crazy stuff that it can do, just how it can empower collaboration and how it's changed your approach to practice and other people's practice and wonder if you wanted to address that. Yeah, I think I also come from a background of improvisation and I just want to say thank you for everyone who spoke earlier. I'm just making tons of notes and I will think deeply about these things and can't think deeply about them right now, but I will. Yeah, and also, Whit, thank you for the title of my next show. Be something else for no reason at all. I appreciate that. I'll shout out to you. I think that, like, where the artist is is that, you know, I come from a... I didn't come through university in my theater training. I was at Loose Moose and sort of got mentored through and, like, you want to try directing? Sure. Do you want to try writing a kid's show? Sure. And so I have this nature of experimentation in me. And so there's all kinds of tools. Where the artist situates is, someone said earlier about what we need is artists thinking creatively about the tools and someone else said, sorry, I can't credit. Someone else said we're outsourcing our digital literacy and learning. So play with these tools, right? Like, that's what we did last year at Fold that we played with Squisher. We had no idea what we were doing and now it's iterated. There's an old school application called, or a program called TWINE, which is hypertext. And if you use it, it teaches you how to keep thinking about multiple endings and it's really fun. Game structures we use with kids all the time. We're trying to play with game structure in our way. Like, what if there's no winner and loser? What if you get some of what you want? And by pointing, I work with Adrian Wong on this stuff. What if there's no winner? What if there's no loser? So, but all those ideas came by playing with the tools first, right? By, my show is now followed by this live segment called Brave Space where we're talking about how do we all check into our emotional lives so that we, you know, the biggest problem on the web right now I think is it's an echo chamber. So, how do we get people talking that don't normally talk, you know? Text is great for that. You know, in my house, if we're having an argument, we do it on text. And that really keeps it sane. So, you know, I think that, play with the tools. These kinds of gatherings are fantastic. You know, there's people here that know so much hack stuff that's already been built. We're working on something that is built on the platform of Grindr. Some of you may be familiar with that. And we're building an app called Kindr. And, you know, shit like that. So, lots is already built. And all you have to do is, you know, I work with this one young person in Vancouver who broke my heart one day when she said coding is the new creative writing. And she's right. And so, I'm learning code. So far, I've built these little lights that will light up on a Raspberry Pi. So, just be willing to learn other languages. You know, cross discipline. Yeah, the academic, it's always interesting to pop into an academic setting again because stuff happens here. I was saying to Sarah earlier, it'd be great to have a swap meet where we're actually, you know, there's lots of work being done, you know, outside of the academic. People are hacking. We're doing things together more without having to do degrees necessarily that we could benefit from each other's different kinds of learning. Well, we do have the Canada-US exchange as part of full dust. So, there will be some opportunities for that sort of swap meet thing. I'm just wondering, that's a great kind of, you gave some great examples of interactive tools including Switcher for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is basically lets you do a three-camera live stream, but you can just use three cell phones as a great example of like a way to hack something that used to be like tens of thousands of dollars that can be done with kind of available equipment. And I'm wondering if anyone around here has any suggestions or just things that they find are interactive tools that they've seen in the theater that are working, not working, helpful, useful. We're just hacking, and on Broadway now they have this great system for captioning where it's quite an expensive system, but you can, anyone can just use their smart phone and have the performance caption. We do that with text, speech to text. So, do that. Well, it's time to move our chairs back. So, this is the time where the brave amongst us join in. We're talking interactivity and live performance, what changes, what's different, what works, what sucks about it. We have one lucky joiner, so you definitely get the microphone. All right, just one point sort of picking up on the conversation. I think when you're talking about interactivity it's important to be clear who's interacting with what because there are lots of different configurations. So on the one hand you have performers interacting with each other, right? And you've got performers interacting with audience and then you're adding technology into the picture. So where does it fit? So, the technology can be an interactor in which case you can have performers interacting with the technology in the audience watches and that's actually still a lot of really exciting work happening there. The technology is truly responding, interacting in many ways. You can have the audience interacting with the technology and creating an interesting dynamic experience with no live performer. When you try and there's millions of applications of that I think what people were talking about is when you have the three, where does the technology fit in? And in a lot of the cases that I heard you guys talking about the way that I would think about it is actually it's people interacting with people with the technology being a conduit and that could happen either through tele-matic communications or if you're interacting with people online maybe through a kind of game engine that creates avatars. So the technology there, again, is creating an environment for human beings to be interacting with each other. And that can be happening live too even in the most annoying interactive events where you hit the button and you vote on something and the performers do something different. There too, the technology is a way to communicate that interaction. So just to be thinking clearly about where the interaction is happening. Between technology in person or person to person? That's right. I think it's a way of being a conduit or if the interactivity is on the stage or between the audience. Good questions. Something over here? I think that getting people in virtual world and sometimes it's much more powerful when you actually try to make something collective in this virtual world. So we've been developing a multiplayer theater performer theater performance and within the action of this performance 30 or 50 people are connected together in VR heads as they can see each other as avatars and what was really important for us was collective action. So when they are together they can open a portal in this world or when they act together and do something then another story appears. So as far as I'm concerned I think this is an interesting approach not only just putting somebody in another world but doing something together in it. So that's one issue and about interactivity in multiplayer. And another thing which I find very interesting is creating a body in VR and also interacting with other users who also have a body. And you can analyze and see how people are really like omitting the boundaries that are in the real life and act totally differently. Some are more shy, some are totally open and this kind of experience when you have some kind of body and multiplayer experiences I find very interactive and very interesting. Does anybody here in this circle think that maybe this is a false assumption that the theater has always been interactive and that this is just a new design tool? I bring this up because I think I was making the point on Twitter once and there's a playwright here in Canada named Michael Healy who the Canadians will recognize who left me a message with a number of exclamation marks about how the theater is always interactive and I was overselling my case. I think one thing in the history of theater that might be of use to think about is that audiences didn't tend to be as homogenous as they are now that in Shakespeare's time for instance part of the show, a huge part of the show was what the audience did to the audience and so that it was a three way kind of the groundlings, the nobles I mean this is the old saw and then the actors who were always trying to provoke differentiation and so that different people got to see different things so I think that stimulates interactivity. That's earlier why I specified interaction through technology is different than interactivity because there's a lot of interactivity in improv for sure. I worked with a playwright one time who wrote this long treatise after we had worked on an interactive piece about how she flatly disagreed with what we were doing because it didn't really address what interactivity was to her having people in the same room breathing the same air was interactive and it's like okay so we have to I think it's finding the right semantics defining the terms and figuring out what that is. No I think you're absolutely right about defining the terms and this is where I might take issue with Michael Healy. Yes, yes, theater has always been interactive I don't want to argue with that but this is why I'm not sure interactive is the right word. The word that I've gravitated to is participation because the way I'm thinking about participation is the audience and that may not be even the right word that person occupying that role is a contributor that they have agency that word's been used already they have input and their contributions shape the work their contributions make a difference to what happens it's in a really material way that the work could not happen without them not merely by their presence but the work could not go forward nothing would happen nothing would happen without that role so the word I'm stuck with right now is participation I'm happy if anyone else would give me a better word because I think you have to take part in something there's an involvement there the word participation speaks to but I also think audience maybe isn't the right word I don't think the audience becomes an artist I don't think they displace the artist someone asked where is the artist and I think that's a question that is worth pursuing in this context the word that I'm sticking with right now is player I've heard a lot about games already this morning thinking about the participatory audience is a player that's where I'm at but I would love to hear other people's thoughts about words and about interactivity versus participation or if there's other words in that cluster that might fit better the kind of thing we're trying to capture which I think is new I guess I would just want to argue with the notion that theater has historically been interactive having people in a room doesn't necessarily equate interaction and I think about when I think about making theater that is engaging a whole person I think about my sister when she was learning how to fly fish and she talked about she loved fly fishing because when you go out into the river there are all the things that you have to consider in order to be able to catch the fish you have to consider the temperature of the water the speed of the current the temperature of the air what insects are hatching right now what time of day it is where's the sun where's the shadows of the rocks where are the eddies on the water and where the fish are going to be hiding so all of those being able to balance and think about all those things is really pleasurable for her and that makes her feel like she's inside of this experience and that she's not just a passenger on someone else's experience and that description from her is something that's guided me a lot as I create work is like how am I making use of which is again we're getting over there but how am I inviting somebody to bring their whole selves into this experience and their three dimensionality and their complications and their contradictions in a way that they feel like they're being invited to participate and invited to problem solve to engage Yeah I think to like build on that same idea is I do think that when technology becomes involved in participation or interaction what it does is it creates layers to the experience and somebody this morning said that digital meant an onion and I was like yeah that's a great thing for that to mean I do think that there's a question of where is the primary experience happening are the actors who are interacting with each other on stage having the primary experience of the artwork actually probably not is the person wearing the VR headset having the primary interaction or are the people in the room watching the person in VR having the primary experience of the artwork and I think that the artwork can exist anywhere within that continuum per the intention of the artist but this question of shaping the experience is specific to where you exist in relationship to the technology as those experiences are unfolding Yeah so it's been mentioned a couple of times like if we're using or using is a terrible word but we're using people in an experience to creatively advance the experience so to me it's like this issue of true co-design so co-design is this term that's become popular but true co-design is if I'm building for this group of people they're in from the start therefore they're paid from the start they're credited from the start whether they are have my I can leverage my experience as a writer or director but they are their lived experience in building that experience is valuable and therefore paid and so a lot of times we see kind of a hangover almost from research that we can just glean stories but the moment a person tells us a story then we have to acknowledge that we have to pay honestly and we have to in the co-design invite participation there so in other words even in this we are as an ambivert who spent most of the morning back on the couch there even this is privileging extroverts so we're building with extroverts we're making experiences with extroverts you know we're and what we're trying to do with our kid stuff anyway is like build, opt in, opt out so that if you're inside an experience and you can leave it you can relax we have different stations but I think it's really key that that is one thing that technology can do bring together a lot of voices but we have to value those voices we have to say this is shared authorship this is shared creation yeah did you have something you wanted to add to that? yes I think about interaction on several levels and first is when it comes to VR and connected to VR with theater first the environment that we are creating virtually should be solid then the interaction happens then another thing that is important is communication when you can really talk to a character an animated character or another person who is participating in it then another thing is when you can move the objects and interfere with the environment and when you make magic with style or with some visual effects let's say but also I would like to just mention about Grotowski's theory art as vehicle and I think there are many types of theater and it could be all interactive but in this theory theater was supposed to be used like the whole space there is no division nobody is dividing the audience and the actors everyone is participating and all the space is used so for me this is the true interaction I kind of want to propose a provocation here which is that is it that we're actually shifting eras in terms of going from art that is like to more of a collaboration-driven approach to art or perhaps the new author is a collaborator so in terms of that collaborative as Grotowski brings in a lot of these ideas of collaborative art really come from even before this but certainly fluxes the performance in the 1960s and the idea of participatory theater and it goes even before that as well so the technology is providing new ways potentially to create the kind of participation or to create the, in most cases I think the illusion of participation without any real participation but I think one- Can you elaborate on that? Well, so I'm thinking in particular of game structures both in gaming and in this game structure where there is in fact a very very limited path that you can take so if you've got a branching narrative then you've basically just written X number even if it's a hundred you've written a certain number of pieces and people can pick which one they're going to do there's nothing even remotely interactive or participatory about that anymore than anything else but it creates the illusion I'm making my choice here this is really great I picked the ending no you didn't you just read one of you you passively consumed one of the endings that have been prepared for you and that politically could be very very problematic in giving people this feeling of empowerment when they absolutely have none Yeah, I mean we just, a lot of us I think probably experienced Bandersnatch a couple of months ago which is totally that framework I'm so sorry to do this to you Gada but can you come sit here and just talk about what we've been working on because it's too related Sure, well we're working in VR and I think that is often seen as like fundamentally interactive in this way and I really like to distinguish between the fact that the form allows for interactivity and has these sort of input systems and the narrative or structural level of a piece I think that, like what you're talking about I would say that is interactive because you are inputting information that affects it and even, I think we're talking about different levels of interactivity like the idea that theater is fundamentally interactive and some level is saying if I'm responding to you if you're changing a moment of what happens on stage that's interactive on some level and that makes sense but that's not on any level going into the structure of the experience or the narrative of the experience which I would say what you're talking about does go into the structure you're having but it's a confined it's a confined a confined version of it but I think one of the things working in VR people always want to talk about interactivity because it's fundamentally has this element of moving in the space and I think it's a really separate question than what the technologies are because you can use the technologies to structure really, really confined narrative experiences and what you're doing is almost like in VR like one of the things I actually love this process of thinking about how do you mitigate the interactivity so that you can structure experience because to me that's a key part of narrative and that's one of the things I think about all the time and if you're trying to think how do you, like the question that you raised about how do you get people to bring more of themselves and almost the ways that they want to think into a piece I feel like that's fundamentally a different question than what technologies you use it's like you can run that process through different technologies and then when you apply or work mentally through those technologies you're actually trying to get people to engage or think differently Thank you, sorry to just do that to you Does anyone have something to jump on that? Yeah, I think this ties to the tyranny of rationale and that there's many different ways to think and we've privileged rationale and we've privileged certain story structures and so, you know, a very interested and fractured thinking and how what is thought of as disordered thinking is actually arriving at solutions a lot faster than rationale so I think if we think about this when we move through technology super interesting if we allow as much different thinking as possible that's recognizing when we want to jump in and structure and we talk about building the buffet like keeping it open as long as possible before deciding what to eat and she wants to eat right away but yeah, yeah Okay, check, check, check Pink mic, pink mic, check, check Okay Hi Vijay, I'm on the pink mic, yeah Alright, so now we've expanded full circle I think I see something here Yeah, just because the microphone was over here Yeah, I think it's very interesting to think about sort of levels of interaction in terms of the historical continuum of theatre as it's evolving and I think something that's maybe missing from a conversation is the discussion of spectacle which has always been innate to theatre so how are these new forms of interactivity these new forms of participation actually helping us enhance the wonder of the theatre and the actual, the element of surprise the element of spectacle which is part of what makes theatre a vibrant art form that's all I wanted to say I just wanted to also go back for a little bit I think Brenda was mentioning the idea of immersion and I wanted to maybe actually more of a question like hear a little more about it and thinking that, I mean maybe I'm wrong but I think across all really art forms the idea of suspension of reality is something we strive for we want as participant audience artists this engagement that takes us there are so many interesting points about a different body, a different place and I do wonder if I have worked with various ways of including interactivity in my work, sometimes using technology actually we want to incorporate because we want to expand on that suspension of reality we want to draw the audience, our participants more into the work and make it more immersive but I think it sometimes happens that actually we end up on the other side of it because we kind of activate the person's body or mind in a moment where they find another place might actually have the opposite effect of it and I don't know maybe this is kind of actually a question if you can talk a little bit more about that idea of immersion versus interactivity I guess I'm next so I think it goes back to that question of agency again I mean with immersion you're more viscerally involved it's like theater companies that take you from room to room or ask you to participate you eat a meal with them there's all kinds of different forms of really immersive theater I mean more so I mean in the sense that all theater is immersive because I do believe that emotionally but there's that physical immersion interactivity to me is a different game that's where you actually make choices that affect outcomes so there are consequences to what it is that you do that changes the outcome and sometimes it's a binary choice and it's not a little bit of branching narrative sometimes it's more devastating but it's all depending on consequences to the actions that you take that's to me more interactive so does that help? I'd love to tag on to that because I wanted to speak about agency as well and so the residency that I run is a 360 video creation residency it's called Immersion and it started as a immersive theater and VR creation residency and then the technology was so novel that every artist that came just wanted to make VR pieces so it's focused on that and in the first year just speaking about this question of agency and affecting outcomes so in working with VR and workshopping with artists how to create stories in VR I've developed this idea of prismatic storytelling so that it's actually really harnessing the agency of the viewer and a lot like so that the entire environment tells the story and it's not about forcing them to look in a particular place sorry I'm shaking, I'm nervous my colleague Naima Ramos Chapman in the first year of the residency made a piece about the residency takes place in the south and there's horrific history around racial violence in the south of course in particular in this town Wilmington and she ended up making a piece that placed the viewer in the middle of an environment where on one side I really am nervous I don't know why on one side there's two white women on a picnic blanket having a conversation about politics in America it was in 2016 and on the other side there's a lynching happening and the artist or the person, the audience has a choice to look in one direction or the other and their choice is a reflection of their relationship with racial dynamics or actually their choice is a reflection of so many different things and it's influencing the outcome of the piece but it's also influencing how we're going to have a conversation afterwards about the piece so anyway just to sort of complicate that idea of agency and as it's related to how we are situated within the social realities that we're inside of and then how we enter a kind of digital space that's what I wanted to put into the room this is sort of dialing back to us slightly earlier train of thought one of the things worked on a big project last year that was very much people wandering around town getting sort of clues and directives off their phones as part of the project very GPS kind of thing based and one of the things we found was really important is allowing people to have a chance to not interact so the tempo is really important to allow people to stop and not actually be constantly barred with like, you know, your text messages pop it's like when you go viral on Twitter or something and you're in notifications to go off the wall we didn't want to have that happen in our experience so you could always stop it you're always sort of in control of when things were going to come at you which we found was a really important part of not overwhelming the audience so the ability to not interact was a key part so it's sort of small scale interaction not bigger scale narrative interaction but tempo and pacing is one of those things that gets very complicated to do when you're dealing with an interactive medium versus a scripted produced one off medium there's different ways of conceptualizing things and in our case in some of the work that we've been doing is we've been looking at immersion and its relationship to presence and ultimately looking at how to impact emotionally and how to have some sort of empathetic reaction from the audience so the way that we've been looking at it is that as with a book or a really well done film there's an immersion that takes place but with virtual reality a lot of what people have been looking at in the literature anyways is looking at virtual reality and the different ways that you can immerse technically so the elements of immersion in a lot of the work on virtual reality is it spatialized sound is it stereoscopic or is it 2D what's the fidelity of the image and in that context the interaction that you have is often seen as another element of the technical so comparing do you just look around or do you actually have the ability to move around and to be able to see the space behind which gives you more interactivity within the scene simply looking around like this is like looking at an IMAX screen in a sense but it gives you more ability to do so but then looking at someone earlier talked about in the smaller group the idea of presence really so presence being either spatial or beyond that being a social presence so the spatial presence being that idea walking around or interacting with the objects in the environment but then having virtual characters avatars or virtual characters that have been pre-recorded providing that social presence so that's what we've been looking at that sort of layer from immersion interaction as an element of immersion and then presence and the impact that that has on an audience Rob I'm sorry I forget your name but I have a question for you because I was really interested in the idea of agency and you said what does it mean to give the audience agency and do they want it and I've worked a lot with audiences and I did a show that Michael commission curated me to do I guess so he saw it in where I had three community members and we taught them all how to use Twitter and then Beth who was on the screen earlier did all this amazing video design and these three women in their 70s like talked about legacy in the context of leaving things on the internet versus leaving things in real life and what that means for them and we asked the audience to tweet back to pre-written tweets that had come as sort of a pop-up video for the show so the women had written sort of a subscript to be tweeted out live during the show and we asked people to tweet back and we had quite a number of people in the audience tweeting but what we found in the end was that what they ended up tweeting largely when we put it all up on the screen for the women to react to was actually recording what was happening or reporting on what was happening engaging in the questions that were being asked and so the culture of engagement being actually about I was here which I've seen some of us have done already you could like I did the same thing this morning like I'm here in this beautiful space to report or record rather than to engage or react or question and I guess I just wondered about the difference when you're talking about agency what does that mean we should just good teamwork with the mic yeah I get back to agency it's like having an actual effect on something so what you're talking about that's why I say I'm not sure audiences all want it because I've created several experiences for the Games for Change Festival which is in New York City next weekend and it's a different tack it's from a game perspective but we did a piece a few years ago on gun violence and it turned into a theater piece and it was about point counter point counter objectives and two actresses improvised I mean they had a loose script story they were following but they were improvising one their friends one found a handgun and her friends accidentally found a handgun and her friends purse and they had this intense conversation it was the one to get her friend to give up the gun willingly and the other was to justify why she wanted to keep the gun but we also let the audience drive the conversation so we created an app where they were able to send questions and observations and comments on the action and then we'd aggregate you know the ones that were similar and bring them to the top had phones in front of them so it was very complicated and involved very interesting but you know you occasionally get like where did she buy her dress you know why doesn't she cut her hair so you'd get these caddy griefers who just wanted to see they wanted to see whether or not they had agency you know it's like are they really attention are we really having an effect and so there's that kind of awkward learning curve you go through when you throw something in front of an audience where they're like I don't believe it I'm gonna test this and find out if I really have but then you lose something so you know you get those those oddball comments in and it takes away from the power of what you're trying to create as a theater piece so it's complicated I don't have any answers I just have a lot of observations about God that didn't work you know because we couldn't control that you know but if you control it too much and the audience doesn't feel like they have any kind of effect then they feel cheated so it's finding that sweet spot which yeah I don't have an answer speaking of loss of control what's up speaking of loss of control I just wanted to bring things up because we're already at the end of this conversation but I just wanted to share something related to what will happen after which is we have this concert choir choir choir it's going on right here this evening and we're doing two things with it one is we're sending a live stream to these three venues in Montreal Vancouver and Toronto and so they'll be experiencing this community concert with us but there's also this element of we want to be able to hear the venues we want the venues to be able to feel and see us and so that is a grand experiment that you will all be able to see tonight in the context of this conversation we really don't understand how it's going to work I'm going to go in that room and look at it shortly but just to point out that anytime that there is this level of interactivity there's a lot of risk involved and you don't really know what's going to come back at you and so when we see this concert tonight we do see like this experiment in interactivity how does it empower these creators are these people on the other side like these questions of agency are they the singers are they part of this are they in the room with us do they impact us from across distance and so I'm really happy to have this example of interactivity for us to talk about at the end of this two other things the next session is only one hour long so just encourage you to just really take a straight up 15 minute break because that's how we're going to roll into this last section and I just have to do this but just to say I'm sure that the theater has always been interactive but we wouldn't be curating the festival the way we did if we weren't sure that digital tools have changed how the work has to be made and so that I think is an important distinction perhaps interactivity has always been there but these tools require different creative processes and different supports and I'm willing to argue with each of you individually over the course of the next four days ok, we're on break, thanks