Macro: Interacting with Performance Environment and Audience

In popular live electronic music practices such as Dj'ing and EDM57 _performance the relationship between the performers and the audience (and space) plays a crucial role for the conduct of performance. The 'vibe' or atmosphere in the space produced by the co-present (listening and possible dancing) audience is taken as an indicator for the direction of performance. If the feedback perceived by the performer is not as expected she needs to change the direction of her musical activities, if this vibe is positive then one may continue. Even though this research- practice does not share the aesthetic or rituals of EDM, this 'vibe' still plays a role in how an improvised performance develops. In the dialogic approach of FIM the atmosphere of the performance event naturally influences the decision making process (i.e. who is the audience? how is the climate? how is the light? how does the space resonate and so forth). In addition, the programmable technology provides the possibility to integrate a co-present audience directly through participation. The interactions on this level are visualised in the diagram in Fig.7. This aims to show the complexity of the situation in which the improvising performers are mainly focused on themselves and their interactions. The 'vibe' of the audience is a diffuse and non-personal kind of atmosphere emanating from the audience and space in the direction of the performers.

3.3.1 Creating Dialogic Spaces through Participation

The basic problem in the communicative exchange between a programming performer and a listening audience lies in the fact that the relations between programmer and apparatus are not represented in an expressive or explicit way. A consequence of this problem may be that the listening audience needs to change their viewpoint to come closer. Only in close proximity may an outside spectator be able to experience the performance as an actual display of dynamic human- apparatus interactions in order to see the liveness of the actions more clearly. Live coders have responded to this challenge by the visual display of the computer screen onto a large screen in order to make the performance of typing code more visible. From my own experience however, the best understanding of the computer interaction results from first-hand participation.

57_{EDM refers to the genre of 'Electronic Dance Music' which 'features electronic synthesized and} sampled instrumentation, with at least some parts of a percussive nature, in tracks designed for dancing' (Collins et al, 2013: 102).

In my practice I have attempted few such participative scenarios58_{. They helped} me to understand that a low-level access to the technological interface is helpful for the participant to respond in a meaningful way and this has enabled the experience to become empowering. An overly complex interface with layers of automation built into the system will be opaque for an outsider, unlike for myself the designer and author of the interactive system. This recalls Buber's call for

mutual authenticity as a precondition for a dialogic relation. To speak in an

authentic voice may, in this scenario, translate to giving the participant and user of the interactive system at least a hint of how input and output of a system relate to each other in order for her to make sense of the apparatus' opaque interactions. For the Projectionist Orchestra project, I attempted another scenario which invited anyone independent of their level of practical knowledge and experience to participate. I had imagined this piece to enable a dialogic encounter between the participants themselves through the interactive system.

However, the result seem from my performer's perspective was different. While it did successfully integrate the outside audience 'into' an interaction with the apparatus, the coordination amongst the participants turned out to be difficult. Participants seemed unable to act in direct response to each other – the majority of users of the system focused on the free exploration of the afforded sonic possibilities. The beginnings of each performance were chaotic or in dialogic terms: no one seemed to listen to each other, there was no obvious responsibility in the music and interaction. In response I felt a need to facilitate more structural coherence and proposed an interaction with the participants through written instructions: I, the algorithmic performer, would write text in the form of suggestions for action or commentary on the emerging structures of the music, and the participants could respond to these by changing their gestural interactions. In summary my text-based intervention revealed a new way of performer– audience interaction in live coded performance which produced a specific proximity in the relationship between myself as the algorithmic performer and the audience in the room59_{. On top of that the feedback from the participants indicated}

58_{Most prominently features the piece The Projectionist Orchestra (see section 2.3.4) as well as a} two week residency in the OpenSpace of the AxisArts Centre, MMU Cheshire in february 2014 during which I created an on-going interactive installation interrupted by occasional performative interventions in the space.

59_{The mutuality of this experience is based on conversations I had with participants of the} performance who expressed the described kind of involvement in the process.

that their experience of the system was similar to how I, as the author, had conceived of it. By this I mean how in the process of interacting with the provided touch interface of each mobile device the same questions came up which face the free improvising performer: How to proceed? What to do or play? How to exactly interact with others? In this way the changes in the spatiality of the performance environment and the roles of audience and performers made it possible for the participants to get a first hand experience of the human-apparatus interaction in free improvised performance.