Practice
Co-creating novel
experiences & technologies
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Theory
Abstracting concepts
and frameworks
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Studies
Understanding
experience “in the wild”

• Figure 3. Relating practice, studies, and theory in artist-led research.

 

life in their final form. Not only has this involved developing interfaces and supporting technologies for the participants, but it has also often involved creating authoring and orchestration tools for the artists. A second role for HCI researchers has been to study the participants’ experiences—and here we have turned to ethnography to produce “thick descriptions” of experience from participants’ points of view— as well as to focus on the artists’ rationale and the work required to manage live performance from behind the scenes.

Beyond feeding back into fur-
ther iterations of the experiences
and underlying technologies, these
studies have informed theoretical
work through a series of conceptual
frameworks that generalize key
aspects of performative interaction
for the wider HCI audience. Notable
examples include:
• informing discussions of the
potential benefits of ambiguity in
designing interfaces that provoke
reflection and interpretation [ 3];

This relationship between creating performances, studying them as they tour, and then deriving broader principles of interaction operates as an iterative cycle, with these activities feeding into one another in various ways (Figure 3). In general terms, we characterize the resulting research process as being “ artist led,” in that artists contribute original and creative ideas for new experiences that drive the process forward, and “in the wild,” in the sense that experiences are rapidly and iteratively deployed to public audiences and so can be studied under realistic use. Indeed, many of the projects lead to the somewhat unusual situation in which participants pay the researchers to take part by purchasing tickets.

 

Trajectories Through Mixed-Reality Performance Our ultimate aim in the book is to articulate a broader conceptual framework for describing the core of mixed-reality performance. This is based on the idea that, in spite of their apparent diversity, the essence of the various performances that we analyze can be expressed using the common concept of trajectories. Our goal is to provide researchers with a sensitizing concept for grounding their own studies in this field, as

May + June 2012