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MATT ADAMS, NICK TANDAVANITJ, and JU ROW FARR, Blast TheoryWe explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creation of novel performances with the support of HCI researchers that are then deployed and studied at public performance in cultural settings such as galleries, festivals and on the city streets. We motivate the approach and then describe how it consists of three distinct activities -practice, studies and theory -that are interleaved in complex ways through nine different relationships. We present a historical account of how the approach has evolved over a fifteen-year period, charting the evolution of a complex web of projects, papers, and relationships between them. We articulate the challenges of pursuing each activity as well as overarching challenges of balancing artistic and research interests, flexible management of relationships, and finally ethics.

The idea of interactional trajectories through interfaces has emerged as a sensitizing concept from recent studies of tangible interfaces and interaction in museums and galleries. We put this concept to work as a lens to reflect on published studies of complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. We develop a conceptual framework in which trajectories explain these user experiences as journeys through hybrid structures, punctuated by transitions, and in which interactivity and collaboration are orchestrated. Our framework is intended to sensitize future studies, help distill craft knowledge into design guidelines and patterns, identify technology requirements, and provide a boundary object to connect HCI with Performance Studies.

Temporal trajectories can represent the complex mappings between story time and clock time that are to be found in shared interactive narratives such as computer games and interactive performances. There are three kinds. Canonical trajectories express an author's intended mapping of story time onto clock time as part of the plot and schedule of an experience. Participant trajectories reflect a participant's actual journey through story time and clock time as they interact with the experience. Historic trajectories represent the subsequent selection and reuse of segments of recorded participant trajectories to create histories of past events. We show how temporal trajectories help us analyse the nature of time in existing experiences and can also generate new approaches to dealing with temporal issues such as: disengagement and reengagement, adapting to different paces of interaction, synchronising different participants, and enabling encounters and travel across time.

___________________________________________________________We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the 'cultural'. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI.