Beyond Immersive Theatre

Alston, Adam

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6

Cited by 88 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…Here the audience member's attention is directed inward towards the 'deeply personal, involving, intrusive and richly experiential product' and projected onto the immersive environment in 'its relation to an audience member's perceived or prospective involvement' [1] (p. 35). Narcissistic participation is made up of two mutually reinforcing parts: the participant's internal experience and his or her participation (or potential participation) with the objects, spaces and people that shape that experience.…”

Section: Narcissistic Spectatorship and Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Narcissistic participation is made up of two mutually reinforcing parts: the participant's internal experience and his or her participation (or potential participation) with the objects, spaces and people that shape that experience. Thus the 'affective experience' generated by immersive performance 'takes on aesthetic significance' such that '[a]ffect then implicates the audience not just as a judgemental and potentially empathetic observer of a fictive world and its inhabitants but as an essential part and co-producer of that world' [1] (p. 36). Given the emphasis on the internally perceived experiences of narcissistic participation (and spectatorship), we understand Alston to refer to an affectively perceived co-production as much as a physically embodied co-production.…”

Section: Narcissistic Spectatorship and Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Often it is not clearly defined, but it can be interpreted as a synonym for 'engaging' or 'absorbing', descriptions that many designers (and theatre makers) would be happy to have applied to their work. Alston articulates the key difference between immersive and other forms of theatre as those that create an 'audience experience' that 'tends to be framed as the primary, aesthetically meaningful element', and that 'tend[s] to promote introspection, because in the heady heights of immersion and participation it is not art objects that take precedence so much as the affective consequences of an audience's own engagement' [1] (p. 7). In other words, immersive theatre aims to engross audiences in an aesthetic experience that is built around a visceral sense of their own involvement and therefore directs attention to that very involvement: 'It is introspection that ultimately gives rise to the aestheticisation of experience, as aesthetically constitutive audience attention is diverted .…”

Section: Affect Through Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. to the experiences that arise from audience immersion and participation' [1] (p. 8). Seminal theorist Josephine Machon agrees that immersive theatre takes the participant's experience as part of the aesthetic of the work [33].…”

Section: Affect Through Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…that immersive performances attempt to draw the spectator into deeply affective and absorbing situations. These can act as 'experience machines' that 'place audience members in a thematically cohesive environment that recourses their sensuous, imaginative and explorative capabilities' [1] (p. 2). While interactive experiences have received attention from both researchers and practitioners in interaction design, HCI, theatre and performance studies, these disciplines have overlooked one small but, we believe, potentially powerful element: the relationship between a participant and another person brought to mind by the event.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sensibility, Narcissism and Affect: Using Immersive Practices in Design for Embodied Experience

Spence

Benford

2018

MTI

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'Embodiment' need not focus on isolated individuals or group interactions. This article articulates the potential for designs that prompt participants to bring relationships with other people to mind. These can be fleeting relationships between participants and unknown others, or remembered relationships with romantic partners, family members, or close friends who are not physically co-present or digitally represented. In either case, it is possible to generate affective responses that profoundly shape participants' emotional and physical reactions to, and co-creation of, the designed interaction. This article presents existing practices of immersive theatre to frame our exploration of this phenomenon. It introduces three theories-mise-en-sensibilité, narcissistic spectatorship and affect-through which we illuminate both the internally felt and the externally designed experience, whether or not it is explicitly framed as theatrical performance. Through analysis of two immersive performances (one-on-one interactions that could easily be understood in terms of experience design) and two designs of our own, we argue that the affect generated by personal relationships in immersive experiences can both shape and drive participation, and we offer a three-point guideline by which one can design for the affective consequences of bringing relationships to mind.

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Section: Narcissistic Spectatorship and Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Narcissistic Spectatorship and Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Affect Through Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Affect Through Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Sensibility, Narcissism and Affect: Using Immersive Practices in Design for Embodied Experience

Spence

Benford

2018

MTI

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Implicit Fandom in the Fields of Theatre, Art, and Literature

Hills¹

2018

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies

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News of the demise of the audience, much like the death of the author, has been greatly exaggerated. Recall Jay Rosen's (2006) description of "the people formerly known as the audience, " whom he characterized as "the writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak. " Rosen was certainly not alone in celebrating a not-yet-achieved emancipation of the spectator from the constraints of the mass media era. Here's Clay Shirky (2005): "Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment-phones, computers-lets you consume and produce. " Some of this anticipated shift has happened. More than 300 hours of videos are posted on YouTube every minute, many of them coming from amateur, semi-professional, non-profit, educational, activist, religious, and governmental producers producing media for noncommercial purposes but also involving content from commercial producers that has been appropriated, remixed, and recirculated, often at the hands of their most dedicated audiences.Rosen asked, "If all would speak, who shall be left to listen?" Well, so far, we are still spending much more time listening (and watching) than speaking, though we may do so across a broader range of media platforms. Prioritizing production behaviors and separating them off from the other things audiences do overlooks the ways that curating, sharing, and discussing media content are themselves active practices that create meaning and context, even if they do not necessarily "produce" new kinds of media texts. In this changing realm, broadcast networks still have an enormous capacity to set the cultural agenda, determining which stories, performers, and topics engage the public. But conversations on social network sites also have an expanding capacity to set cultural and political priorities, often reframing and critiquing, making demands upon broadcast content, and increasing the visibility of some clips as users circulate them across their range of online connections (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013).Those working in the media industry tend to imagine audiences primarily, if not exclusively, as markets for their products. As Ien Ang (1991) notes, the actual people watching television are "invisible" to media companies, a mass "hidden behind the millions of dispersed closed doors of private homes, virtually unmanageable and inaccessible to the outsider" (30). The industry's imagined "audience" consists of individual consumers, each making independent decisions about

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‘What Country, Friends, Is This?’ Using Immersive Theatre Practice to Inform the Design of Audience Experience in Estate 360°

Palmer

2018

Interactive Storytelling

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This paper focuses on issues arising from the making of an experimental interactive 360-degree video that emerged from a relational ÔimmersiveÕ sitespecific theatre project for a public audience that was staged in historic grounds in South Florida, USA in April 2017. This work was undertaken with academics from University of Miami, Kim Grinfeder and Stephen Di Benedetto. The specific nature of the performance event, the filming of aspects of this experience and the post-production processes each raise significant questions relating to the development of methods of ÔinteractiveÕ digital storytelling for Ôimmer-siveÕ audience experience. The role of theatre practice and performance design in developing these mediated experiences seems to be an important element that has largely been ignored in thinking about how digital immersive experiences might be created. The video Estate 360¡ was first published on-line in January 2018 and is freely available to download: https://interactive.miami.edu/estate/

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Beyond Immersive Theatre

Cited by 88 publications

References 0 publications

Sensibility, Narcissism and Affect: Using Immersive Practices in Design for Embodied Experience

Sensibility, Narcissism and Affect: Using Immersive Practices in Design for Embodied Experience

Implicit Fandom in the Fields of Theatre, Art, and Literature

‘What Country, Friends, Is This?’ Using Immersive Theatre Practice to Inform the Design of Audience Experience in Estate 360°

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