Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

Abstract

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.

A Survey of the Trajectories Conceptual Framework

“…'everyday interactive artifacts […] do not possess any explicit "stories" [71]'). On the other hand, some critiques resonate with themes that are present in our corpus, with a number of works exploring whether trajectories can extend to open-ended, user-created [68] or less structured experiences [85], or proposing intermediate levels where trajectories "scaffold" the experience [37,85] rather than directing it. This critique resonates particularly with the types of experiences described in original trajectories, i.e.…”

“…We found a few indications of how trajectories have been part of design methods and processes, although the description of "how" is far less systematic than of "what". Processes include first authoring a script, then considering supporting resources [74], speculating about how an element (an animated character in [85]) would entice participants into a trajectory, and an iterative design process in which detecting dropouts in early versions led to a refined experience [89].…”

“…It is often seen as a framework that "describes", "characterizes" or "expresses" experiences [36,39,46,47,52,71,89] or that helps understand them [60,66]. It's also seen as directed at designers and artists, with a more or less prescriptive phrasing ("urging" [53] or "encouraging" [34] them or simply suggesting their use to "create" [72] or "frame" [85] experiences).…”

Understanding Public Evaluation

“…The humanaquarium researchers used their experiences from performing to inform the design of the installation. Nightingallery [30] positioned researchers as circus barkers, attracting and guiding users to interact with an animatronic bird. In both humanaquariam and Nightingallery the researchers provided guidance in an open-ended interaction.…”

Supporting Group Coherence in a Museum Visit

“…The approach balances orchestration of the experience with visitors" own agency; by scaffolding rather than directing, we encourage visitors to carve their own trajectories through the experience, rather than designing for a canonical way of visiting [3]. This is a common approach in visiting experiences with mediascapes [14] and participatory performance [27]. This manual approach to scaffolding rather than directing experiences even extends to the use of headphones (traditionally a thorny issue in mobile CSCW systems [1,17]) with visitors manually putting them on and taking them off as required.…”