IN/ACTive

How long shall we be separated? How else might we break through? IN/ACTive explores the relationship between audiences and performers from distance, exploring how the classical venues for dialog between a seated audience and a staged performer can be transfigured into a physically embodied expression across a digital divide. It is an exploration of the way technology can bring presence to distanced expressive communication, transforming the classical staged performance with the help of robotics, camera technology, and internet-of-things to a nuanced, environment-centered narrative and physical expression behind the scenes in an artist's studio.

Performers create long-duration, expressive moments like getting the audience to take care of plants, taking a bath, google-searching text communication, live-broadcast, etc, from their own studios, where their movements are read by a Kinect to move a industrial-scale robotic arm in the exhibition space. Visitors to the exhibition can also use home-lighting-like-panels to control the lights and music of the performer's studios from a distance. Performers react to these lighting and musical changes with their own improvisation strategy to reflect their mental model of audience perception. Despite expecting a loneliness from distanced interaction, performers actually feel more connected with audiences in these nonverbal interactions, gamefying the expectations of care and common understanding in an attempt to connect through physical and environmental actions across distance.

Performers included in the exhibition: Florence Lam, Joseph Lee, Carmen Yu, Koala Yip, Ashley Leung.

Exhibition website: IN/ACTIVE.
Publication: ACM Proceedings on Multimedia (MM'23).