Performing Mixed Reality

Working at the cutting edge of live performance, an emerging generation of artists isemploying digital technologies to create distinctive forms of interactive, distributed, and oftendeeply subjective theatrical performance. The work of these artists is not only fundamentallytransforming the experience of theater, it is also reshaping the nature of human interaction withcomputers. In this book, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi offer a new theoretical framework forunderstanding these experiences--which they term mixed reality performances--and document a seriesof landmark performances and installations that mix the real and the virtual, live performance andinteractivity. Benford and Giannachi draw on a number of works that have been developed at theUniversity of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory, describing collaborations with artists (mostnotably the group Blast Theory) that have gradually evolved a distinctive interdisciplinary approachto combining practice with research. They offer detailed and extended accounts of these works fromdifferent perspectives, including interviews with the artists and Mixed Reality Laboratoryresearchers. The authors develop an overarching theory to guide the study and design of mixedreality performances based on the approach of interleaved trajectories through hybrid structures ofspace, time, interfaces, and roles. Combinations of canonical, participant, and historictrajectories show how such performances establish complex configurations of real and virtual, localand global, factual and fictional, and personal and social.

Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia in the English Department at Exeter University