Riders Have Spoken: an artist-led practical exploration of recording and replaying live, distributed and interactive experiences

Team: Steve Benford, Alan Chamberlain, Duncan Rowland (Nottingham); Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter), Matt Adams, Julianne Pierce (Blast Theory), Jonathan Foster (Sheffield), Adrian Haffegee, Kate Allen (Reading)

The relationship between liveness and recording is critical to many creative industries including performance, music, live art, theatre, new media, photography and animation. Live experiences are often recorded, recordings are embedded into live experiences, and there are well established techniques and technologies for doing this. However, the move towards more distributed, mobile, mixed reality, intermedial, interactive, and social experiences challenges the nature of recording and replaying due to:
the highly dispersed nature of participants, being distributed across a mixture of real and virtual spaces
the integration of multiple media with physical places, artefacts and actors
the involvement of the public as active participants who contribute to the content of the experience
the interleaving of different modes of time so that recordings are replayed as part of the live experience
Recording these new experiences in a way that captures their ‘live’ character is extremely difficult. The most common approach is to produce a video documentary. However, such documentaries typically focus on just one or two participants and present a linear and often much shortened account of their experience. We need new ways of recording and replaying complex, non-linear, multi-participant experiences.
The proposed project
We will explore the challenges involved in recording and replaying distributed interactive experiences so as to enable new creative practices and also better support interdisciplinary research. We will address the following questions:
what are the potential creative uses of record and replay and what requirements do they raise?
what are the potential research uses of record and replay and what requirements do they raise?
what technical challenges arise from new forms of record and replay and how might we address them?
what artistic, business and social (e.g., legal and ethical) challenges must be met in this area?
Technical issues include: how do we capture media from mobile and distributed participants? how do we upload and share this? how can we generate appropriate metadata so that multiple recordings can be searched, accessed and inter-related? how can different forms of recording be synchronised, composited and replayed? what new temporal models and mechanisms are required to enable us to flexibly mix recorded and live events within ongoing experiences? and how can ‘intelligent’ documentations and archives be created that can themselves grow and change according to their usage? In turn, artistic, business and social questions include: how can we understand and manage issues of consent, privacy and rights? what new business models will arise from the future uptake of record and replay techniques? And how can different researchers collaborate around common data?
We believe that it is best to explore these issues through a practice-led approach in which an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and researchers undertakes a series of workshops and prototyping activities. We will take an existing artistic project and explore how it might be archived, studied and extended through the use of record and replay. We are therefore an example of an ‘artist-led, reflective’ practice project within the overall Creator framework.Our example work is Rider Spoke from Blast Theory, a mobile interactive performance work for cyclists. Participants explore a city on cycles and engage in a game of hide and seek in which they record and hide personal stories at chosen locations and then find and listen to others’ stories in turn. Rider Spoke has already been performed three times – at the Barbican in London in 2007 and subsequently in Athens and Brighton in 2008. More than 700 participants have taken part in these performances and all of their audio files and associated interactions have been captured. There is also a set of video recordings of participants taking part and an initial project documentary video. Thus, Rider Spoke provides a relatively rich set of existing materials with which we can immediately begin to explore replay and archiving issues in a practical way. However, further performances of Rider Spoke are likely to take place in Autumn 2008, raising the possibility of trying out new forms of recording in practice too.