The Justice Syndicate: A Practice as Research Project exploring interactive horizons of participation, agency and Flow in interactive performance

Our research questions were: Q1. What are the most effective means of inviting people to participate during an interactive performance? How can an experience designed so that participants overcome their fear of experiencing or causing embarrassment (White, 2013)? Q2. How can we widen the horizon of participation in performance (White, 2013)? How do we increase the intensity of interaction and the level of agentive behaviour (Breel, 2017)? Q3. Is it possible to design an interactive performance without live performers that facilitates in audience members a sense of immersion by stimulating a state of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)? We undertook an iterative design process (Dieli, 1989) resulting in a piece of “actorless performance” The Justice Syndicate, featuring an audience who take on the role of jurors considering a difficult case. All of the content (video, audio, documents, prompts to interact, invitations to vote) was delivered to the audience on iPads using a bespoke new software system. Our results were: Q1. An effective solution to the fear of experiencing or causing embarrassment is for the invitation to participate to come from a machine and for there to be no distinction between “audience” and “participants” i.e. all audience members participate. Q.2 This use of machines to stimulate interaction in the absence of live performers also stimulates a high intensity of “agentive behaviour” among audience members, although it does not automatically lead to a greater feeling of agency. Q.3 Lindinger and colleagues (2013) had already established that it is possible to use procedural design to stimulate a sense of Flow in audience members; we proved that this works in contexts without live performers. This portfolio contains: • An article about the project, published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media • A short film about the project • Evidence of performances • An outline of structure of the piece • Reviews and press coverage of performances