‘Liveness’ and ‘presence’ in bio-networked mobile media performance practices: emerging perspectives

Abstract

If you could share and exchange your dream imagery, feelings and sensations with your friends and loved ones, how would you do it? If could not only share and exchange, but remix and collage them, what would it look like or feel like? How would it work? Explored through the new media performance project, MindTouch, uses biofeedback sensors and mobile media phones in live, staged events. MindTouch is a BBC R+D sponsored PHD research, to connect people remotely through the mobile phone, allowing them to re-engage with each other and with the world, affectively and expressively in new creative, non-verbal/nontextual ways through mobile video performance events. The aim of this article is to discuss current practice-based PhD research underway at the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute's UK base at the University of East London, under the direction of Professor Lizbeth Goodman. The MindTouch project involves the pursuit of a better understanding and facilitation of the individual's mode of expression in relation to the collective experiences of liveness and presence, as observable and ‘capturable’ within the virtual ‘space’ of a live mobile performance event. This article reflects on meta-concepts of this research and on past video collection workshops completed in the first phase of the project, including observations from these workshops, and the on-going practice, development and technical issues involved. It discusses practical processes and concerns (such as methods for encouraging people to connect remotely, that are allowed to reengage each other and the world affectively using the mobile phone), both in and through participants’ bodies, and through a range of expressive, creative, non-verbal/non-textual means, through networked performance activities.