Distributed Liveness: Understanding How New Technologies Transform Performance Experiences

We identify emerging phenomena of distributed liveness, involving new relationships among performers, audiences, and technology. Liveness is a recent, technology-based construct, which refers to experiencing an event in real-time with the possibility for shared social realities. Distributed liveness entails multiple forms of physical, spatial, and social co-presence between performers and audiences across physical and virtual spaces. We interviewed expert performers about how they experience liveness in physically co-present and distributed settings. Findings show that distributed performances and technology need to support flexible social co-presence and new methods for sensing subtle audience responses and conveying engagement abstractly.