The Digital Dimension of Doom – how can we work with new technology without losing the soul of the live performance experience? Have can we use digital without sacrificing the live experience? Is possible to digitise the live experience Do successful digital projects rely on/focus on interaction with the audience? Example of an improvised electronic music festival where the audience could conduct the musicians by sending text messages to a display screen Or isn’t this interactivity necessarily essential? Fascinating example of Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot where a film is created live with members of the public in the hour before a show and then screened to the audience who arrives for the show. Is it possible to transfer a National Theatre Live type model to outdoor work or is this dependent on proscenium arch theatre, huge production budgets and celebrity names? OCM have tried live streaming- have found it expensive to film the events and hard to build an audience. Felt that they needed a partner to increase visibility and access audiences There are strengths and there are weaknesses with digital – how can we work to the strengths? Is there a danger that good quality digital access could ever discourage people from going to the live event. Notice that comedians are not putting their material online in case it spoils the tours. What is meant by digital can be one of a number of things: Live Streaming Online legacy Engaging people in new way with show Inherently digital work Digital as a collaborative tool Digital can create accessibility issues (how do you experience a headphone piece if you are deaf) or can be an enabler allowing people to access work that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. Talking Birds theatre company is developing an app called the Difference Engine aimed at providing subititles and audio description for shows. National Theatres subtitles via digital glasses How can we avoid the trap of headphone text pieces in sounding like piece that sound like Radio 4 plays? Perhaps rather than seeking to translate existing work to digital we should be looking at where digital can create a totally different dimension Some pieces that rely on headphones or screens can be insulating from the real world and other audience members. Are there other ways of using digital which are more connected? Ray Lee’s new piece Congregation uses sound devices that connect audiences moving through the city using GPS. So in a more low tech way does Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night which uses synchronised boomboxes carried by audience members. Some exciting work that was talked about: Complicite’s The Encounter and the binaural headphone piece that accompanied this and which could be listened to at home National Theatre Wales – some exciting digital work in recent years Blast Theory – digitally conceived from beginning to end Dream Think Speak – One Day Maybe – incorporation of virtual reality in a immersive installation environment Brendan Walker’s virtual reality swings – also engaging a secondary audience Other pieces where there were physical, real world aspects to a virtual piece – eg. Being touched with a feather or swinging on a trapeze in Il Pixel Rosso’s The Great Spalvados. AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival couples VR and augmented reality with outstanding natural locations but in some cases these (like the definition of golf) were great ways to spoil a good walk by peering through an iPad. Others like Ooni’s We Dwell Below were playful, social, interactive and hallucinatory ways to use VR