I had a great time at The Big Thing which was part of the Immersive Arts programme last week. It felt joyful actually. There were lots of people really excited about their work and open to new ideas and collaborations. It reminded me of being a new playwright 20 years ago!
It was also great to meet old friends and make some new ones.
One of the events that has really stuck with me was about Impact. Speakers Francesca Panetta, May Abdalla, and our friends who spoke at an early Light Bulb Session the team from Produced Moon were beautifully insightful and provocative.
It’s something we think about more and more at Civic Digits. What is the impact of our work? How do we measure it? Do you design the work so that you can measure impact? Can you ever know what impact your work has? And such like.
The reason Civic Digits makes work is to challenge and change how we live with and understand data-driven tech, (including AI, games and smart phones and well everything really, because we live in a data driven age… also known as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’). We call our work ‘data driven theatre’ and that means our work is ‘immersive’ because we engage the bodies of our audience: we create (playful) space for them to be active participants in the experience and, usually, the story.
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Gertrude Stein.1913
Isn’t that an immersive line? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, maybe it could mean everything… it wants you to step in and decode it I think. Is it nonsense? A statement of fact? Is it maybe, a bit erotic?!
Perhaps any art form could be said to be immersive, if it’s transforming and transporting the audience. Yes. And…
Maybe we chose to make work that connects in an embodied way with the audience, that brings the agency of audience to the centre of the experience because we want to have impact and we’d like to know what that impact is… somehow…
How to measure though?
We can measure ‘how many’, some of ‘who’, or ‘what type’, we might be able to measure attitudes changing if we do a longitudinal…
But, and so, and but again.
I’m thinking about a piece exploring ‘staying with the trouble’ of online radicalisation (Donna Haraway’s brilliant idea and phrase). I want to make it for under 10s. So how do you design capturing impact that you’re hoping will land in years to come, when they’re 13 or 36 or 78?
I know work like that stays with me, helps me with life and stuff even though I saw it decades ago.
So
There you go.
Also,
Ancestors by Smart Phone Orchestra was so good and is going to live with me for years to come for sure!
Zuboff, Shoshana.The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019