The Public Performance project emerged in the second half of Equator as a result of various reflections on earlier public performances and devices, alongside a growing interest in artistic and performance applications of ubiquitous and mixed reality technologies at various Equator partners, most notably Lancaster and Nottingham. The term ‘public performance’ has two broad but closely related meanings here. The first is the use of technologies to create live performance events. The second concerns the way in which people implicitly perform their interactions with technologies in highly public settings such as museums, galleries and science centres. Both of these share a common set of concerns and design challenges.

Early explorations by Jen Sheridan and Alan Dix at Lancaster on technology support for performance events in clubs, most notably the Schizophrenic Cyborg project, had inspired new reflections on the ways in which technology mediated performance events are structured and managed and also on the ways in which technology can foster new relationships between participants. In parallel, reflections on the design of different interfaces for public settings, drawing on the catalogue of existing Equator devices as well as on various artistic interfaces outside the project, led to a joint paper between Nottingham and Bristol on design strategies for ‘spectator interfaces’, suggesting ways in which interfaces might be made expressive, secretive, magical or suspenseful. This then led to further joint work that explored how interactive technologies can contribute to the framing of performances in public settings, how this leads to important distinctions between audience members (who are inside the frame and therefore aware of the performance) and bystanders (who are outside the frame and potentially unwitting) and how framing relates to orchestration, the ongoing management of performances from behind the scenes, a topic of previous Equator studies of performance such as Uncle Roy All Around You.

This intense period of conceptual work led to a growing awareness, both within Equator and externally, of the issues involved in deploying ubiquitous technologies in highly public settings such as clubs, museums, galleries and the city streets, drawing attention to the need for designers to consider the impact on spectators and bystanders and how this should be managed. The trajectory of this work swung back to a practical focus in the final stages of Equator through three final demonstration experiences: Fairground: Thrill Laboratory, Enlighten at MAGNA, and Flypad, all of which consciously reflect different aspects of our design frameworks for public interfaces.