introduction

From the opening line of Hamlet ("Who's there?")¹ to the openness of the Happenings,² the need for an audience is fundamental to theatre and performance:

Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as a performance.
Carlson (1996, p. 5)

The same is true of networked performance³ - but the networked audience occupies a different position to the traditional theatre or contemporary performance audience. Networked audiences are frequently not physically co-present with the performers, or with each other. They may be on the street with a mobile phone, watching a CCTV screen, or at home with their laptop. They might be passive spectators, but they are more likely to be actively engaging with the performance in various ways.

This chapter explores the reconfiguration of the audience through the medium of networked performance, giving examples of recent work, artists and technologies, and exploring audience response in the networked environment. The chapter is divided into three sections: a background to the audience's role in performance; an analysis of their role and responses in networked performance; and a proposal of the 'intermedial audience' as a new approach to the audience in networked performance.

background

Networked performance opens up exciting possibilities for audiences as active participants and collaborators in performance events. As artists and audience experiment with new tools, technologies and techniques of performing over networks, questions arise such as:

• what can networked performance offer the audience?
• how are artists taking into consideration the place and role of the audience in networked performance? and
• what does the audience want and expect from networked performance?

In traditional theatre, the audience's role is passive witness; participation is typically limited to responses such as clapping (and perhaps booing or cheering), and occasionally individuals may be invited on-stage for a moment of 'audience participation'. In the second half of the twentieth century, Happenings, Invisible Theatre, Forum Theatre and other performance art events began to reposition the audience as an active participant, and concepts such as the open work⁴ and the death of the author⁵ emerged. As early as the 1930s, playwright Bertholt Brecht had envisaged radio as emabling two-way communication between artists and audience (Salz, 2004, p. 128), and the evolution of telecommunications technology has made this a reality.

Concepts such as 'produsage'⁶ and the trend for interactivity have blossomed in the Web 2.0 environment; ever-cheaper technology and digital tools allow almost anyone in the developed world to create and publish their own work. Blogs, mobile phones, social networking sites and virtual worlds are touted as opportunities for individual creative expression and our "15 megbytes of fame" (Dixon, 2004, p. 102). User-generated content has many positive aspects, but the separation of artist and audience should not be too quickly rejected. The gap between performer and audience is an unspoken agreement that underpins the magic of live performance, a distinction that enables a complex and dynamic relationship between artist, audience and performance. Networked environments provide a unique playground for experimenting with subtle adjustments to the distance of this gap, and playing along this sometimes invisible line leads to new discoveries and innovation. Networked audiences step out of their seats in the darkened auditorium and claim agency through keyboards, consoles, mobile phones and other participatory technologies, while keeping one foot still in the dark.

Networked performance artists recognise a shift in our meetings with the audience. When we do not encounter the audience face-to-face, we lose the visceral response that feeds a performance; new signifiers of 'presence' and 'liveness' must be found. If some performers are physically co-present with some of the audience while others are remote, the variables for each individual's experience of the work are increased. And the audience are in a new relationship to each other - chatting with friends or strangers from opposite sides of the world, alone at a keyboard in the middle of the night, or peering through the frame of a web cam to a distant scene. The audience can no longer be considered as a homogenous unit.

audience roles

This section examines audience roles and responses in different forms of networked performance, including:

• purpose-built online environments (Panoplie, VisitorsStudio, UpStage) where the audience is typically online and dispersed, partipating via text chat, or simultaneous online and proximal audiences;
• non-internet networked performances, using devices such as mobile phones (Blast Theory) or CCTV cameras (Surveillance Camera Players);
• performances employing audiovisual software (pure data, Max, etc) over a network, usually offering a passive audience role (Aether9);
• performances in virtual worlds, such as Second Life or online gaming environments. Some performances mimic real-world theatre, requiring audience avatars to be passively seated, while others create roles for the audience;
• IRC theatre and other forms using chat applications (the Hamnet Players, Plaintext Players, Desktop Theatre);
• one-off networked events (DIAL);
• other examples contributed by readers of this chapter.

Case studies illustrating these examples will demonstrate the ways that audiences can participate and the response of audience in different situations, including:

• passive spectatorship;
• text chat: embellishing the narrative, questions and answers, dialogue with performers and audience, instructing the performers (e.g. Chameleons3), commentary;
• taking or being given a role (Hamnet, Belonging);
• virtual worlds - from passive to active (Second Front, Lynne Hershman);
• task-driven participation (Blast Theory).

An online forum will invite further contributions and discussion around the works and ideas.

the intermedial audience

The 'intermedial audience' positions the networked audience as one that traverses the boundaries of real and virtual, mediatised but remaining to some extent indeterminate or in-between. Who is the intermedial audience? What are the characteristics of this audience, and how do they respond to and interact with networked performance?

The 'intermedial audience' is based on an understanding of intermedial as:

... a space where the boundaries soften - and we are in-between and within a mixing of spaces, media and realities. Thus, intermediality becomes a process of transformation of thoughts and processes where something different is formed through performance.
Chapple and Kattenbelt (2006, p. 12)

This quote refers to intermedial performance, however when the audience is also transformed in-between spaces, media and realities, the audience can be understood as intermedial. This is demonstrated in the performance Familiar Features (Avatar Body Collision, 2006) where the role of the audience extends beyond interactive participation, firstly through the mediatisation of the audience via text chat and web cam, and secondly through the confluence of two simultaneous audiences.

The intermedial audience encompasses proximal and online audiences; active participants and lurkers; performers of the audience role and spectators of their own mediatised representations; and the fluidity of movement (individual and collective) between all of these and any other permutations of 'audience' that may emerge within networked performance (and other intermedial forms).

'Intermedial' describes an audience that is as unfinished and (r)evolutionary as the work it is engaging with. It upgrades the passive spectator to an integral position within networked performance, without relinquishing the fundamental gap between performer and spectator. It also acknowledges the mental multitasking that can be demanded of the networked audience, and the complexity of relationships between participants.