mixing my realities

While I am still very pleased to be counted as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Surrey, I am actually spending the bulk of 2016 at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. This afternoon marks the end of my second week here, and my head is officially exploding. I've tried to go against my natural grain and NOT pin down every single person for a protracted and extremely animated conversation within the first three days. This counterintuitive (to me) strategy has the added advantage that it gives me a half a chance to learn people's names a few at a time - a major bonus when you're as hopeless with names and faces as I am. But even though I've only properly spoken to a smallish fraction of the researchers here, I am totally blown away with ideas. And everyone's so friendly!

Part of my evil plan here is to write some proposals, a goal that at this point is far too grand and vague to even spell out for myself, much less blog about. But the other part of my evil plan is to bring PED to bear on one strand of the FAST project, funded by the EPSRC (EP/L019981/1) and involving Nottingham, Queen Mary University of London, and Oxford University. In a way, I'm bringing some of the findings of my work with the performance of personal digital photos into a project on performative experiences with personal digital music. Ephemerality and experience, placelessness and location, disembodiment and visceral responses... Again, very early days, but incredibly exciting! And made all the more so by the company I'm keeping, primarily Adrian Hazzard, Chris Greenhalgh, and Sean McGrath.

Springing to life

It's been awfully quiet on the PED front the last few months, but not for lack of developments. Instead, great news - a book on PED is coming out from Springer this May! I spent the past autumn in a deadline-meeting frenzy, and now I can distribute the link:

Performative Experience Design, the musical book!

This book is part of Springer's series on Cultural Computing, so it's skewed towards an HCI/interaction design/ experience design audience. While I hold staunchly to the idea that PED is a genuine hybrid of these fields and performance studies, it doesn't yet have enough traction to constitute its own marketing niche, so this text attempts to target the argument for the HCI audience.

I'm very keen to incorporate further developments into a text targeted to the theatre and performance communities, as well. Watch this space...