A Blast from the Past

The paper Orchestrating a Mixed Reality Performance marks a transition in my own research trajectory. The paper itself presented an ethnographic account of the behind the scenes management of Desert Rain, the first performance work that we produced with the artists Blast Theory. The theme, scale and professional production qualities of Desert Rain were unlike anything that we had encountered before and ultimately led to a series of further touring works with Blast Theory and other artists, including Can You See me Now, Uncle Roy all Around You as well a various ‘Thrill’ projects with Brendan Walker, that in turn, informed HCI concepts such as ambiguity, seamful design, spectator interfaces and trajectories – much of this as part of the Equator project. Looking back, it is interesting to note a gap of several years between the production of Desert Rain in 1997 and the publication of the paper in 2001 and I wonder if we were struggling with how to frame this work for the HCI community? The challenge for the next 20 years was as much to figure out why and how we were collaborating with artists, gradually refining the approach of ‘performance-led research in the wild’, as it was to deliver further performances and HCI concepts.