Live theatre performance in XR (extended reality), which includes both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), is a rapidly growing field of digital drama that sits at the convergence of immersive theatre and interactive games design. While a number of theatre companies have adapted their existing work for VR, (notably the Royal Shakespeare Company with Dream Online in March 2021), our research project, Mrs Nemo XR, aims to create new works of musical theatre specifically written, designed and built to utilise the interactive and immersive features of this exciting new performance medium.

Mrs Nemo XR

Our initial project, a short-form immersive musical — which we term an ‘Immersical®’— is inspired by an episode from Jules Verne’s classic Victorian adventure story, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Verne, 1, featuring the attack of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus submarine by a giant sea creature, the mythical ‘Kraken’. Adding a contemporary twist to the tale, the story is retold from the perspective of a mysterious female character in a Victorian bath chair, who appears at the outset to be Nemo’s wife, but who is later revealed to be a mermaid, one of the many marine creatures that Captain Nemo has collected for the undersea museum which we use as the setting for the show. 

Although we draw on Verne’s original story for the undersea environment and basic plotline, we have devised our own narrative to tell the tale from an alternate viewpoint; that of one of the sea creatures whom Nemo has captured. As the audience members join the show, they find themselves embodied as individual avatars of deep-sea divers, who have been transported into the submarine, and invited by the curator (Mrs Nemo) to explore the gallery displaying the museum artifacts. As Mrs Nemo tells her own tale through improvised dialogue and song, the audience can interact with the actor by talking to her avatar and examining in 3D some of the items in the museum. 

VR Platform

Staged on the browser-based online social VR platform Mozilla Hubs, accessible  either via desktop computer or VR Headset, Mrs Nemo XR is performed by a solo actor working remotely from home, singing live to pre-recorded music tracks. We are limited to one live singer, due to audio latency issues across the network which prevent multiple performers singing in sync. The show also has a short run-time of ten minutes due to concerns of how prolonged use of VR may adversely affect actors and audience members, especially new users of the technology.

Performances 

Our initial trial run of twelve performances with a live audience began in October 2021 and was staged in collaboration with an informal collective of virtual theatre-makers from around the world under the title OnBoard XR. While the whole event shared an underwater-themed virtual environment, each team designed their own show, including the set, props, avatars, and individual backstage cueing system. This article details the technical, design and production challenges we encountered while making Mrs Nemo XR, with specific reference to the narrative design and scenography of the production.

Performer singing in a VR Headset, while moving her own avatar in VR

Creative Team

This virtual theatre production, as with a typical physical theatre company, has a creative team composed of Producer, Writer, Director, Designer, 3D Artist and Performer; all theatre practitioners and creative technologists, several of us conducting research at Digital Creativity Labs, at the University of York, UK. Throughout the four-week production period in the autumn of 2021, team members worked remotely from different locations across the UK and the USA. Pre-production meetings, rehearsals and performances all took place online, managed through a combination of VR, video conferencing and text and audio messaging. Many of the sessions were intense early morning or late-night events, due to the complexity of distance working across time zones.

Interactive Narrative Design

Mrs Nemo XR, aims to engage the audience with the narrative, while giving them the freedom to explore the immersive submarine environment and interact with the performer and each other. Without a traditional framing device, such as a proscenium arch or cinema screen, we rely on alternate ways of directing audience focus, such as guided direction and environmental storytelling. Our audience, who were represented by avatars of deep-sea divers, were actively encouraged to be part of the story-world, through improvised dialogue and narrative song, and the way in which the actor directed their attention to the interactive props, such as the toy Kraken that could be picked up, moved and resized, and scenic effects like the sudden and dramatic appearance of the giant sea monster outside the viewing window of the sub.

Technical Challenges

One of the main technical issues we encountered when using Mozilla Hubs with our Meta Quest 2 (previously the Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets), is the limited audio capability afforded by this form of Web-based VR (a VR platform that is easily accessible on multiple devices via the Internet). While we did have the capability for spatial audio, we elected instead to have our performer’s voice override this feature, so that she could be clearly audible, regardless of position in relation to the listener. Since we knew that audio and visual latency would be problematic, our actor ran the music tracks from her laptop, whilst performing in a VR Headset and manipulating her own avatar, thus syncing all her actions at the point of transmission. 

The scenic cues, including the change of avatar for Mrs Nemo for the final reveal that she is a mermaid, and the attack of the Kraken, were also subject to delay of operation across the internet, and so were run remotely by the backstage crew to avoid distracting the performer by the desynchronised scene changes. This also enabled the production team to make live adjustments during the show when latency of operation necessitated the removal of used props from previous scenes or by ‘respawning’ the placement of set pieces that had entered the scene at the incorrect size or location.  

Scenography 

The inspiration for set design, props, avatars, and interactive artifacts were both derived from Verne’s original story, and from the writer’s scripted dialogue and lyrics. From the book it was clear that while the Nautilus did have a library and salon with a large viewing window, there was no dedicated space for storing or displaying the Captain’s undersea collection. This led to the idea that the salon should become a museum, its walls filled with books and artifacts relevant to the story. Using Mozilla Hubs’ custom editor, Spoke, which allows developers to create 3D worlds with their own designs or pre-made assets, we built the submarine interior, and using a bespoke plugin Stage Management System, we were able to program cues to make scenic objects, props and avatars appear, animate, and change size and position within the scene. 

Tech rehearsals in Zoom and Hubs showing the cues of the stage management system

Working in Mozilla Hubs

In order to perform well across a wide-range of devices, Hubs has certain operating limitations, such as the inability to move or ‘spawn’ objects easily, and a maximum scene size of 16MB, which resulted in our immersical taking on a low-poly (an art style where the number of polygons in a 3D model are reduced to give a low quality appearance to the resulting graphics. This style has the benefit of being efficient and easy to optimise)

style of graphics. Because of internet latency, we could not accurately predict how the scene would appear on the various viewing devices that would be subject to differing connections, internet speeds and locations. For example, we aimed to trigger the Kraken’s appearance outside the viewing window, as a shocking reveal to the audience, especially for those in VR who would see a gigantic monster attach itself to the side of the submarine. However,  the physical distance between the stage manager in York (UK), the performer in New York (US) and the worldwide audience, meant that the significant delay between cue and action led to some audience members, depending on the efficacy of their own devices and connection, experiencing a slight delay between what the actor was saying and what the scene was showing. 

Set Design and Layout

Our initial design plan for Mrs Nemo XR was to divide the submarine into smaller clustered areas to direct audience movement, (see Figure 3) to where the action in the scene was taking place. We particularly wanted to guide the audience towards the window to provide a good view of the Kraken’s sudden appearance outside the submarine. During rehearsals however, we realised that the audience tended to cluster around the performer and follow her around the scene. This led us to strip back some of the central blocked-out areas to provide a clear line of sight throughout the submarine interior, so that the performer and the action could be seen at all times.

Preliminary design of the submarine interior

Sub interior with Captain Nemo’s portrait on the wall

The eye of the Kraken at the window

Audience member as diver with props

Conclusion 

In spite of the technical limitations of the Mozilla Hubs platform, in particular the external cueing system, the low-poly graphics, and the audio/visual latency experienced, the show was well received and we felt we had achieved our central aim of creating our first fully functioning immersical. Through the rehearsal process and by observing the performances, we established methods of directing audience focus and promoting their engagement with the narrative, in three key non-verbal ways. Firstly, through the use of scenic devices like the viewing window, to frame the attack of the Kraken, and secondly, in spite of internet latency, we were able to sync actions to the music, cueing movement of scenery and interactive props at appropriate times. Thirdly, we found that  guided direction from the performer (e.g. gestures, movement, following her gaze and use of interactive props), supported audience attention and engagement with the story-world. 

Our research continues with a new iteration of the show, where we will be using a different VR platform, and extending the length of the performance, working with innovative techniques for reducing audio latency. We also intend to offer greater user agency and interactivity, and explore different styles of narrative design including non-linear and object-based storytelling. We see a great future for live performance in XR, particularly in terms of ease of access and affordability, and look forward to our next collaboration within the rapidly expanding community of VR theatre-makers and their virtual audiences.

Bibliography

RSC Dream online. Audience of the Future Live. (n.d.). Dream. [online]
RSC Dream online. Latest Press Releases | Royal Shakespeare Company.
Mrs Nemo XR – performance video #OnBoardXR [SHOW3.3] Live Short Series in WebVR.
Verne, J. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (first published in English, 1872). Project Gutenberg.

Credits

Mrs Nemo XR Creative Team: Director: David Gochfeld, Writer: Mary Stewart-David, Designer: Daniel Lock, Exec Producer: Cristobal Catalan, 3D Artist: Guy Schofield, Performer: Vivian Belosky
OnBoard Stage Management System developers: Roman Miletitch, David Gochfeld, Clemence Debaig, Michael Morran.
Digital Creativity Labs & Department of Theatre, Film, TV and Interactive Media, University of York

I love location-based promenade theatre. I feel immersed in the narrative, surrounded by actors, music and lights. One of my favourite things to do is see if I can break my own suspension of disbelief. When I am aware that I’m not fully engaged with the theatre, and I am in that state of 4th wall curiosity, I actively explore the space and look for the cracks in the set and the gaps in the telling.

The best performances I’ve experienced have rewarded that exploration with small treasures for my wandering eyes. Well placed props, lighting and narrative hooks from eagle-eyed actors catch me exploring and successfully reel me back into the story.

VR Live performance: Tender Claws’ ‘The Under Presents Tempest’

Writing for XR requires writing a detail for every moment the audience exists within the narrative. It’s world-building for people like me who are always looking around, actively discovering their place in a story, instead of just watching it unfold. 

XR means ‘Extended Realities’. It’s a catch-all term that can describe experiences that use virtual or augmented technologies to extend our reality. It can also encompass experiences such as promenade theatre, which use various technologies and techniques to deepen our immersion. Writing for XR is still an experimental endeavour, rules are grafted from other industries and new lessons emerge with each new project.  

Here are 5 tips that may help you write stories for experiences where the audience is always present.

1. Build what feels like an entire world

Build a whole world, not necessarily in minute detail but in the sense of the audience’s perspective, their relationship to the space and characters around them and the wider contexts or laws of the world. The core narrative you’re writing for the experience is just a pathway into the story world for the audience and needs to feel like a living thing.

Ask yourself as many questions as you can about the world you’re building to help you.

For example; When the audience turns their head and they see a fridge behind them, are there any post-it notes on it? Can they open the fridge? Can they open it easily? How can you make the character and contents of the fridge a part of the narrative for the audience? Is there food in there or a penguin dimension? What does the penguin say if the audience prods him? 

2. Be present in the process

Just as your audience, who will be actively present in your story, you also need to be actively present in its creation. 

Narrative isn’t a silo in this production process and you shouldn’t expect the story you’re writing to be the only source material. XR is sometimes a full-body, multi-sensory experience where narrative will be processed by more than the audience’s eyes and ears.

Familiarise yourself with the delivery medium and the technology. Communicate with those in the project who are responsible for the UX or ‘user experience’; they’re the ones who will wrestle the technology to the will and whims of your narrative. Through their work, you’ll be able to understand the nuances of interactivity that will enable your story to be experienced. 

Make time to share perspectives and interpretations and decide how those experiences might influence the project. (Photo by Scott Graham)

3. Treat the interactivity as a scaffold for the narrative.

Once you understand how the audience will be encouraged to experience your story, then you can construct an effective narrative within that scaffold of interactivity. 

Be careful not to do the opposite and build the narrative around the interactivity as the best XR experiences have narrative at the core. Some XR experiences lean on interactivity to drive engagement but don’t allow it to lead the experience. Remember to keep the interactivity as the support.

A good way to make sure you’re keeping the narrative at the core is to always ensure that everyone (audience and makers) are approaching a ‘problem’ of interactivity from a narrative context and that the solution makes narrative sense. Back to the penguin in the fridge. I would try to interact with in by prodding it with my controller, which starts to eject me from the experience. If, however, the narrative asks how I would try to communicate with the penguin and the answer is that I ‘flap’ at him, moving my arms up and down, my controller would become invisible to me and the reward would be the penguin leading me into his cool ice cave. 

4. States of play

XR experiences are unlike games. In games, people are almost always interacting and their experience is almost always active. XR is more nuanced and audiences can sometimes switch, mid experience, between active and passive states of play. 

Depending on the kind of experience your team is building, the core ‘intended’ state of play for the audience can be defined in a way that denotes their active or passivity by describing them as ‘users’, ‘participants’, ‘witnesses’, ‘agents’ or ‘guests’ etc. 

Knowing this core tenant of interactivity is a useful tool for you to help structure your story amongst the interactivity. As a ‘guest’ in the penguins ice cave, an audience will have different narrative contexts for their engagement than an audience who might be described as ‘explorers’. 

Despite  a core tenant for us makers, the audience may not be privy to this but, even if they are, people will switch their state of play. Inexplicably, a person might become passive in an experience where the story is structured around them being active and vice versa. My advice for this phenomenon is to try and write in moments of reprieve for those people who might switch but, when in doubt, just write the fullest experience you can.

There is, at present, no standardised system of planning for XR experiences and many projects reinvent the wheel. You should seek advice from those who have gone before. (Photo by Startaê Team)

Understanding at which points people in an experience will likely switch from passive to active states of play is hard but it usually coincides with the level of intended immersion. 

You can try and force a switch of states. Games do this all the time by inserting cinematic sequences in between periods of gameplay but it’s hard to get right in XR experiences.

5. Levels of immersion

Many XR experiences involve multiple senses and need a certain level of immersion for people to feel the most engaged and allow themselves to solely focus on the story rather than the fact they’re wearing a VR headset, for example. We are always looking to create artificial flow states for those present in our experiences.

A tool to help you distil your XR writing into a flow state guide is a simple visualisation to map out the main beats or acts of the narrative onto a line that ramps, plateaus and slopes down again. The line represents the ideal immersion level for an audience throughout an experience.

The Ramp & Slope of the immersive experience
(Harrison Willmott)

People may always be in states of flow and so, when we want them to engage in XR experiences, we can guide their transition by gradually easing them into it. It’s a tough, careful and controlled process, which is why pushing them up a ramp seems like a fitting metaphor.

Once they’re in immersive flow, it’s relatively easy to keep them there until we want them to stop but we can’t just eject them from the experience as that can ruin the whole thing. The slope is a gradual, careful and considerate exit from immersive flow that enables the audience to properly process and appreciate what they’ve just been a part of.

You can assign the beats or acts of your narrative to any point on the immersive ramp and slope as though you were chronologically planning out a traditional story. The difference with this is that you can use the level of the line to help you determine the narrative’s immersiveness and from there you can extract more details about how your narrative may be experienced at each stage or act. 

Typically, at the start, the narrative may begin at the first moment an audience hears about an experience, where the immersive level is at the lowest. As you begin to guide the audience up the ramp, either through marketing of the experience or perhaps this is during a tutorial or loading screen, the immersiveness is still slowly rising and your writing will need to be delicate and intriguing, designed to entice and convert a person from curious to engaged. 

As you ascend the audience over the precipice and into the plateau of full immersion, you can really begin to flex your writing, surrounding them in a rich world of wonder and brilliance. As you prepare them for the gradual and controlled descent down the slope and out of immersion, perhaps this is an excellent time for an epilogue or fun little extras. This kind of thinking when it comes to writing feels as though you are writing the whole campaign for an experience but the experience for the audience isn’t just the bit where they’re in the headset or in the theatre. An XR audience begins their immersive journey for an experience from the moment they hear about it all the way to when they’re sharing their experience with friends and family afterwards. You should try to extend your writing to be alongside them for their whole immersive journey.

Even if you just take on one of the five tips I’ve written above, you will be well on your way to writing an exceptional XR experience. 

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The Writing Platform will feature a series of articles on virtual, augmented and mixed reality between July and September 2021. Get in touch if you’d like to propose an article. 

Democracy is starting to feel uncomfortable. In 2016, we saw the rise of the ‘silent majority’ with Trump, Brexit, and the return of One Nation. In the most recent Australian election, all of our polling was proven wrong with another surprise victory going to the major right-wing party.

It doesn’t matter how often this same plot twist happens – each time I feel personally shocked. There are so few people in my immediate community that share these ideologies, so it always feels so absurd that they can achieve power. But of course, this is the nature of our 21st century echo chambers.

 In such a noisy world, we curate our communities so tightly that we get used to the sound of our shared opinions. It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when everyone you know denounces the alt-right.

It has been suggested that the silent majority is a consequence of generations being taught that it is rude to discuss politics at the dinner table. Maybe it’s not so much that democracy is not working for us, but rather that we are not using democracy in the way that we should. Even if we disagree with electoral outcomes, it would be great if we weren’t always so surprised!

This feeling became our starting point for a new project by Counterpilot, the transmedia performance collective that I direct. All of our work centres around the audience experience, with interactive technologies and gamified narratives. In this case, we wanted to create a petri dish of democratic dissent; a context where strangers could be invited to debate and disagree with each other without having anywhere to hide. Our challenge though, was to make the experience apolitical – it was to be about the feeling of political systems, without any political bias.

The result was Crunch Time:

Here, twelve participants sit around a projector-mapped dining table and share an elaborate five-course meal with two unique twists. The first is that they must democratically vote on each ingredient that will be used in the preparation of the meal. The second is that the ingredients will be cooked not by a trained chef, but by a special guest whom each night is co-opted from a position of public leadership.

 Our guest chefs typically included politicians, artistic directors and CEOs from within the local community. Their attempt at cooking in response to the diners’ choices was filmed live and streamed to the table, from a nearby kitchen space. Though their role was performative in nature, the guest chefs served as participants in their own right, reading from an automatic teleprompter and navigating the circumstances of the work with as much freshness as the other participants.

There’s a particular look some people give me whenever I explain a project like Crunch Time. They raise an eyebrow, cock their head to the side. “But how is it theatre?”

Of course from a distance, the project looks more like a dinner party than a piece of traditional theatre. Depending on an individual’s own frame of reference, I’ve also heard it being described as like an episode of reality TV, a video game, or a piece of installation art. But I maintain that theatre is in the DNA of this work.

I turn to Chapple & Kattenbelt (2006) for support here – where the notion of intermediality is used to position the audience as an integral part of the theatrical form. The audience acts as its own site of meaning with each member bringing their own lived experiences and cultural baggage with which to influence their reception of the work as meaning-makers. But they also become themselves one of the many media – as much a part of the work as the lighting, the video design, or the written script.

The bodies and minds of the audience members in the room become part of the confluence of media that makes performance. Intermediality is concerned with the space between where all of these components collide. While other formats like film (or in fact, traditional dramatic theatre) may seek to seamlessly integrate their components, contemporary performance thrives on empowering the spaces between, where reality and fiction can co-exist and where a constellation of forms crash against each other in time and space.

For another perspective on the argument, Peter Brook (1968) famously claimed that the DNA of theatre was comprised of three simple ingredients – an actor, an audience, and a space . In Crunch Time, the audience are simultaneously enrolled as actors. Throughout the experience, they are led to watch each other through a performative lens, with the understanding that the actions people take during this experience are both real and also un-real, provoked by the heightened nature of the evening.

The third ingredient, the space, becomes a powerful tool in enabling this mode of engagement. In this context, the space refers not just to the physical location, but the dramaturgical reality – the circumstances, rules and medial infrastructure that play host and give structure to the evening’s experiences.

There’s something hokey that tends to happen when participants are invited to improvise with a performer from within a fictional frame. They become self-aware, and they ‘perform’ with a layer of comfortable artifice, often making choices that disregard their own personal impulses, instead assuming that the exchange is merely a tool for moving the story forward.

When participants interact with fixed media though, there is seemingly less artifice. The media doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not, and so the participant is also invited to respond as their real self. The moment does not demand any particular falsehood in order to move forward.

This performance dynamic is inspired by a style of automatic instructional theatre known as autoteatro, first defined by Sylvia Mercuriali & Ant Hampton. In autoteatro performance works, participants follow instructions, acting as both performer and observer for themselves in stylised or unfamiliar circumstances. In this way, Hampton & Mercuriali suggest that an autoteatro work acts as a “’trigger’ for a subsequently self-generating performance” (n.d.).

Being made to operate in this instructional context means that the participants must navigate the porous boundaries between the real world and their self-generated arts experience. Such ambiguity prompts a level of self-awareness, as the participants become conscious of the part that they are playing. In this way, participants become audience to themselves as actors, as much as they witness the other actors around them.

The work develops a uniquely liminal position in this genuine-but-manufactured zone of aestheticised reality. On one hand, nothing matters because it’s just a game and in gameplay we know not to take things too seriously. But on the other hand, the currency of the evening is established as food, which though trivial still feels strangely personal when it’s going to end up in your mouth.

And so Crunch Time is theatrical because it depends on this particular balance. It also depends entirely on the audience, innately trusting them to be interesting and to develop a genuine throughline in conversation with the work.

Crunch Time runs for two and a half hours, throughout which there are lots of fixed elements and carefully designed stimulus. But there is also space. Space for the audience to be surprising, to distract themselves with their own tangents, and to unpack their own roles in the moment. The balance between open and closed elements becomes a rhythmic dance like sex or music – riding the waves of give and take in order to craft the best possible circumstances for impact.

And in response, our audiences delivered time and time again. Like the sub-plot about a vegetarian diner who campaigned for one course to be meat-free, securing promises that were quickly abandoned as soon as bacon was available to be voted on. Or the diner who lunged across the table to knock someone else’s token out of the way, manipulating the outcome of a vote and feeling immediate shame when the significance of this act was pointed out by other diners. Or the conspirators who rallied the whole table to abstain from a vote in the hopes that they could bypass a set of ingredients that nobody wanted (spoiler: the system doesn’t work this way, and they ended up with cloves).

Giving so much control to the audience is both high-risk and high-reward. But maybe it also says something broader about culture too. That in a true democracy, we need to leave space for everyone to be heard.

Image by George Margelis, 2019

This article has been adapted from a talk delivered at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (26/10/18), as part of the Friday lunchtime open talk series.

This book was written in an urge to remember, reflect, mourn, overthink, celebrate, and seek meaning in the transparent, or otherwise irrational dynamics of human relationships; while extending the sense of self and feelings. Please treat it with the greatest of care and respect, it is fragile and alive, it feels and it breathes like any other soul.

In this book, the human hand is as important as love. The words on these pages reflect the way by which the idea of you often haunts corners of my mind, echoing the transition and ephemerality of your effect on me; revealing the diminishing value of words expressed on impulse that vanished into the aether, as they were never intended or belonged to anyone, not even to us. My writing will greet your eyes with the same sensuality as the palm of my hand once gently pressed against your face.

(opening text, To You by Yiota Demetriou)

I have created an interactive artist’s book that combines elements from performance, philosophy, creative writing, experience design, tactile art, science, and pervasive technology. It responds to the reader’s body heat. In it is a series of love letters that were never sent, addressed To You, the reader. It is a quasi-semiotext (e.g. books like I Love Dick), poetry written in prose, interweaving philosophical notions of love, attachment, loss (Sartre, Barthes, Camus,  et al.), with autobiography and fiction. I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactictility/materiality for a while now (thinking postdigital).

The book is presented as an intimate reading experience hidden in the pages of an apparently unreadable book. The content draws parallels between the intense erotic delusions played out in the exchange of love letters, and the dynamics of human relationships. Imbued with warmth from a reader’s gentle touch, its black pages gradually become translucent. The writing becomes visible, and traces of fingerprints are left on its pages. Unlike many reading experiences, this book responds to body heat by inviting the reader to lovingly caress it.

The book’s design and the way it invites the reader to engage with it reflects its very content and the way in which it was conceived. It makes visible all those ritualistic and performative aspects experienced when writing a love letter. If you have never written a love letter, I urge you to write one now and return to this article later.

Image by George Margelis, 2019

Creating a book was not my intention. It became a book. The narrative was born out of something highly personal: love letters, as mentioned, that were never sent. A conversation with myself attempting to rationalise and put into perspective what had happened in a relationship. A mode of healing I suppose, by questioning the human condition, the different dynamics at play, and simultaneously negotiating vulnerability with oneself.

At the time, I was conceptualising my performance project, Love Letters (2012-), which some of you might have encountered through an article that was previously published here on The Writing Platform, or might have even participated in: http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/03/love-letters-performance-creative-technologies-audience-participation/

Whilst writing the former article, I reencountered and refamiliarised myself with schools of thought around the ritual of reflective and reflexive writing, writing letters (not only love letters!), autobiography, attachment theory, etc. These notions influenced my writing, not at least the conceptualisation of my performance project, but also my letters, the way in which I discussed, and wrote about my own situation.

Within the intuitive process of the content itself flourishing into a collection, and further into a book, the content was re-written, re-configured, layered, reconstructed, and interrogated several times. It eventually became something that was less about me, or what had occurred, and instead something about being human; finding a space where so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ can live in their raw form, without having to apologise. In the book, I use a Greek word to describe this experience, Apogymnomeno/(a). I couldn’t find a suitable term in English to deliver the depth of its meaning, another untranslatable viscerality. I suppose it’s because I communicate in English, I think in English, but I feel in Greek.  The challenge was to navigate and distance myself from the content without the writing losing its emotionality or rawness.

Image by Yiota Demetriou

The other challenge was the presentation of the content. I wanted the book’s material form to reflect its content; a love union between form and text that work together, responding to each other through exterior interaction. The book had to be alive. It had to resonate with the erratic eruption of feelings, the non-linearity of life, the difficulty of relationships, the chaos and irrationality of emotions, the vulnerability and rawness of things.

While I was thinking about love letters, particularly how love letters are written and encountered, I was inspired by Sartre:

“Love letters are awaited with impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

In a way, the experience of reading To You and engaging with it reflects Sartre’s thoughts. For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, the lover uses their ‘analogon’, their own perception, to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent.

For both Sartre and Roland Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. The aspects of presence, absence, and embodiment are central themes that To You engages with, and perpetually returns to and interrogates, throughout its narrative.

First Prints, 2017

The book is printed in thermochromic ink that manifests these ideas and aids their materialisation. Through a lot of trial and error I eventually ended up with an object, “that was less like reading a book and more like handling a precious treasure”, as a colleague has commented. She also said:

Somehow you already feel a personal connection. Pressing your hand to the black pages, your body heat creates a flare of white appearing between the web of your fingers, and you feel as though secrets are being shared in the dark. You see the object you are holding take the impression of your own body, and yet you see only windows onto the words below. Like a lover, there is great intimacy of a hand pressing the page, and yet the text underneath retains its enigma. Zoe Heron (†) Comedian, Multimedia Performance Maker, and Academic.

Another person, who experienced the book during its prototype testing, commented:

What’s fascinating about the overall experience of reading and touching, especially the aspect of covering and uncovering or unraveling thoughts through this type of interaction; and the way the book is put together, in concertina form, is the possibility to connect with the more ‘irrational’ aspects of being human. The moment I pressed my hands onto its dark pages, was also a moment of paying attention to the flow of emotions inside of me: the content becomes transparent from my own warmth; emotionality that is sometimes frowned upon is suddenly allowed. These seize to be dark by my own engagement with it as if reclaiming my own state of being. Like relationships, of any type, the book echoes the effort needed to sustain them – so the book can almost feel comfortable to open up and talk to you.  Francesca Prandelli, Journalist.

The design of the words in the book follows a signiconic approach. Text and image merge to provide the reader with a new perspective that has as much to do with semiology and language as it does with experience and emotions. In this way, the book attempts to materialise the emotions behind words. This emerged through conversations with my co-conspirator, (I think that’s a suitable title), Tom Abba, a well-known book artist/designer (based in Bristol), and fellow erotographomaniac. To You allowed space for collaboration, a space for another voice in the piece, where Tom’s contribution to the visualisation of the text, amongst other things, became highly significant to the work – “much as the work itself is a voice communicating with an (absent) voice”, he says…

Image by George Margelis

All components that make the book what it is, indicate the necessity of affection through touch, and thus the significance of the human hand as an organ both of performance and of perception. As I said in the beginning of this article, “I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactility/materiality for a while now”. For Aristotle, the hand is the “tool of tools”. It is strength, power and protection, generosity, and hospitality. For Quintilian: “The hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, shame?”. I find it interesting reading up on the symbolism of hands, and explaining how this is associated with my overall artistic practice, but this is perhaps a subject for another article.

The book’s design makes it difficult to read. You need to give it warmth, you need to give it love and attention, you need to make an effort. Sometimes it is not easy, you need to touch it… you need friction… You will put it down, pick up it, make a cuppa and warm your hands up; you won’t read it all in one sitting. That’s what it is really about; physical bodies relating to the work. The letters return to the idea of physicality, tactility, materiality. The book asks to be touched, it seeks intimacy and attention. This is revealed through its very first lines: “In this book, the human hand is as important as love.”

To You, will be made available for purchase soon! To keep updated and find out more about the book, follow Yiota on Twitter @yiota_demetriou, or visit the book’s site: www.to-you.live. Sign up to the book’s mailing list via the site above, to follow its journey.

The project is supported by Dr. Tom Abba (Bristol-based Book Artist and Designer), and Prof. Kate Pullinger (Novelist and Academic) through the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (@CCCIBathSpa), at Bath Spa University.

“[…] the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire)” (Barthes, p. 157)

I am a performance practitioner and researcher, interested in archives, personal collections, and spoken histories. My work is immersive and allows for audience participation through using audience stories as the main focus of the piece presented. It further employs creative technologies and sound art installation to exhibit and present the stories collected during each performance. In this article, I will be concentrating on one of my performance projects called Love Letters; while touring this work  I have collected 200 love letters written by audience members. In this article I will describe  the diverse narrative/storytelling ‘interfaces’ used in the performance  as well as how we aim to redevelop Love Letters by making the costume/dress, used in the piece, a storytelling object that will narrate past audience letters from the collection to present day audiences.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.

Love Letters is a live, durational performance with a performer wearing an interactive dress, a station for writing love letters, and an installation of letters. It is a performance project that has toured international performance festivals and art-related events since 2012: Performing Documents (2012), Performance and Live Art Platform (2012, 2014), Tempting Failure (2013, 2014), Latitude (2015), and iDocs (2016). Reviews about the piece have been published both in online and print media, in Vice Live Art Almanac Vol. 4 and EXEUNT magazine.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

The piece invites participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion, to share other audiences’ letters and to interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting memories and streams of consciousness onto both the costume and the performer’s body. The collection of letters contains audience love letters about moment in time, letters to old friends, old lovers, family, about falling love, or even love that can never work. At the end of the performance, the dress I wear is full of audience love letters. In each performance past audience letters are revisited and new love letters are added to the collection.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Through a collaboration with creative technologists and interdisciplinary artists we aim to redevelop the dress as a storytelling object using creative technologies,  as explained below. This will enable us to build upon the audience-led experience of the love letters collection encountered in the performance.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Inspirations

I have been living away from ‘home’ for the past 11 years in order to pursue my academic research and artistic practice which includes developing interactive approaches to curating and exhibiting oral histories as well as  new ways of storytelling with and for the public. Within this timeframe, I have moved between 3 countries, 4 cities, and 13 houses. The process of unpacking each time is not only mundane but sometimes painful, as I often find myself, as one does, going through boxes and boxes of old photographs, reading strips of paper,  dwelling on postcards and letters. This memorabilia  – remnants of relationships long past, traces of intimate relationships that no longer exist, recollections of desperate apologies –  is too precious to discard. Thus, it ends up hidden in the depths of my wardrobe or roughly preserved in suitcases under my bed.

The process of self-archiving – unpacking, reading, labeling and preserving my own collection of love letters and emotional luggage – made me think about how, if I consider my memorabilia  important enough to keep, then other people may share similar emotional attachments to such tangible traces. This prompted a further question: is the practice of writing love letters vanishing because of technology? Surely, the love letter  hasn’t disappeared, but rather it has been democratised and made commonplace by technology. However, what about the actual ritual, the analogue procedure, the aesthetic, conceptual and emotional value that is found in the very act of handwriting a love letter, the physical artifact that lives on?  Does the digital form of the love letter share the same value as its material form? Is it able to capture the emotional registers (anguish, longing and desire) that make the performance of writing love letters so powerful?

“Love letters are awaited with  impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, lover uses their ‘analogon’ to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent. For both Sartre and Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. As discussed further on, absence and presence are themes that my performance project, Love Letters, plays with strongly; for the reason the performance employs creative practices that encourage human expression and therefore evoke emotions such as grief and loss. Hence, does typing a love letter, faxing it, emailing it, coding it, posting it, sharing it – have the same effect, even if its purpose is to communicate via written word the same raw emotion of human pathos?

Love Letters at Wickham Theatre, 2013. Image by YD.

The love letter has been cherished for centuries, written by: Beethoven and Embry, Napoleon to Josephine, Jean Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir; Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Leo Tolstoy to Valeria Arsenev, Allen Ginsburg to Peter Orlovsky; Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf; John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Voltaire to Olympe Dunover, and the list goes on. Throughout history, love letters have taken a biblical tenor, literary forms (early Renaissance, evolving in the Enlightenment), going beyond being written as literary device for romance and affection. Instead emerging into a political act of wisdom, an opportunity for self-reflection and introspection.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

For instance, Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey’s computer-based, automated love letter generator is well-known as one of the the first attempts to humanise the computer by digitising emotive writing, exposing the mechanical nature of romance. Frantic and random love letters started appearing on the notice board at the University of Manchester’s computer lab in August, 1953. This was the outcome of Strachey’s programming for the Manchester Mark I computer (M.U.C.), a Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first general-purpose and commercially available machine of its kind. The love letter generator was among this early computer’s many programmes. In Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts (2016), David Link maintains that Strachey’s program was one of the first experiments in producing text-generating softwares or electronic combinatory literature created from Alan Turing’s random number generator. “Ultimately the software is based on a reductionist position vis-à-vis love and its expression,” Link writes. “Love is regarded as a recombinatory procedure with recurring elements.” The computer would insert nouns and adjectives of endearment randomly selected from its database and through this the computer would become the author of a one-sided epistolary romance. All the letters were variations on a basic syntactic template: “you are my [adjective] [noun]. my [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] your [adjective] [noun].” And the signatory was always the same: “M.U.C.”

I used an online interface that uses Stratchey’s code to produce a computer-automated love letter:

FANCIFUL DEAR,

   YOU ARE MY CRAVING FERVOUR, MY PRECIOUS FERVOUR. MY LOVE EAGERLY LUSTS AFTER YOUR LOVING FONDNESS. MY PASSION PINES FOR YOUR ENTHUSIASM. MY SYMPATHY FERVENTLY HOLDS DEAR YOUR HEART.
YOURS ANXIOUSLY,
M.U.C.

The chaotic remix of sentimental words indicates an ‘ache of longing’ which journeys “beyond the one that already accompanies the genre: one can almost sense M.U.C.’s thirst, as if the computer were struggling to speak from the heart but discovered that its vocabulary had been arbitrarily limited to the language of clichés”  (Wardrip-Fruin, 2011).

Returning to my initial point, the value and beauty of this ritual of writing a love letter lives in the passionate and intentional desire to capture the message in writing, turning the praxis of writing a love letter into a performance of composition and reflection with the recipient at the heart of this action.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

The symbolic actions engaging audiences in the performance project, Love Letters, do not only intervene in the idea of keeping memories private by compelling the audience to participate in an exchange of memories, but also creates a second level of intervention by compelling the audience to witness other people doing the same. This is realised by ‘exposing’ their intimate and personal testimonies (with their consent). The audience accounts – composed and narrated during the performance of Love Letters – make evident how narrative is a vital component of the human mind, key to making sense of the world around us. Thus, the collection of these letters acts as a type of candid cultural artefact or resource that carries  ‘intangible’ personal heritage – the letters tell stories that are sometimes profound and intense, and at other times superficial and trivial, and are then given existence through their mediation within a performance setting. The action of writing a letter is  used in the piece as a tool to evoke memories. This is achieved by having the audience engage with the performer by addressing and dressing her in particular ways so that the shared memories become attached with new environments, connotations and other ways of telling. These modes of engagement occur through two strands of audience – performer interaction: (1) writing the letter and reading an other letter aloud; (2) pinning the narrated letter onto the dress and writing on the dress and on the performer’s body, which in the performance act as narrative interfaces.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

The dress worn in every performance is the same. It is ‘stained’ with past and present audiences’ contributions, playing with the notions of presence and absence. As described, the audience makes notes on the garment and or the performer’s body, ‘memo’-type messages left on it, for others to see and perhaps to not see. In consideration of this, the dress/the costume used in the performance is a crucial component of the piece. It becomes part of the audiences’ recollections, not only for its traces of past written and narrative acts, but also as an in-between, a mediator, of what was said and what was lost. It most importantly becomes a vessel that embodies audience members’ intimate stories. The dress witnesses the different tellings and shares a different type of intimacy with each and every audience member who  has interacted with it. It is a technology that is physically embedded with their memories, as well as the cultural connotations it carries because of its material form.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

Further research has posed new questions for the project: what if the performance’s dress narrated letters written by its past audiences, as a response to its interaction with present audiences? To explore this I put together an interdisciplinary team of creatives, including artistic practitioners and technologists with experience of developing interactive technologies for storytelling and immersive performance purposes. Together we aim to concentrate on redeveloping the letter writing engagement and technological interactions of the dress, making it a storytelling object or device. To achieve this we plan to create a technological speaking attachment to the dress using electronics and by augmenting the dress with recordings of the existing collection of letters. This will allow it to speak its past audiences’ letters to present-day audiences, as part of a narrative exchange in the performance. Following the original live performance process – writing love letters, depositing these in the space, reading other letters aloud and attaching these to the dress – the audience’s engagement with the costume will trigger a reaction where the dress narrates another story from the collection as a response. The dress will become an interactive storytelling object and a type of ‘worn’ sound installation, which will give the audience a further creative agency and shared ownership over their letters and the entire collection. The primary importance is not the technology itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. This work makes use of technology, whilst offering audiences agency/ownership allowing for creative expression and imagination, while not drawing the attention away from the performance and storytelling aspects of the piece.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

To undertake this project we recently launched a crowdfunding campaign. We need the public’s support to redevelop this piece. Our aim is to raise enough funds to develop the technology for the piece to build on an audience-led experience of sharing memories. We have planned two public events to showcase this work: in the UK at Centrespace Gallery (Bristol) and in Zagreb at the Museum of Broken Relationships (Croatia), where we intend to donate the entire audience love letters for collection once the project is completed. It is important to us that the letters audiences have entrusted us with in each performance are preserved in a safe and loving space, for other people to read and appreciate.

You can check out our pitch here: https://spsr.me/FxkW.

We appreciate any kind of support, If you don’t feel like contributing financially, maybe you would like to send us a love letter instead. Send love letters (addressed to a significant other) to p.demetriou@gmail.com, subject line “love letter donation”.

Supporters of this project include:

• Museum of Broken Relationships
• Pervasive Media Studio
• Centrespace Gallery
• The Writing Platform
• Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture, and the Digital Research Centre (BSU)

Find us here

@yiota_demetriou

http://yiotademetriou.com/

https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/projects/love-letters/

p.demetriou@bathspa.ac.uk

References

• Barthes, R., (1977), A Lover’s Discourse, (London: Random House, New ed. 2002).
• Demetriou, P. A., Pappas, O. and Kampylis, S., (2017) “Love Letters: Wearing Stories Told – a performance-technology provocation for interactive storytelling”, Body, Space & Technology Journal, 16. ISSN 1470-9120, <http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol16/>.
• Kearney, R., (2006), Poetics of Imagining, (New York: Fordham University Press).
• Link, D., (2016), Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, (Minnesota: Univocal Publishing).
• com, (2017), Love Letter generator, [online] Available at: <http://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/> [Accessed 13 Mar. 2017].
• Sartre, J., Elkaïm-Sartre, A., Webber, J., (2004), The Imaginary, (London: Routledge): 145.
• Wardrip-Fruin, N., (2011) “Digital Media Archaeologies: Interpreting Computational Processes,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press): 302-322.

]]> https://thewritingplatform.com/2014/02/live/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:04:20 +0000 http://www.thewritingplatform.com/?p=1416 Reading Time: 3 minutes Someone suggests a theme – perhaps the way a person’s tone shifts when talking about a loved one – and Daljit Nagra instantly writes a poem, keystroke by keystroke. the warmth o- f a blush on his eve- r so lightly altered voice The words appear on two large projector screens in the Royal Festival... Read more »]]> Reading Time: 3 minutes

Someone suggests a theme – perhaps the way a person’s tone shifts when talking about a loved one – and Daljit Nagra instantly writes a poem, keystroke by keystroke.

the warmth o-

f a blush

on his

eve-

r

so lightly altered voice

The words appear on two large projector screens in the Royal Festival Hall, linked directly to his laptop, which sits between.

Writer Sarah Butler is tucked behind a desk between the literary gift section and the shop counter. Prompted and encouraged by a family of booklovers eating cake and browsing the shelves of Woolfson & Tay, she writes a tale of four bunnies named Rose, Rabby, Snowflake and Nibbles.

Following an afternoon in the Jewish Museum’s archive and a quick review of his social media feeds, novelist Joe Dunthorne lists possible subjects to use as prompts. His tale of a miserable old man who steals the football from a game played next door is written for a Twitter user who watches online from home. “They have an instinct for weakness, children,” Joe writes. “It’s admirable, really, the accuracy with which they exploit human imperfection.”

Over seven weeks, David Varela and I managed a programme of events, each exploring writing as performance and also how digital technology can impact on the way writers write. For the Live Writing Series, we used technology developed by Alex Heeton and Riccardo Cambiassi to show every tap of the keyboard by seven writers, live online and in public. We put poets, scriptwriters and novelists in busy venues where they came face to face with the people they were writing for and about. Over 4,000 people engaged with the project, either in person or online, and almost 100 musings, poems, lectures, jokes, anecdotes, stories and other new pieces of writing were produced.

We had ambitious creative goals. Our aim was to offer writers taking part in the LWS project a chance to develop their improvisational skills, finding new sources of motivation, reaching new audiences in new contexts, and hopefully achieving a new mindset of openness regarding their writing practice. We were keen to see the range of work produced by writers under pressure and whether literature formed live, for screen rather than page, resulted in a new kind of text. We enjoyed seeing how the stories and poems had a fluid quality, how narrative and structure were looser, and that many of the pieces had a sense of immediacy and urgency.

Our plan was to produce technology for writers with fairly modest digital expertise. The live writing platform we have developed is functional and accessible. We don’t think that writers need to be well-versed in the digital world to develop an exciting online literature project. Rather, it’s a case of switching a writerly mind away from its traditional focus on the printed page towards the possibilities of a screen and real-time performance, and enjoying playing with the way text and stories can be presented and experienced online.

Since its conception in 2011, when Heeton and Cambiassi created the website and technology behind David Varela’s online writing project 100 Hours of Solitude, the live writing platform has been refined with a photo gallery, an area to highlight the most interesting pieces of work, and improved navigation. Our long-term aim is to keep developing it further with writers of all genres.

That includes writers who are keen to perform and those reluctant to; writers in the UK sat in venues with enormous screens; writers in other countries, their words beamed online to readers. We want to provide a tool that can be grabbed by other writers and used easily as part of a live production.

Technology has given us a chance to forge new relationships between readers and writers, turning conversation into inspiration, fans into patrons, and the act of writing into performance. By cultivating this skill in a generation of writers and opening up this possibility to new audiences, we hope the live writing platform could be a major step towards making the possibilities of digital literature available to all.

GS, DV 23.02.14

—

We interviewed Gemma and David in back in October at the start of the project. Read the interview here.

Last year David Varela wrote for 100 hours straight to raise money for the Arvon Foundation. Readers could watch every keystroke David made as he composed the commissions that people pledged for.

Now he has teamed up with writer, Gemma Seltzer, to produce a new Live Writing Series. Seven writers will be live writing at seven London venues between 25th October and 4th December. Visitors to the venue will be able to interact with the writers and once again readers will be able to watch them crafting the stories keystroke by keystroke.

We caught up with David and Gemma about the Live Writing Series and what it means for writers and readers.

Can you tell us a bit about how Live Writing works. What will the writers be doing and how will visitors and readers be able to interact with them?

David Varela: We’ve built a website – well, the wonderful Riccardo Cambiassi, Alex Heaton and Spela Strukelj have built a website – that shows every keystroke the writer makes, instantaneously, both online and on a big screen in the venue. Each writer is figuring out a slightly different way of deciding what to write. I’m going to be in a crowded gallery, so I’ll be asking people to write ideas down on paper and hand them to me, so I don’t get too overwhelmed. Sarah Butler is writing in a bookshop, so she’s asking visitors to hand her a book as a form of stimulus. We’ll also be inviting ideas online through the website and via Twitter (we’re @LiveWritingSrs).

Gemma Seltzer:  Members of the public  – in the venue and online – can ‘commission’ a short literary work or influence the writing in some way. They could write down an idea, a word or a provocation. It would then be up to the writer to choose how to respond: a continuous narrative or individual pieces that somehow incorporated the suggestions.

What inspired you to launch the Live Writing Series?

DV: After my 100 Hours experience, I was buzzing and ready for more. That sense of improv and having a live audience is a serious thrill – and I thought other writers would enjoy it too. I was struck by how much people enjoyed watching a story unfold as it is crafted, so I’m confident that there’s an audience for this new form of work. We’ll see.

GS: David and I put our heads together and came up with a plan that we hoped would bring live writing to a bigger audience, challenge authors and poets, and encourage venues to think differently about how writers can work within their buildings.

You’ve got a fantastic line-up of writers and venues. It’s a pretty new, not to mention nerve-wracking concept, did you have to do much convincing?

GS: We’ve scared off a few writers with the very idea of sharing their work in front of readers, but mainly we’ve had a great response from everyone. Venues are interested in how to programme literary activity in their spaces in new ways, and writing can be a form of entertainment for their audiences. We’re exploring the impact of technology on how writers write and the new possibilities of bringing writing into real life.

DV: It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure. The writers who’ve chosen to take part are very open about their process already or have some element of performance in their work, but this is still a new experience for all of them. I think no less of those writers who demured…

Gemma, you’re off Live Writing around London on 7th November, what are you most looking forward to? What’s your biggest fear?

GS:  We wanted to find a way of making the project genuinely London-wide, bringing together iconic buildings, the red buses and the night foxes. Our venues cover north to south London, so I’m travelling east to west and writing in places I find along the way. I had a go at live writing at Jewish Book Week in 2013, producing a series of stories for audiences. I watched how people interacted, and the scenes that unfolded in front of me, as a stimulus for my work. It was great fun, and I can’t wait to have another go … but this time I’ll be on the move! I always like writing in real time, from real life. My only fear is unreliable wifi.

What’s next for Live Writing?

GS: We’re so excited to see how writers and readers respond to the project, and have high hopes for the next phase. For me, this project is about the fleeting nature of words, how moments come and then they go – a writer can capture in words, but still the instant has passed. We’re not intending to publish the writing – once it’s written it’s gone – showcasing a selection of work on the website instead. In the future, we might consider how to share the writing in print. That’s phase two…

DV: Each of the events in the Series is something of an experiment to see what format, style, venue and audience works best and in which combination. We’re going to learn a lot, and that will influence our planning. But there are definitely plans. Oh yes.

The Live Writing Series is taking place at venues all over London between 25th October and 4th December 2013.

You can watch the stories unfold online here. Or visit the writers in situ at the following locations:

25th October: David Varela at the National Portrait Gallery

1st November: Sarah Butler at Woolfson and Tay bookshop

7th November: Gemma Seltzer around London (spot her out and about or watch online)

13th November: writer tbc at The Jewish Museum

20th November: Jacob Sam-La Rose at the Deptford Lounge

30th November: Molly Naylor at the Roundhouse

4th December: writer tbc at the Clore Ballroom at the South Bank Centre