Collect yourselves!: Risk, intimacy, and dissonance in intermedial performance

Abstract

Collect Yourselves! is a technologically mediated system that opens up the transformational possibilities of performance to small groups of non-professionals sharing their own digital photos and the stories behind them. Remarkably, their performances achieve moments of emotional and aesthetic power, but these require the performers to take risks, make themselves vulnerable, and establish connections with their audiences. We discuss the framework and methodology of our interdisciplinary approach to designing these performances (Performative Experience Design), then contextualise our discussion within recent work on the subjective experience of risk in the performance literature, from both the performer’s point of view and the audience’s. Our experiences with Collect Yourselves! argue for risk as a necessary component for rewarding and potentially transformational experiences of intermedial autobiographical performance.