Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
as a whole is responding to questions. During the interactive polls, segments of
the audience sometimes compete for control, clapping and shouting to make
their choice the winner. At other times, the audience laughs when a choice
meets with silence (no one wants to vote for it). Sometimes the applause grows
into a groundswell of whistling and clapping as it becomes clear that certain
choices are nearly unanimous.
Of course the audience experience is determined not only by the points
of interaction, but also by the audience's reaction to the historical narrative
produced. The audience recognizes that their interaction has an influence on
the historical narrative, but, unlike a utopian navigation scenario, the result-
ing narrative is not a perfect, transparent response to their interaction. Rather,
the narrative escapes their control, producing a story they did not intend, nor
desire. As the history begins 1000 years ago, the audience should experience a
comfortable sense of historical authority engendered by the familiar documen-
tary form and the remoteness of the historical events. As the history unfolds,
the effect of the periodic audience polls becomes more and more apparent. The
increased bias evident in the history should begin creating a tension with re-
gard to the veridicality of the history (a sense of “wait a minute, this doesn't
seem quite right...”).
In order to fully appreciate the piece, an audience should see it more than
once. In a typical hour-long performance, an audience will be able to see two
performances. In the second viewing, even if the audience answers the polls
in exactly the same way, they will experience a different history. In the event
that the polls are answered in the same way, the differences will appear in the
specific events chosen and the text generated for those events, not in the ide-
ological bias. Seeing two different histories back-to-back makes the effect of
ideological bias in historical construction fully apparent. Typically, during the
first performance, audiences respond to the questions truthfully, that is, ac-
tively trying to reflect their true beliefs in their answers to the questions. Dur-
ing the second performance they tend to respond playfully to the questions,
essentially trying on different belief systems to see how this will effect the re-
sulting history. While this could be seen as “game-like” psychographic tourism
on the part of the audience, this reaction seems to indicate an understanding
of the influence of belief system (as reflected in the answers to the questions)
on the resulting history.
