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smell, or taste them. There are interesting exceptions. In the 1920s, for in-
stance, director David Belasco experimented with using odors as part of the
performance of realistic plays; it is said that he abandoned this approach
when he observed that the smell of bacon frying utterly distracted the audi-
ence from the action on stage. In the mid-1960s, Morton Heilig invented a
stand-alone arcade machine called Sensorama, which provided stereoscopic
fi lmic images, kinesthetic feedback, and environmental smells; on a motor-
cycle ride through New York City, for instance, one could smell car exhaust
and pizza.
In a much more serious vein, Jerzy Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre ex-
perimented with involving the audience in the production in a variety of
ways in the 1960s and 1970s. The point was not so much to expand the sen-
sory palette of the audience, but to create “unself-conscious” participation
by the audience in the form of deep emotional engagement. In his master-
ful book,
Towards a Poor Theatre
(1968), Grotowski acknowledges that he has
two ensembles to direct: the actors and the spectators. In the Laboratory
Theatre's ground-breaking performance of
Doctor Faustus
, Grotowski had
the audience seated at long banquet tables. The audience was “asked to
merely to respond as people might at such a function.”
A spate of interactive plays and “mystery weekends” in the late 1980s
employed the scheme of having the audience follow the actors around a
space, although only as observers and not participants in the action. In
one “interactive” play of the period,
Tony and Tina's Wedding
, the audience
was invited to follow the actors around from room to room (kinesthetic),
to touch the props and sit on the furniture (tactile and kinesthetic), and to
share in a wedding banquet (taste and smell). Another notable example
is Chris Hardman's Antenna Theatre, an approach where audience mem-
bers move around a set prompted by taped dialogue and narration that
they hear through personal headphones. These works have roots in ex-
perimental theatre work in the 1960s and 1970s by such artists as Judith
Melina and Julian Beck of the Living Theatre, Robert Wilson, John Cage,
and many others. Contemporary performance art shares many of the
same origins. It is interesting that the development of interactive theatri-
cal genres has been concurrent with the blossoming of computer games as
a popular form of entertainment.
In fact, it is at the areas in which dramatic entertainment and human-
computer activity are beginning to converge that pan-sensory representa-
tion is being most actively explored. When we examine that convergence,
we can see ways in which human-computer interaction has evolved, at
