Location-Based and Audience-Aware Storytelling

📝 Abstract

While the daily user of digital, Internet-enabled devices has some explicit control over what they read and see, the providers fulfilling searches, offering options, and presenting material are using increasingly sophisticated real-time algorithms that tune and target content for the particular user. They redefine the historical relationships between tellers and users, providing a responsiveness paralleled only by forms of live performance incorporating elements of improvisation and audience interaction. The general accessibility of algorithmically driven content delivery techniques suggests significant untapped potential for new approaches to narrative beyond advertising and commercially orientated customization.

💡 Analysis

While the daily user of digital, Internet-enabled devices has some explicit control over what they read and see, the providers fulfilling searches, offering options, and presenting material are using increasingly sophisticated real-time algorithms that tune and target content for the particular user. They redefine the historical relationships between tellers and users, providing a responsiveness paralleled only by forms of live performance incorporating elements of improvisation and audience interaction. The general accessibility of algorithmically driven content delivery techniques suggests significant untapped potential for new approaches to narrative beyond advertising and commercially orientated customization.

📄 Content

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Location-Based and Audience-Aware Storytelling:
Grace Plains and Bodies for a Global Brain Jeff Burke, Jared J. Stein Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) {jburke, jared}@remap.ucla.edu September 25, 2016

Everyday life now includes frequent exposure to media that changes depending on algorithms developed by content providers. While the daily user of digital, Internet-enabled devices has some explicit control over what they read and see, the providers fulfilling searches, offering options, and presenting material are using increasingly sophisticated real-time algorithms that tune and target content for the particular user. Shopping, research, news, entertainment, social media, and other services select, arrange and deliver content dynamically based on sets of variables—including users’ past use, purchasing and viewing habits, current or recent locations, and even contact lists. (See, for example, Brusilovski, Kobsa, & Nejdl, 2007.) With shifting text and layout, embedded advertisements, sponsored content in news scrolls, menu choices, etc., the algorithms at play primarily serve providers’ interests. They also redefine the historical relationships between tellers and users, providing a responsiveness paralleled only by forms of live performance incorporating elements of improvisation and audience interaction. The general accessibility of algorithmically driven content delivery techniques suggests significant untapped potential for new approaches to narrative beyond advertising and commercially orientated customization. At UCLA REMAP, faculty, staff, and students have been investigating the applications and implications of such constructs within the dramatic arts. (Burke et al, 2006; Burke, 2014) Exploring these ideas in 2013–14, two full-scale experimental productions resulted from a two-quarter course created as part of UCLA TFT’s participation in Google’s Glass Creative Collective: 1] Grace Plains by Cole Baker, Pierre Finn, and Phill Powers, which combined participatory, immersive theater with live-action role-playing, viewed in-person and live online; and 2] Bodies for a Global Brain by Eben Portnoy, a web cinema piece that used machine learning to provide dialogue to its actors dynamically. The specific impetus for the experimentation was to explore Glass as a storytelling tool—given its point-of-view recording, wireless Internet access, and capability to deliver (algorithmically determined) digital information to individuals, received hands-free. The creation of these pieces involved faculty, students, research staff, and software 2

developers. From the outset, they aimed to establish a range of creative possibilities for the use of Glass: location-based and audience-aware narrative conventions, methods of telling and experiencing a story that shift dynamically based on viewers’ locations, identities, and choices. Ultimately, the development process yielded two different productions that were distinct in platform and format, but similar in theme and the challenges presented to creators, casts and crews. Bodies for a Global Brain integrated a traditional episodic story structure with text that was dynamically selected from social media using machine learning, which was delivered to its primary performers via Glass. Shot in public spaces in Los Angeles, these two actors used the text as dialogue to interact with unknowing passersby, other actors not wearing Glass, and each other— as the writer-director manipulated the parameters of text selection and delivery. Text mined from social media served as the dialogue, re-contextualized by and motivating changes in the action of the scenes, in real time.
Grace Plains’ in-person audiences were participants in a live-action role-playing game facilitated by Glass. They were led along a journey of continuously evolving circumstances at YouTube Space Los Angeles, across multiple studios and public spaces, which collectively became the project’s set. Groups of eight people (six audience members and two actors) were fed, via Glass, suggested dialogue, motivations, facts, and options that progressed the story and overall experience.
The course, Location-Based and Audience-Aware Storytelling, taught by one of the article’s authors (Jeff Burke) and supported by REMAP research staff, was designed to explore how to conceptualize, write, produce, and then distribute dramatic content that takes advantage of the capabilities of wearable technology (like Glass) to expand narrative possibilities. The resulting work, which included a series of smaller projects leading up to the two full-scale productions described here, melded “systems thinking” with “story thinking.” Like the daily experience of interacting with contemporary media, but involving human performers rather than only web browsers or mobile apps, both Bodies for a Gl

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