Abstract
A growing body of human-computer interaction (HCI) research uses performance to explore embodied or multi-user interactions with technology. At the same time, digital technology is reconfiguring approaches to performance practice and research. This interaction design thesis identifies areas of overlapping interest within these two fields: digital media sharing in HCI, and autobiographical performance in performance studies. It posits a practice of ‘intermedial autobiographical performance’, in which people engage with a technological intervention to create autobiographical performances by sharing photos and stories of their life experiences. To explore this practice, the thesis develops a hybrid methodology that draws on relevant theories in both disciplines, as well as detailed analyses of four autobiographical performances, to create a two-phase interactive technology called Collect Yourselves! The first phase uses prompts to guide participants who do not identify as performers through a process of selecting and contextualising their personal digital media. The second phase provides a structure through which they perform their media for each other, engaging with the properties of autobiographical performance. Analyses of the Collect Yourselves! performances reveal new theories for both digital media sharing and performance, including ‘doubled indexicality’ and ‘performed photos’, as well as frameworks of reminiscing and storytelling, comfort and challenge, and ‘attending’ and ‘marking’. These frameworks help to explain the workings of an interactive performance event centred on personal digital media. Finally, the methodology and findings point towards a larger field of Performative Experience Design (PED), situated between HCI and performance studies. Intermedial autobiographical performance is only one part of this emerging field, in which performance is understood not as a rarefied or optional realm that exists only for its own sake, but rather as an insightful, intimate, risky, and potentially transformative experience that personal digital media technologies are particularly well suited to enable.