Fostering participation through ubiquitous media in pervasive performance

This article reflects on Chain Reaction (2009 and 2011), a mixed performance combining ubiquitous media with performance conventions and experimental game design. It explores the ways in which ubiquitous media were used to foster participants’ creative expression and how these strategies impacted performance conventions of spectatorship and participation. By combining performance, game and ubiquitous media in public space, it is claimed that Chain Reaction enables spectators to cross conventional thresholds and experience different participatory roles during one and the same event, going from spectator, to (performative) player, to theatre actor and to documentalist. In this way, ubiquitous media are vital to developing a performance genre that seeks to empower the cultural participant.