‘What Country, Friends, Is This?’ Using Immersive Theatre Practice to Inform the Design of Audience Experience in Estate 360°

This paper focuses on issues arising from the making of an experimental interactive 360-degree video that emerged from a relational ‘immersive’ site-specific theatre project for a public audience that was staged in historic grounds in South Florida, USA in April 2017. This work was undertaken with academics from University of Miami, Kim Grinfeder and Stephen Di Benedetto. The specific nature of the performance event, the filming of aspects of this experience and the post-production processes each raise significant questions relating to the development of methods of ‘interactive’ digital storytelling for ‘immersive’ audience experience. The role of theatre practice and performance design in developing these mediated experiences seems to be an important element that has largely been ignored in thinking about how digital immersive experiences might be created.

The video Estate 360° was first published on-line in January 2018 and is freely available to download: https://interactive.miami.edu/estate/.