Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk's Theatrical Worlds

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023
Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk's Theatrical Worlds is a detailed account of the company's award-winning productions and their historical context. Examining Punchdrunk's role as pioneers of immersive theatre in the UK through a range of their productions including Sleep No More and The Drowned Man besides theatrical works such as Faust, The Duchess of Malfi and Kabeiroi, and cross-platform productions like The Moon Slave, The Borough and The Oracles, the book presents an original framework for understanding immersion in theatrical and mixed reality experiences.
Central to the book is a study of how immersive experience is produced in interaction with physical and digital scenography for participatory audiences. Through ethnographies of the company, their designers, actors, producers and audiences, the book interrogates the relationship between the aesthetics of interaction and the experience of immersion in Punchdrunk's work. The theoretical framework that the book introduces affords analyses of material cultures and the influence of technology on interaction design in theatre and beyond, and offers a blueprint for next-generation immersive design and scenography for interactive multimedia environments.

Carina E. I. Westling is Lecturer in Cross-Platform Media at Bournemouth University, UK and researches immersive experience, interaction and mixed reality design.

List of Illustrations
1. Introduction: Immersion in Punchdrunk's Theatre
Scaling up: Space, Time, Audiences
Audiences on- and Offline
Gravity, Consequence and Emergence
2. Ritual and Rhetoric in Narrative Systems
System Narratives and the Shape of Interaction
Perspectives on Agency in Interactive Systems
The Postdigital Sublime: Beyond the Digital Mythos
3. A Genealogy of the Immersive Aesthetic
Key Influences on the Immersive Aesthetic
Antirealist Modernism
Complicity and Participation
Blended Spaces and the Vertigo of Transformation
4. Punchdrunk's Interactive Systems
The 'Punchdrunk System'
Emergence and Order
Art-work and Algorithmic Audiences
5. Behind the Interface: Making Punchdrunk's Storyworlds
Crafting Storyworlds
Devising and Performing
6. Audience Experience and Participation
Analysing Punchdrunk Audiences
The Effects of Anonymity
Active Immersion
Delinquent System Aesthetics
7. Impure Futures
Condemned to Change
The Sublime vs. Efficiency
Harnessing the un-Modern
Notes
Bibliography
Index