Studying and designing emotions in live interactions with the audience

In the last decade, a number of projects have investigated the use of digital technologies to increase the engagement of the audience in live interactive performance. In this paper, we explore the relation between interactive performance and emotional participation of the audience through an experiment in the wild where perftormance is mediated by a computational system, DoPPioGioco. DoPPioGioco detects the emotional response of the audience, conveyed through face expression, allowing the performer to encourage or oppose it as the performance progresses. Based on the data collected during the experiment, we discuss the limitations and strengths of this approach for audience engagement, in the attempt to identify the factors which must be accounted for when affective technologies are employed to mediate between audience and performer in live interaction.