Performing live AV under pressure

This module is where the material you built in the live-cinema and Resolume modules meets an actual room: a 15-minute AV set played from your own rig — laptop, controller, projection — in front of people who did not watch you make it. That gap is the whole subject. A laptop performer’s effort is invisible, and audiences cannot tell a live set from a DVD unless the performance makes its own liveness legible; the set only trades on liveness value — shared risk, instant feedback, ephemerality — if the audience can perceive it.

The arc starts supported. First, build your rig at the desk: use the principle of prioritising most-used controls as always-visible (“A live performance patch should prioritise the most-used controls…”) as the JIT how-to for laying out the patch, and rehearse gesture mappings until the action-result correspondence reads like a piano key producing a note. Then run a dress rehearsal for one or two friends, deliberately practising the split attention Schacher describes — inward on the machine, outward on the room — and asking them where the set felt live versus like playback. Only then play the unsupported capstone set, choosing your stage visibility deliberately, and write the post-mortem.

The required atoms are exactly the ones the capstone cannot survive without: the dual inward/outward view keeps the set running and landing; stage visibility, performer presence and gestural legibility solve the visibility problem the post-mortem interrogates; interface design and the performer/audience asymmetry of real-time discovery govern what you build and what you improvise. Supporting atoms deepen the frame — software as instrument, the levels of real-time, autonomous versus guided systems, the participation spectrum — enriching the reflection without gating the performance itself.