The neurocognition of liveness
What makes live experiences special? Liveness is not just central to the performing arts, but to political rallies, sporting events, virtual reality and distance learning in higher education. NEUROLIVE is an inherently interdisciplinary research project, that combines theoretical concepts from theatre and performance studies, artistic research in performance making, psychological experimentation and mobile neuroimaging to understand how liveness is generated and experienced. NEUROLIVE proposes that the live experience can be conceptualized and quantified as a form of sustained entrainment, in which the minds, brains and bodies of performers and spectators are linked. Across three research streams we will combine artistic research (I) and cognitive neuroscience (II) to delineate the contextual, experiential and neurocognitive components of liveness, resulting in four live performance experiments (III). These live performances will be co-developed by performing artists and cognitive scientists with a view to establish an empirically testable, ecologically valid, multidimensional measure of liveness. NEUROLIVE combines dynamic experience sampling with psychophysiology, and mobile EEG. Advanced modelling techniques from machine learning will be used to integrate information from the different experiential, physiological and neural signals. This new measure will be grounded in the aesthetic principles of contemporary live performance, yet should be applicable across artistic and non-artistic performance situations, and to digital liveness in augmented and mixed realities. In this way, NEUROLIVE implements a conceptually and methodologically novel approach to understanding what makes live experiences special.