Ambient Performance and Spectatorship in the Workplace

Building with a Memory is an experiential media system for capturing and representing dynamic human activity in a distributed workplace. Participants can perform purposefully, incidentally and unknowingly with the system, with individual and collective actions represented through a variety of ambient feedback mechanisms. Two iterations of the system are presented and observations and recommendations for performative workplace media systems described. In this paper we discuss the performative aspects of Building with a Memory, an experiential media system for capturing and presenting patterns of human activity in a transdisciplinary workplace. The indirect mapping between performance and feedback challenges how we consider performativity in the piece.