The insightful comments on yesterday’s post, together with Sharon’s link to CS Unplugged, made it abundantly clear that there is no one correct way to engage an audience in interactive activity. Even if you stick to one subject area, the nature of any given audience imposes its own constraints and presents its own opportunities.
For example, Manooh had the wonderful suggestion that I could have asked audience members to exchange seats. I had thought of that, but had decided it would not work with this crowd. We had little kids with their parents, and they would have been required to separate. Also, we had very old people, some of whom just can’t move all that fast. Yet if I had been giving the same talk to a crowd of ten year olds, I definitely would have had them physically change places.
Also, I decided to go with sorting because everybody in the audience understands immediately what the goal is. Various other ideas had come up, including Conway’s Game of Life, and having the audience emulate the bits in binary arithmetic. In each case there were two problems: (1) The question of “what are we doing and why are we doing this” would have been far more abstract, and (2) there are lots of places in most audiences where there are gaps between people. Most of these other ideas require a regular grid, so they just don’t work when there are empty seats.
The possibilities are probably inexhaustible. It would be interesting to look at audience participation not as one particular activity, but rather as an entire space of possibilities, a set of disparate artforms, connected to each other by their mutual reliance on an active audience.
Somebody really should write a thesis on algorithmic audience genres.