Jennifer Sheridan share her experiences on working on the Equator project.

Jennifer Sheridan was a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology before she joined Lancaster University as a Research Associate. In fact one of the main reasons for joining Lancaster University was the EQUATOR project, which sparked her interests.

Jennifer’s research interest is in the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Live Art. She carved a niche research area which she coined as Digital Live Art. However, she felt her work was on the periphery of the main EQUATOR research strands at Lancaster, which was more technology centric rather than performance or user centric. But she did find the experience of collaborating with some local EQUATOR team members to be enriching as this exposed her to various areas including tangible computing, sensors, wireless and mobile peer-to-peer technologies, and embedded physical computing technologies. Although Jennifer did find all this technology quite intimidating to start with, the skills she acquired were useful and helped her direct, design and produce innovative interactive installations and performance events.

Jennifer’s interest in performance was shared by some EQUATOR team members at Nottingham University. She found the collaboration to be very beneficial to her research and this led to several publications. Jennifer also found the EQUATOR group workshops to be extremely helpful for giving presentations and fostering many research links which fed into her work.

Jennifer organised a few hands-on ‘extreme prototyping’ workshops, which gave her the venue to create, promote and expand the understanding of Digital Live Art. These workshops produced refereed publications at international conferences and were partly funded by EQUATOR.

Jennifer completed her PhD thesis, Digital Live Art: Mediating Wittingness in Playful Arenas in 2006. According to Jennifer “mediating wittingness allows people to step in or out of a live performance based on their knowledge or awareness of the performance frame”. Her PhD work generated iPoi, a wireless, peer-to-peer interface, which is currently being supported as part of the AHRC-funded Design for the 21st Century ‘Emergent Objects: Designing the human/technology interface through performance’.

In her quest to develop a network of practitioners and academics who reflected on Digital Live Art in real-world situations and unanticipated performance spaces, Jennifer co-chaired (re)Actor: the first international conference on Digital Live Art at the HCI 2006 Conference. The conference attracted a different crowd – more people from humanities and a lot more women, who usually find technology very intimidating. Jennifer attributes the success of drawing women to technology to “it is how you approach the technology; if you have to struggle through the process yourself and you know what those fears are, it is much easier to get people to warm up to the idea”. She also adds “I have so often seen computing people doing the technology and performance people doing the performance; there were no knowledge transfer”. With this in mind and following last year’s success, the organisers are hosting this year’s conference as an event in its own right, reActor2. The focus of reActor2 is on women, computing and the arts.

Jennifer enjoyed her time she spent working on EQUATOR, she found it to be beneficial for her PhD work and found the collaboration to be very insightful, creative and motivating.

Jennifer is now running her own company, BigDog Interactive.