Audience Participation in a Dance-club Context: Design of a System for Collaborative Creation of Visuals

The club environment contains a lot of interaction, mainly visitor to visitor but also between the visitor and the people employed by the club such as bartenders and DJs (disc jockey). There is not much a visitor can do to affect the environment, apart from asking the DJ if he or she would like to play a certain song. The people that attend the club should be able to enhance their own and everyone else’s experience by adding a personal influence to the visit to make it more interactive. We want the club to be a place where one can share visual material with all the other visitors, and where one can experience what other people want to show. A club is an exciting place, with a lot of different areas and activities, which makes it a suitable place for innovative experiments like this. This short paper will present a concept that shows how the clubbing experience can be more interactive and engaging by letting the visitors be responsible for the visuals that are displayed. We will first provide a context for our concept by giving an overview over the work others have done regarding expression, interaction and audience participation in night clubs. We also provide pointers to research about visuals in the club context as well as the role VJs (“video-” or “visual jockey”), DJs and (mobile) technology play in contemporary dance