As marketers, we often ask: How can we better connect with our audiences? What more can we do? How else can we reach out?
The question we don’t ask as often is: How can we help our audience feel connected to us? Enabling, rather than pushing.
Recently, I saw a fantastic example of technology-as-connection at a concert (on a boat) by singer-songwriter-music technologist Imogen Heap. She performed using mi.mu gloves, a technology she (and a team of smart engineers) developed that fits a pair of gloves with sensors, so that every motion controls the sound in the same way that a soundboard might.
Instead of sliding a knob to move sound around the room, she could point. A twist of the wrist might record a snippet of music from the song’s intro, then a flick send it out again to fill the room as her backing track. Of course, this is something that could be done with a sound tech at the control panel, or by a performer multitasking with a set of sound controls, but the experience is profoundly different when it gains physicality.
Instead of sound editing happening behind the scenes, invisible, it became an inextricable part of the performance – actively breaking down the barrier between performer and audience by bringing the whole show into the moment.
So I wonder – where else can performers and brands of all sorts use technology to make the work that they do real and physical, so that audiences are able to make the connections they seek)?
(In general, mi.mu gloves are pretty cool. Check out their website for how they work, for DIY ideas and for ways that they are helping people with disabilities communicate and use technology).
Image is “Wearable Technology” by
Keoni Cabral, available under a CC BY 2.0 license. ©2012