I Wish You Knew That You Are Me is a networked participatory performance that connects online and live audience members to collaboratively write a poem reflecting the collective’s dreams, memories, yearnings, untold stories, and inhibited fantasies.

The online audience can watch the performance via livestream and participate via a designated webpage, which prompts them to share something intimate about themselves anonymously. The live audience is cast as voices for the online audience and can participate by entering another designated webpage on their mobile phones.

During the performance, a performer activates individual live audience members, who then receive a randomly selected message submitted by the online audience. The live audience member is then instructed to perform and read it out loud in the performance space. Meanwhile, an artificial listener captures their speech, processes it using a speech-to-text algorithm, and projects it onto a screen, weaving their words into a visual tapestry.

The title I Wish You Knew That You Are Me emerged from the messages of the online audience during the first performance, encapsulating the work’s exploration of the aesthetics and poetics of communication, participation, and emergent collective behaviours.

I Wish You Knew That You Are Me was developed and performed for the Experiments in Networked Performance course at School for Poetic Computation (online & New York) in June 2023, in collaboration with Jonathan Thaw and Lauren Wedderburn.