Audience participation

Audience participation is an artistic approach in which audiences actively make, alter, perform, or otherwise shape an artwork. The audience’s actions become part of the work rather than merely responses to it.

Interactive art: Art that changes in response to actions by viewers or other participants. Interaction is a direct way audiences can affect an artwork’s form or behavior.
Yoko Ono's Cut Piece: A 1964 performance by Yoko Ono in which audience members cut away pieces of her clothing. The audience’s physical actions directly shaped the performance as it unfolded.
Dada: An early twentieth-century avant-garde movement that rejected established artistic and cultural conventions. Dada performances and events helped unsettle passive spectatorship.
Spectatorship: The condition of observing an event or artwork without taking part in its production or action. It marks the passive role that participatory approaches seek to unsettle.
Authorship: The creation or attribution of a work to one or more makers. Shared audience action complicates who can claim authorship of the resulting work.
Happenings: Experimental live events that combine performance, visual art, and audience activity. Happenings made audience action part of the event rather than keeping spectators separate.
Rirkrit Tiravanija's untitled 1992 (free): An installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija in which he cooked and served food to visitors in a gallery. Cooking and eating turned gallery visitors into participants in a social artwork.
Fluxus: An international art movement that emphasized playful, experimental actions and blurred art with everyday life. Fluxus instructions and events often invited participants to carry out the work.
Interactivity: A reciprocal exchange in which a system responds to actions by a person or another system. Interactivity can involve response without giving participants meaningful influence over the artwork.
Consent: Voluntary agreement to an action or arrangement, given with adequate understanding and freedom to refuse. Participation can expose people to demands or risks that require meaningful consent.

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