P3R: Performance, Participation, Provenance and Reward in Responsible AI

In a climate of declining live performance venues and rising AI developments, artists, audiences, and venues all need to be reimagined through responsible AI futures. At one end of the spectrum, the live performance space is being transformed, especially in live music contexts as seen in mega-productions like Abba Voyage, or KISS, whose introduction of their digital avatars are in partnership with big tech companies to re-invent the live experience as entirely virtual for artists. At the other end of the spectrum, the UK has experienced a net loss of 125 grassroots music venues in 2023, equivalent to approximately one-tenth of the sector. Responding to BRAID’s AI for Inspired Innovation theme, ‘P3R: Performance, Participation, Provenance and Reward in Responsible AI’ proposes a new and imaginative performance landscape that addresses these challenges of rising costs and declining venues asking: How can we innovatively re-conceptualise live performance in a diminishing financial sector for diverse and emerging artists and smaller or grassroots venues using AI infrastructures? This future landscape places creativity and inspired innovation at the centre of the development of responsible AI infrastructures and collective values of privacy, provenance and reward. AI innovation is inspired, tested and piloted in P3R by both need and opportunity: the need to re-imagine what grass roots venues can become as live performance and AI grow together, and the opportunity to leverage CoSTAR, the UK’s largest ever investment, into creative industries R&D in support of an entirely new value chain of creative development. Through a demonstrator model, P3R seeks to galvanise equitable access to the rapidly developing AI-driven technologies and research expertise that will reshape the creative industries and put it at the disposal of younger, diverse audiences and talent who come to performance with an expectation of digital participation. P3R’s aims and objectives are to demonstrate and engage with new audiences to show what performance might look like in a world where immersive personalised and spatial experiences are the norm; to give artists, audiences, and venues the capabilities needed to manage ethical provenance and reward; to create conditions for the exploration of creative data via a human-centred AI-enabled blockchain platform that intersects with creative tools and practices; and to develop and pilot experiences for audiences demonstrating the potential to creative performance, participation, provenance and reward. The integration of research, AI development, collaboration with industry stakeholders, artists, audiences, and venues will result not only in pilot demonstrators but will also facilitate dissemination of outcomes, tool-kits and impact across key performance and screen sectors. Working with Industry partners as well as venue partners in Wales and Northern Ireland, P3R’s demonstrator will leverage the CoSTAR network to ensure that it is scalable beyond the initial scope of this grant and is integrated into the long-term creative industries R&D ecosystem. P3R’s goal is to imagine a performance future in which artists and audiences can interact and innovate in responsible AI-driven venues without reliance on proprietary big-tech platforms, and with the security of an equitable AI driven data sharing system.