Live Interfaces is an open access, peer-reviewed and media-rich journal that aims to reflect on how specific understandings of ‘liveness’, ‘immediacy’, ‘timing’ and ‘flow’ manifest in performance with creative media, be they physical, electronic, digital or hybrid. It seeks to expose and discuss how different technologies and creative processes might convey original approaches to and/ or alienation from the physical body and the natural environment. 

While vitally necessary debates on environmental impact and sustainability continue to develop more widely, so do social “off-grid” movements translating extreme disaffection with technology. This makes the role of work with live interfaces in the performing arts – encompassing music, visual arts, dance, puppetry, robotics, and games amongst other forms – more important than ever. Such work can offer critical, communicative approaches to the technologies it creatively mobilises.

“Live interfaces” will show how artistic practices can inform and inspire us in our ever-evolving environment, challenging, subverting, and providing insights into technologies that otherwise remain too unquestionably integral to much human communication and expression.  This online journal aims to serve a platform for eminently live work and dialogue. 

Not coincidentally, its name recalls the International Conference on Live Interfaces (ICLI); that is because it stems from a desire to expand the research developed by a growing community, which addresses these issues in a wealth of different ways. So far, ICLI took place in Newcastle, UK (ICLI 2012), Lisbon, Portugal (ICLI 2014), Sussex, UK (ICLI 2016), Porto, Portugal (ICLI 2018), Trondheim, Norway (ICLI 2020) and Lisbon, again (ICLI 2022). The chairs and co-chairs of these conferences are also members of the journal board.