‘Liveness’ is a term most commonly associated with performance and theatre studies, which describes the distinctiveness of experiencing live performance. With liveness, emphasis is placed on the value of interaction between performers and audiences during live performances. The term is used in order to relate ideas of what is live to what is considered real, in contrasts to recorded, remediated or representations of performances. Although the term emerged to highlight the distinctiveness of experiencing live performance, this has received criticism recently as being too global and generalising, without sufficiently accounting for context, or as being too dismissive of mediatisation as secondary to that which is live. More recently the concept of liveness has been broadened from performance studies to also include, for example, digital artistic productions that share similar principles of interactive experience.
