We built PAVLOV before GDPR was a household word. Back when the idea of a warm, helpful AI assistant guiding your every move still felt like science fiction rather than Tuesday morning. We thought: what if we made that the show?
PAVLOV is an interactive theatre experience for one. Just you, a pair of headphones, and a silky-smooth AI personal assistant who's delighted to have you as a beta tester. Set inside the lesser-known corridors and spaces of LIPA, it's a 15-minute promenade through a world on the cusp of its biggest technological breakthrough — and a slow-burn realisation that the line between helpful and invasive is thinner than you think.
The fictional mega-corporation Dumat needs volunteers for their PAVLOV system. You're one of the lucky ones chosen for an exclusive preview. PAVLOV will guide you, assist you, understand you. Progress in machine learning is accelerating, after all. This is a seminal moment. Sign up here. We'll guide you through the steps.
What audiences didn't know walking in was how much we already knew about them.
How We Pulled It Off
PAVLOV is a single-audience promenade experience — one person at a time, fully live, every performance unique. The audience member is wired up with headphones at the start; from that moment, "Pavlov" speaks directly into their ears via a Sennheiser wireless IEM system piped from our control room. A hidden radio mic lets our voice actors and operators hear everything the audience member says, creating real two-way interaction in real time.
We built a custom host application that received OSC commands from our Stage Manager's iPad, giving us surgical control over every beat of the experience. A smartphone strapped to the headset streamed live accelerometer data for head-tracking, feeding into an ambisonics engine that placed sounds in 3D space around the listener as they moved through the building. Turn left, and a voice appears on your left. The world bends around you.
Tools used: QLab · Reaper · AmbiX · Blue Ripple O3A Core · Touch OSC · Dante
The Team
Producer / Sound Designer — Findlay Claydon Writer / Director — Harry Machray Designer — Dylan Howells Composer — Tammy Howarth Stage Manager — Kate Condon
Pavlov — Dylan Howells · Margot — Jenny Plackemeier · Sidney — Kate Condon
We wrote PAVLOV in 2017 to reflect on the vast amounts of personal data collected by large tech companies — a fact that, at the time, was surprisingly easy to miss. A few years later, the world caught up. We'd already been inside your head.
