Sundara Karma’s single, ‘Explore’, thematically explores the feedback loop that occurs between artists and fans as an artist’s career develops. To complement the track, we partnered with The Hook and Dot To Dot Festival to create the perfect “lean-in event”: the world’s first feedback loop interactive live-voted performance. The event was held in Manchester on 26th May 2017. During the event, we enabled viewers to vote on different aspects of the show: from band members’ outfits, to live stage visuals and production, performance antics and the setlist. Participants at the event contributed to the feedback loop by voting during the show and tagging/encouraging their friends to participate from home.

The hour-long livestream event and all interactive voting occurred on Facebook. The concept was based on Facebook livestream reaction polls, prevalent throughout the 2016 US elections. Taking learnings from highly engaged livestreamed content on Facebook, we established that user contributions on reaction polls need to be fundamental to the editorial and content narrative. Therefore, we created a dynamic multi-cam setup and enabled live input from viewers and attendees to control the show in real time. The event was streamed utilising Facebook’s Livestream API.