Creating the spectacle

Interactions 20 (5), 16-20, 2013

inte rac ti o n s S e pte m b e r + O c to b e r 2 013

… Conference of the …, 2010

While technologies and theories of interactive media have developed exponentially over the past twenty five years, an aesthetics of interactivity, as a philosophy of perception and validation of interactivity as a form of art, has been slower to emerge. While aesthetic inquiry has expanded to investigate the sensuous perception of many forms of electronic art, interactivity as an expressive medium, challenges many fundamental assumptions of traditional aesthetics This paper addresses the performative aesthetics of interactivity through a consideration of a programme of interactive art works presented through the Digital Art Live (DAL) project in Auckland. The DAL initiative is New Zealand’s only specialised, ongoing, interactive art programme. It has engaged both public and private entities, artists, developers, community organizations, staff and students from three universities. The location of the DAL screen in a performing arts complex introduces some new perspectives into the emerging discourse about interaction, aesthetics and creative practices. Nine DAL projects are considered in relation to issues raised in Simon Penny’s critical interrogation of the performative aesthetics of interactivity (2010) and literature on contemporary aesthetics. Key issues including the importance of aesthetic inquiry; the notion of performativity as meaningful, embodied practice; object/veiwer spatial relationships; synesthetics and the interdisciplinarity of interactve art; and the relationship between representation and interaction are adressed as part of ongoing research into interactive art that is being conducted through the DAL project.

2006

In this paper we discuss an adaptive museum guide prototype in which playfulness is a key design goal for the interaction experience. The interface for our prototype is a combined tangible user interface and audio display. We discuss how we determined the specific requirements for play through an ethnographic study and analysis based on ecological concepts of Bell and Nardi & O'Day. We found that we could consider play in two main forms in regard to the interface: content and physical play. We also found that play is highly contextual. Designers need to consider the situated nature of play for two reasons: 1) to best serve the overall design purpose; 2) in order to understand the nature and degree of play required. We augmented traditional user experience evaluation methods of questionnaires and interviews with observational analysis based on Djajadiningrat's descriptions of aesthetic interaction.

Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Digital Arts - Crossing Digital Boundaries, ARTECH 2012, 2012

This article analyzes the effects of the reduction of physical distance between artwork and spectator/participant during aesthetic experiences. It claims that immersion and transparency, so commonly found in interactive artworks, extend a design strategy found in everyday gadgets and appliances. However, despite their power to engage the spectator in a sensual experience, they seem to lack critical thought, considered here as a key aspect of art experiences. Regarding this situation, the text proposes three pathways for a critical interactive art practice.

Proceedings of the 27th international conference on …, 2009

As HCI becomes more self-consciously implicated in culture, theories from cultural studies, in particular aesthetics and critical theory, are increasingly working their way into the field. However, the use of aesthetics and critical theory in HCI remains both marginal and uneven in quality. This paper explores the state of the art of aesthetics and critical theory in the field, before going on to explore the role of these cultural theories in the analysis and deployment of the twin anchors of interaction: the user and the artifact. In concludes with a proposed mapping of aesthetics and critical theory into interaction design, both as a practice and as a discipline.

newmedia.yeditepe.edu.tr

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005

Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCIhow should spectators experience a performer's interaction with a computer? We classify public interfaces (including examples from art, performance and exhibition design) according to the extent to which a performer's manipulations of an interface and their resulting effects are hidden, partially revealed, fully revealed or even amplified for spectators. Our taxonomy uncovers four broad design strategies: 'secretive,' where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; 'expressive,' where they tend to be revealed enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer's interaction; 'magical,' where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally 'suspenseful,' where manipulations are apparent but effects are only revealed as the spectator takes their turn.

Citeseer

The relationship between interface and content helps to formulate the user experience. The term interface here refers to the way people access systems which in the context of this paper, are not limited to hardware such as mouse and keyboard, or to graphical user interfaces (GUI's). The interface has a significant effect on how the connection between the user and the content manifests and is traditionally seen as mediating this connection. This paper seeks to explore this relationship in instances where the user has a 'thick' relationship -meaning one with an increased personal or subjective association -to the content. Content (sometimes known as data) is, according to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, "that which is contained", in this case by a socio-technical system. In such systems, it is the interface that allows us to access, share, manipulate, generate or communicate with or through it. This paper explores complex content-interface relationships by looking at interactive artworks, commonly designed to be explicitly subjective and personal experiences. In doing so we ask whether use in an art context can inform the development of everyday systems where users have a personal or 'thick' relationship to the content, such as when choosing search terms, generating personal content through communication tools such as SMS and email, or when considering context aware or pervasive computing.

2020

This artwork exploits recent research into augmented reality systems, such as the HoloLens, for building creative interaction in augmented reality. The work is being conducted in the context of interactive art experiences. The first version of the audience experience of the artwork, "H Space", was informally tested in the SIGGRAPH 2018 Art Gallery context. Experiences with a later, improved, version was evaluated at Tsinghua University. The latest distributed version will be shown in Sydney. The paper describes the concept, the background in both the art and the technological domain and points to some of the key computer human interaction art research issues that the work highlights.