Interactive Installation Research Articles

The audience experience of immersion through intersubjective embodiment in Sensuous Geographies (2003)

Abstract This article analyses an immersive interactive installation Sensuous Geographies (2003), created by choreographer Sarah Rubidge in collaboration with composer Alistair MacDonald. It applies phenomenological philosophies to critical interpretations of audience participants’ embodied experience. Rubidge employs choreographic sensibilities in designing a performative human–computer interface where the participants create their own sonic signature through physical behaviours while interacting with each other. The digital sound emerges as the ‘dys-appearing body’, as philosopher Drew Leder terms it, because it becomes part of their doubled embodiment but is perceptible due to its otherness. Moreover, the emergent sound embodies the participant’s subjectivity, which develops out of inter-subjectivity, since it is not transparent for the participant him/herself but generated through the intertwinement of the self and others. The self-perception of the corporeal body is heightened through digital imagery, costumes, facial veils and tactile materials, which provide the participant with a more intuitive and embodying experience of the sonic environment.

Android Corporeality, Transhuman Performance and the Japanese ‘Mind’

This essay examines Alter, an android that was developed collaboratively by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro and A-Life (artificial life) scientist Takashi Ikegami. Alter is an experimental robot platform conceived as a ‘machine human’. Alter was created at the juncture of Ishiguro’s interest in android appearance and Ikegami’s search for what he sees as internal principles underlying life. While Ishiguro’s anthropomorphic machines are intended as models for future humanoid robots in workplaces and domestic contexts, they are also intended as experimental tools for his investigations on human identity, the ‘soul’, and sociality, and related philosophical questions, such as ‘What is the human?’ In contrast, Ikegami works with a different question: ‘What is natural life?’ Ikegami’s question emerges from his research interest in and development of artificial life systems, which combine computer simulation, chemical experiments, and robotics. Alter, presented as an interactive performance installation at a science museum in Japan in 2016, was intended as a model with which to study human embodiment and sentience. In this essay, I examine how Alter’s 2016 performance was designed dramaturgically to induce a sense of agency hovering between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and mechanical, the random and controlled, and between the autonomous and programmed. I discuss how Alter rehearsed human-machine inter-corporeality, and how its dramaturgical staging contributed to its agency.

Polícia, Bandido, Cachorro, Dentista

O artigo descreve o desenvolvimento da instalação audiovisual interativa Polícia, Bandido, Cachorro, Dentista inspirada na obra do músico e compositor Sérgio Sampaio. Exibida no Museu Nacional da Republica em Brasília, a instalação permite ao público a mixagem audiovisual por meio do toque sobre objetos de metal. Construída inteiramente com tecnologias open source, a obra converte ready mades como panelas e baldes em instrumentos de mídia que atuam sobre som e projeção de vídeo em tempo real. A partir da noção de metamídia e remixibilidade profunda, o artigo destaca como o processo artístico inspirado na Cultura Maker e DiY experimenta o uso de software, interatividade e mídias audiovisuais.

Art for Sale: Covering the Contemporary, Courting the Commercial

Art for Sale: Covering the Contemporary, Courting the Commercial

Cultural Artefacts with Virtual Capabilities Enhance Self-Expression Possibilities for Children with Special Needs.

In this paper we discuss how new combinations of technology, art and culture enable children with special needs new ways to express themselves. UN declaration (UDHR) states "All human beings have the right to participate in cultural life, enjoy art…", later including children (CRC) and persons with disabilities (CRPD). To meet these UN demands, several countries have created cultural programs to offer children art and culture activities in school. In the Norwegian Cultural Schoolbag-program they emphasize that art and culture can provide experiences that may be decisive in order to develop the individual's personal identity, life quality and alternative worldviews. Since 2015 one county offers a unique "Accessible-Program" for children with special needs. From many years of research, we know the health-promoting value of artistic and musical activities. New technology opens up completely new ways to make art and culture accessible for all. In this paper, we show how we used music and cultural artefacts with musical and visual capabilities (RFID, AI), giving diverse users new musical, artistic, sensorial and creative experiences. We do this in relation to Ruud's concepts of Health Affordance and Cultural Immunogen. As a travelling interactive art installation, being part of the Norwegian "Accessible-Program", we made participatory observations in six schools. We experienced how the children expressed themselves, co-created, showed self-efficacy and made different cultural experiences, depending on disability and relations. With this paper, we emphasize that art and culture, in combination with technology, offers valuable new health-promoting potentialities, important for the UD community.

Layered Motion and Gesture Sonification in an Interactive Installation

Layered Motion and Gesture Sonification in an Interactive Installation

Light Harvest: an interactive sculptural installation based on folding and mapping proteins

ABSTRACTLight Harvest is an interactive sculptural installation that explores a protein called Light-Harvesting Complex II (LHCII) in the realm of materials, digital fabrication, projection mapping and interaction design. This article gives an account of the making of Light Harvest, a collaboration between an artist/designer, a structural biologist, and an interaction design technologist. The artistic concepts in material construction and digital techniques are drawn from protein folding, sophisticated mapping processes in protein X-ray crystallography, and the remarkable abilities of LHCI proteins to convert full-spectrum visible sunlight to useful energy for life. Through its interactive installation, Light Harvest engages us in an appreciation and understanding of the biological processes studied and the scientific techniques used to study them.

Bird Song Diamond in Deep Space 8k

The Bird Song Diamond (BSD) project is a series of multifaceted and multidisciplinary installations with the aim of bringing contemporary research on bird communication to a large public audience. Using art and technology to create immersive experiences, BSD allows large audiences to embody bird communication rather than passively observe. In particular, BSD Mimic, a system for mimicking bird song, asks participants to grapple with both audition and vocalization of birdsong. The use of interactive installations for public outreach provides unique experiences to a diverse audience, while providing direct feedback for artists and researchers interested in the success of such outreach. By following an iterative design process, both artists and researchers have been able to evaluate the effectiveness of each installation for promoting audience engagement with the subject matter. The execution and evaluation of each iteration of BSD is described throughout the paper. In addition, the process of interdisciplinary collaboration in our project has led to a more defined role of the artist as a facilitator of specialists. BSD Mimic has also led to further questions about the nature of audience collaboration for an engaged experience.

The Battle between Simplified and Traditional: Chinese Text-based Interactive Installations and French Lettrism

This paper will discuss several Chinese text-based interactive installations from Taiwan and Hong Kong which reflect the anxiety about facing the growing influence of Simplified Chinese and the cultural power from Mainland China. As a logosyllabic script, Chinese is structurally distinctive from alphabetical scripts. However, the ideas of French Lettrism on creating art through deconstructing languages to its smallest particles and using them as objects for a new form of aesthetics and social-political struggle has similarities with some Chinese text-based interactive arts of recent years. This paper will discuss how the ideas from Lettrism can be applied to artistic creations and to analyze Chinese text-based interactive works, so as to examine the specificity of Chinese-based works and the ways they handle the topics of China’s cultural expansion.

Advertising Positions: Data Portraiture as Aesthetic Critique

Advertising Positions integrates 3D scanning, motion capture, novel image mapping algorithms and custom animation to create data portraits from the advertisements served by online trackers. Project volunteers use bespoke software to harvest the ads they receive over months of browsing. When enough ads have been collected, the volunteer is interviewed, 3D scanned and motion captured. Each ad is then mapped to a single polygon on the textured skin of their virtual avatar. Outcomes have been displayed as 2D/3D images, animations and interactive installations.

FeelOpo

FeelOpo is an interactive art installation that allows contact with fragments of the immaterial heritage of the Oporto City in the North of Portugal. Through location-based storytelling of the living city, this interactive installation allows visitors to explore, at different levels, several typical characteristics of this city, addressing aspects of cultural identity based on contrasting images and videos. The visitors feel and explore visual stories of the live city, through a process of appropriation and articulation of these narratives, generating an expansion of this intangible heritage.

Wi-Fi Defiance

Abstract As programs of internet surveillance have increasingly pervaded our contemporary social and political lives, resistance has become necessary for those seeking to evade online data tracking. This article interrogates such resistance through an examination of Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum’s Autonomy Cube (2014)—an installation that initiates a public Wi-Fi hotspot using the open-source anonymizing Tor network. Allowing connected viewers to retain their independence from internet surveillance, this work is often discussed as offering a model of resistance in terms of self-determined autonomy. In its reading of the interactive installation through the lens of systems theory, however, this article qualifies autonomy as at once distributed and communally managed yet sensitive to the ways in which infrastructures of wireless technologies are deeply imbricated in lived social realities. Ultimately, this article gestures toward a model of resistance that acknowledges the dissensual shifts between the local public Wi-Fi network and the global internet commons.

A Multi-Sensory Approach to Cultural Heritage: The Battle of Pavia Exhibition

In the last years, several museums and exhibits have adopted new kinds of interactive installations that present artworks in more attractive ways, especially for young visitors. At the same time, new communication technologies have been introduced to allow vision and motion impaired people to visit arts centers. In this work, we present the multi-sensory solutions we have implemented for the “Battle of Pavia” Exhibition, a collateral event of Milan Expo 2015. The installation combined different interaction methods to achieve two main goals: providing visitors with engaging experiences and allowing blind and partially sighted people to appreciate the exposed artworks. The used technologies include gesture communication, gaze-based interaction, 3D character reconstruction, virtual avatars, and 3D tactile images. This work can be also viewed in the context of digital humanities for cultural heritage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exhibit to gather such a high number of interactive technologies in a single installation. The positive response from visitors is a great spur to continue our research in this direction.

"Enheduanna-A Manifesto of Falling" Live Brain-Computer Cinema Performance: Performer and Audience Participation, Cognition and Emotional Engagement Using Multi-Brain BCI Interaction.

The fields of neural prosthetic technologies and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have witnessed in the past 15 years an unprecedented development, bringing together theories and methods from different scientific fields, digital media, and the arts. More in particular, artists have been amongst the pioneers of the design of relevant applications since their emergence in the 1960s, pushing the boundaries of applications in real-life contexts. With the new research, advancements, and since 2007, the new low-cost commercial-grade wireless devices, there is a new increasing number of computer games, interactive installations, and performances that involve the use of these interfaces, combining scientific, and creative methodologies. The vast majority of these works use the brain-activity of a single participant. However, earlier, as well as recent examples, involve the simultaneous interaction of more than one participants or performers with the use of Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multi-brain BCIs. In this frame, we discuss and evaluate “Enheduanna—A Manifesto of Falling,” a live brain-computer cinema performance that enables for the first time the simultaneous real-time multi-brain interaction of more than two participants, including a performer and members of the audience, using a passive EEG-based BCI system in the context of a mixed-media performance. The performance was realised as a neuroscientific study conducted in a real-life setting. The raw EEG data of seven participants, one performer and two different members of the audience for each performance, were simultaneously recorded during three live events. The results reveal that the majority of the participants were able to successfully identify whether their brain-activity was interacting with the live video projections or not. A correlation has been found between their answers to the questionnaires, the elements of the performance that they identified as most special, and the audience's indicators of attention and emotional engagement. Also, the results obtained from the performer's data analysis are consistent with the recall of working memory representations and the increase of cognitive load. Thus, these results prove the efficiency of the interaction design, as well as the importance of the directing strategy, dramaturgy and narrative structure on the audience's perception, cognitive state, and engagement.

Performative spaces in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The purpose of this article is to analyze the spatial and temporal relationships in the works of art of Ann Veronica Janssens and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer through the performative. We understand the performative, as a spatio-temporal artistic action that triggers perception, abstraction and political activation. The performative act between the work and the spectator is therefore the essential element of reflection. In the first part, we analyze the decelerated spaces of Ann Veronica Janssens, where the performativity of bodies in spaces and through an ephemeral materiality configures a space in constant transformation. In a second part, we analyze the relational spaces of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In his interactive installations, the performative forms an intrinsic part of the work, so that the meeting between the spectator and the work takes place temporarily. Finally, we conclude that these works of art produce a political activation of the environment that proposes the viewer as the true interlocutor who co-produces the work. This work is framed in the new spatio-temporal performativities in contemporary art.

Landscape of connectivity. Measuring and representing fluctuations in wireless network traffic in space

Abstract Measuring and understanding the propagation of wireless network signals in buildings is an important task for the planning of both architecture and wireless networks. This article documents an approach to understanding the wireless network traffic load in a location-specific manner, based on the users. The traffic counting system enables relating of traffic load (both cellular and Wi-Fi) to a position in space, using Connect or Not smartphone application. Positioning tracking is based on two technologies: Wi-Fi fingerprints, created using existing networking infrastructure and Bluetooth beacons installed at testing locations. The positioning system is able to track movement through space to a satisfactory level. The system was tested in the context of interactive installations as well as long-term observations of user behaviour in space. These experiments facilitate the conceptualization of a communication landscape, highlighting the activity of people and devices in the network layer. The system can, thus, be useful for post-occupancy evaluations. Moreover, it enables a profound understanding of signal propagation and use patterns in space. We argue that the compound measurement of these two phenomena, which are rarely related, forms a productive base for understanding the relevance of built architecture for the design of wireless infrastructures, and vice versa.

Perancangan Instalasi Interaktif Komposisi Musik dan Visual (Studi Kasus: Tari Saman)

On such era of globalization, we can’t only focus on utilization of technological advances, we also have to look on the implementation and development of technological advances itself. Creativity of each individual is a basis in the birth of new innovations if supported by the proper technology. We expected the merger of technology and creativity, along with the local culture will be able to maintain the values and integrity of Indonesian national identity. As a case study, “Interactive Installation Design of Music and Visual Composition From Saman Dance” is one attempt to realize the above ideas. The result of the design of this interactive installation is a game tool for composing music and visual. Different from the pre-existing games, on this game the user is the one who controls the system, not the opposite.

Children's Queered Voicings

Beginning in 2012, the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and a number of other stakeholders supported voice artist Yvon Bonenfant to undertake a sustained process of performance-making for children aged 6-11. Taking advantage of the decreasing cost of working with audience-responsive digital infrastructure, Bonenfant and his team developed a live, interactive touring performance; an interactive installation artwork; and an iPad app. These artworks all intended to elicit the unusual voicings of their audience, and then entice the audience into generating increasingly sophisticated, inter-sensory vocal art, made from non-normative (or extended, unusual) vocal sounds. Through so doing, the artworks intended to celebrate the joy of vocal difference with their users. However, the works raised interesting questions about participation, invitation, coercion, discourses of ‘freeing the voice’, and the nature of the power structures embedded in this kind of participatory performance with children. Four problematic dynamics are addressed: Firstly, we explore how the artworks took advantage of a seeming neurodevelopmental predisposition to respond to their invitations. Secondly, we explore the role of live performers, the pace at which they move children through participatory activities, and to what degree their actions open up a sense of participant choice, or inversely, highlight a lack thereof. Next, the design language of the artworks, and both its inviting and coercive qualities, is explored. Finally, the nature of the ‘internal story’ told by the bodies of the participants to the participants themselves within the experience of the works is discussed. Through so doing, the article asserts that because the intention to take our child audience into a space of vocal ‘freedom’ and the attendant liberatory affect, is realised largely when the wider culture constructs such sound as forbidden; and its conclusions meditate on the implications of this.

“We Are Victims of Our Past . . .”— Israel’s Dark History Comes to Light in New Documentaries

“We Are Victims of Our Past . . .”— Israel’s Dark History Comes to Light in New Documentaries

Digital matter as interdisciplinary commodity

<p>With the current exponential growth in the sector of Spatial Data Technology and Mixed Reality display devises we experience an increasing overlap of the physical and digital world. Next to making data spatially visible the attempt is to connect digital information with physical properties. Over the past years a number of research institutions have been laying the ground for these developments. In contemporary architecture architectural design the dominant application of data technology is connected to graphical presentation, form finding and digital fabrication.<br />The <em>arc/sec Lab for Digital Spatial Operations </em>at the University of Auckland takes a further step. The Lab explores concepts for a new condition of buildings and urban patterns in which digital information is connected with spatial appearance and linked to material properties. The approach focuses on the step beyond digital re-presentation and digital fabrication, where data is re-connected to the multi-sensory human perceptions and physical skills. The work at the Lab is conducted in a cross disciplinary design environment and based on experiential investigations. The arc/sec Lab utilizes large-scale interactive installations as the driving vehicle for the exploration and communication of new dimensions in architectural space. The experiments are aiming to make data “touchable” and to demonstrate real time responsive environments. In parallel they are the starting point for both the development of practice oriented applications and speculation on how our cities and buildings might change in the future.<br />The article gives an overview of the current experiments being undertaken at the arc/sec Lab. It discusses how digital technologies allow for innovation between the disciplines by introducing real time adaptive behaviours to our build environment and it speculates on the type of spaces we can construct when <em>digital matter </em>is used as a new dynamic building material.</p>