3.3 Practice-based Art Research
3.4 Interactive Art
4.1 Interaction and the Computer
4.2 Interaction: From Complex to Simple
4.3 Interaction: From Reaction to Influence
4.4 Long-term Engagement
4.5 Distributed Interaction
4.6 Interaction Engagement and Experience
4.7 Categories of Interaction Revisited
4.8 Revisiting the Example Artworks
4.9 On the Implications for HCI
5.1 Art, Games, and Play
5.1.1 Lessons
5.2 Art, Beta-testing, and Experience Design
5.2.1 Lessons
5.3 Art, Engagement, and Research
5.3.1 Lessons
5.4 Social Mixed-reality Play Space
5.4.1 Lessons
6 Conclusion: The Next HCI Vocabulary
Acknowledgements
This book originated from a keynote talk given to the Create10 conference held in Edinburgh in 2010: “The art of interaction”, Proceedings of Create10, Edinburgh 2010. https://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/36532. (The original presentation can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W5MzJY_QU4.) Thanks are expressed to the organisers of the conference and Michael Smyth, in particular, for inviting me. A version of this paper was subsequently published in the journal Digital Creativity (“The art of interaction”, Digital Creativity, 21:4, 2011. 257–264, DOI: 10.1080/14626268.2010.556347).
The book also draws on my chapter “Interactive art”, in Candy, L. and Edmonds, E. A. (2011). Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner. Libri Press, Oxford, pp. 18–32.
I am very grateful to my students and collaborators whose work I have explicitly drawn on: Stephen Bell, Zafer Bilda, Andrew Bluff, Matthew Connell, Stroud Cornock, Gina Czarnecki, Brigid Costello, Mark Fell, Francesca Franco, Andrew Johnston, Lizzie Muller, and Mike Quantrill. I am equally grateful to the many other students and collaborators with whom I have worked over the years, all of whom have helped me understand interactive art, HCI, and the relationship between the two. For many stimulating conversations that have informed my thinking, I am indebted to Margaret Boden, Gerhard Fischer, John Gero, Tom Hewett, Ben Shneiderman, and the many members of the art and HCI communities who have encouraged and influenced me.
I am grateful for the thoughtful suggestions made by the reviewers of my first draft of this book. Finally, I would like to thank Linda Candy for her advice and suggestions about the text and, above all, for the unfailing support that she has offered over many years.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Interactive art has become a common part of life as a result of the many ways in which the computer and the Internet have facilitated it. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is as important to interactive art making as the colours of paint are to painting. It is not that HCI and art share goals. It is just that much of the knowledge of HCI and its methods can contribute to interactive art making. This means that artists have been taking a very serious interest in HCI, including as part of their research activities. They have discovered some interesting things that can contribute to HCI. In learning from art, it is important to take the relevant value systems into account and, as art is deeply human, I will come at HCI from a very human perspective. I will not be discussing how to design products that will do well in the market. I will show how art can help HCI in its endeavour to enrich life and expand our understanding of human experience of interaction. This book reviews recent work in the area of art research and proposes contributions that these make to HCI.
Figure 1.1: Shaping Space, Ernest Edmonds. Site Gallery Sheffield 2012. Photo by Robert Edmonds, 2012.
In interactive digital art, the artist is concerned with how the artwork behaves, how the audience interacts with it and, ultimately, in participants’ experiences and their degree of engagement. In this book, I examine these issues and bring together a collection of research results and art practice experiences that help to illuminate this significant new and expanding area. In particular, I suggest that this work points towards a much-needed critical language that can be used both to describe, compare, and discuss interactive systems art and to frame research in HCI, particularly in relation to support for creativity.
This book is, in essence, a lecture. It is written as such and so covers basic background material, some of which most readers will know. However different readers will know different parts of that background. For some, the historical context sections might readily be skipped, depending on the reader’s knowledge. As with all good lectures, the intention is not just to impart information, not even primarily to impart information. The intention is to stimulate thinking about creativity and the future of HCI and to encourage further reading and exploration. At times my text is informal and I do not shy away from expressing opinion that, as yet, I cannot back up with hard evidence. Stimulating questions in the reader’s mind is as important in this lecture as providing answers. The biggest question that I pose is: How best can HCI researchers learn from interactive art?
Digital art is increasingly interactive. Some of it is built on notions that come from computer games and much of it is intended to engage the audience in some form of interactive experience that is a key element in the aesthetics of the art.
This book reviews recent work that looks at the design of interactive systems in the art context. The concerns in HCI of experience design and understanding user engagement are especially relevant ones. We are not so much concerned with task analysis, error prevention, or task completion times as with issues such as pleasure, play, and long-term engagement.
In interactive digital art, the artist is concerned with how the artwork behaves, how the audience interacts with it
