Simon PennyTowards a Performative

Aesthetics of Interactivity

Kathryn HartogRhyan Mahazudin

Interactivity and the Emergence of Digital Cultural Practices

• The aesthetics of interaction has not advanced a great deal in recent times

• Forms of interaction that were once obscure (motion control) are now commercial commodities

• This essay looks at how the past innovated on design and theory and how we can look at this as inspiration for the future

1985-2005(roughly)

• Golden ages of interactive technology• During this time period interactive aesthetics were mainly

dependant on the technology available to them• There was a significant amount of time invested in to

R&D by both artists and engineers• Artists were less focused on user-subject experience

and more focused on artefact behaviour and creating bio mimetic artefacts

• Problem solving of work arounds for limited technology created a very organic development process, often requiring custom tech and coding. This led to more experimental theories and ideas

• This often required an extensive budget, as well as knowledge of engineering which most artists did not possess, creating a small niche where tech skills and artistic creativity fused together

• With the advent of using technology as a means of entertainment, the mass production and trivialisation of rich aesthetic-theoretical systems began

• This created a rift between people against technology and those for it

• This field of interactivity was becoming more accessible due to cheap over the counter tech bundles

• This stimulated a new generation of artists and allowed more interdisciplinary forms of interaction to be created

Major Advancements during this period

• Digital multimedia, hyper media, virtual reality, the internet, digital video, real time graphics, digital 3D, mobile telephony, GPS, bluetooth, wireless communication systems

• Although there were many tech advancements during this 20 year period, there was little development in formal qualities of interaction

Influential Artwork

• Edward Ihnatowicz – Senster– first work of robotic sculpture to be controlled

by a digital computer– A computer implemented a behavioural system so

that the Senster was attracted to sound and low level movement, but repelled by loud sounds and violent movements

• Myron Kreuger– Videoplace

• Machine vision• Artificial reality• His work predates motion controls in video games

by 40 years

• Grey Walters– Turtles – 1940

• Autonomous behaviour using minimal technology• Were as complex as a children's toy of the present

day• Early attempts to simulate A.I• Was entirely analog

Interactive Art before the PC

• This time period was more focused on inventiveness rather than commercial application

• Advances in A.I over 1965-1985 can be attributed to advances in hardware engineering

• There began a lack of ideas being developed

• Advances were being made more for monetary gain and commercial appeal, leaning more towards small improvements rather than innovation

Grounding Interaction

• Theoretical challenges– Traditional objects dont have behaviours

• Plastic art had limited theoretical tools available– “what does the act of interaction mean?”

• Fuller – “I seem to be a verb”– He emphasised process, performance and site specific

art(dynamic, procedural, performative and relational)– Proposed a critical paradigm shift in implications for theory and

practice of interactive art

• An interdisciplinary realm was created, scientific and human narratives collide and form more theorization

• Interaction makes sense to the extent that it is consistent with or analogous to the learned effects of action in “the real world”

• This could be due to the evolutionary adaptation to embodied experience in the world– Perceptions of gesture and sensor-motor experience

• Mimetic environments like second life

• Most common interactive forms are connections made from genetics– Perhaps we can use this information to create more organic interactions

Who or what is Interacting?• System design vs. User experience

– The question of “is it interactive?” has wildly different answers depending on your alignment

• Interaction is; mutually determining actions between two systems possessing agency, whether the critique addresses the experience of the user or the behaviour of the systems– The design of a system must complement the experience

• The system is viewed as an organism enactive in sensor-motor loops with user• Sensing must gather relevant information about the world and interpret it correctly• Content outputted must be meaningful and relate to users behaviour

• Creating intuitive access to unfamiliar modalities is part of the design task for artists

• Began to move away from the novelty of digital interaction and root themselves in more poetic interactions

Temporality and Poetry in Interaction

• Commercial success impedes aesthetic progress– Creates confusion between interactivity for instrumental

purposes and cultural purposes• Instrumental = intuitive and transparent• Cultural/aesthetic = behaviour which exists in territory between

perceived predictability and perceived randomness, a zone of surprise and of poetry

• Augmented Reality– Interactions based on analogical events are poetic– Maintains semblance of reality but distorts certain consistencies

• The dynamic of behaviour between the subject and the artefact was being explored

• Experience can be explained as a sequence of stoppages, a temporal process

• The action of the subject in the context of the work is what constitutes experience, less focused on the destination, and more on the temporal process

• Increase in use of technology which is elegant and economical

Influential Work

• David Rokeby– Very Nervous System

• Based more on dynamic use of temporal patterns rather than pictoral

• Machine vision for interactive artworks• Realised that colour was less important than the

temporal bodily dynamics

• Norman White– The helpless robot

• This piece pre empted affective computing that would be researched in institutions by a decade

• Pioneer in affective computing

• Affective Computing– Systems that recognize, interpret,process and

simulate human affects

• Artists had to tack on new modalities on to understood ones to demonstrate them– In contemporary interaction the tables have

turned, use of digital devices are widespread and serve as a window to obsolete/preceding technology

The Implicit, Enactive, Performative Body

• Interactive Systems fall under two camps– Ones that are simple and easy to understand– Ones that are complex and baffling

• Proposed is a new system that learns from its users and regulates the level of complexity accordingly using A.I

• Terminal Time– Such a system is used in terminal time, where the audience is asked

questions about their historical preferences, and then a documentary is cut together to suit their likes and dislikes accordingly

• Expressive A.I• This displayed automated reasoning and how the A.I was based on

observations

A.I autonomous agents and Virtual Ecologies

• Deeper understanding of the fusion between sensing and user action• Outcome of the experience is not prescribed, it is realized through

experience• Theoretical innovation of autonomous machines that users simply observe

– Resurgence of minimalist/formalist ideas• The reuniting of plastic art systems and interactive aesthetic systems• Pursuit of an organic interrelation between machine behaviour and

sensioriality/materiality than their predecessors could, due to tech restraints and the maturation of fine arts– The result is machine-machine interaction