[ISEA2015] Paper: Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo & Greg Corness – Aesthetics of Immersion in Interactive Immersive Installation: Phenomenological Case Study

Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Immersive installation, aesthetics of immersion, immersive Consciousness, audio-visual, case study.

This paper examines the aesthetics of immersive experience in Light Strings, an interactive immersive environment. One of prominent aspects of Interactive Art is the notion of immersion. The concept of immersion is generally defined as a viewer “forgetting” the real world outside of the virtual environment and by a sense of being in a make-believe world generated by computational hardware and software. As an interactive artist and researcher, I conceive of immersion as any experience where integrated bodily, conscious, and pre-conscious states thoroughly intertwine with the world. Moreover immersion is where mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other inside of technically-mediated, spatially enclosed, and sensuously-interactive computational environments. Light Strings was created based on my previous art practice and research into immersion as a way to study participants’ experiences with the artwork. In the participant study of Light Strings, participants were encouraged to describe the felt experiences of the installation through phenomenologically oriented research methods. As a result, an experiential model of the participants’ experiences was developed by exploring bodily, spatial, and contextual consciousness with temporal considerations.

  • Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo, Interactive Artist/Designer/Researcher. Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA.
  • Greg Corness, Assistant Professor, Columbia College Chicago, USA. He is working with embodied interaction in media environments. His background in music, theatre and dance provides the basis for his research which focus on interdisciplinary improvisation, distributed cognition in performance, and methodologies for researching experience in performance. He is particularly interested in investigating performer’s intuition during improvisation and how to leverage this embodied knowledge in their interactions with autonomous computer systems. He has developed several generative sound systems as well as computer vision and tangible interfaces for use in interactive performance and installation works. He has published in the fields of electronic music and human-computer interaction and his work includes galleries installations, interactive museum exhibits and live performance in Canada and the US. Greg holds a BMus and an MMus in Computer Composition from the University of Victoria. He also has a PhD from the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University in Interactive Performance.

Full text (PDF) p. 375-382