[ISEA2008] Paper: Pai-Ling Chang & Yuh-Shihing Chang – Drawn: The Artist, Audience and Interactivity

Abstract

New media technologies are expanding the range of possibilities for digital media design. Interactivity has been seen as one of the most dynamic features in new media technologies, especially for those new media artists who endeavour to explore the capacity of digital media technology. This paper aims to highlight the important relationship between the digital media artist, audience and the digital media work, by analysis of the audience’s reaction to a digital media work. Giving adequate consideration to how the audience might comprehend a digital media work helps to ensure optimal setting for interactive media design. In addition, this paper suggests the importance that the audience understands interactivity has been used to achieve an immersive creative experience, and it is vital for the artist to appreciate the extent of the audience’s understanding of the use of technology in their work. This paper discusses the relationship between the artist, audience and digital media work by evaluating an interactive media work, Drawn Installation.

Introduction                                                                                                                                            While information technology is currently based around technical rationality and the efficiency and effectiveness of content delivery, increasingly it impacts all aspects of our lives, including our sensory and emotional experiences and the parameters of our imagination. As such, interactive design should not simply cater to factors like base level cognitive processing but the affective and creative centres of the brain.

Interactive digital art works involve new forms of live interactivity and performance, especially those of particularly experimental nature which are difficult to understand or critique for most audiences. Even though what constitutes the ‘audience’ today is more ambiguous than in earlier times, one might consider the audience as an element of artists in their own right, some simply less familiar with the concept or use of digital technology. The Drawn Installation, the subject of this analysis, raised the question of how and to what extent the audience experiences and interpreted the thematic elements: interactive live performance of hand and ink.

  • Pai-Ling Chang & Yuh-Shihing Chang (Taiwan) Shih-Hsin University

Full text (PDF) p. 102-103