Sissy - Elise van den Hoven

Shaping and Understanding Audience Bodily Experience
ABSTRACT
Lian Loke
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW AUSTRALIA
Lian.Loke@uts.edu.au
We are exploring new possibilities for bodily-based
aesthetic experiences, by bringing together participatory
art practices, human-computer interaction, new media and
the Bodyweather performance methodology. In the
development of a prototype participatory live art
installation, Speechless, we placed audience bodily
experience as the subject of the artwork. Internal
physiological processes of breathing and heartbeat were
made audible through breath- and pulse-sensing digital
soundscapes. We were particularly interested in the role
of the embodied imagination and its transformative
capacity on the felt experience of the body. The recounts
of audience testing provide preliminary insights into how
people experienced their bodies in new ways through
participation in the artwork.
Author Keywords
Audience, body, felt experience, imagination, interactive
art, sensors, sound
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.
INTRODUCTION
We are exploring new possibilities for bodily-based
aesthetic experiences, by bringing together participatory
art practices, human-computer interaction (HCI), new
media and the Bodyweather performance methodology.
In the kinds of artistic contexts we are envisaging,
audience participation is crucial and audience experience
of their own bodies becomes a central component of the
work. The application of digital technologies can
externalize and amplify qualities of bodily experience in
ways not possible before, such as internal physiological
processes of breathing and heartbeat (e.g., Schiphorst and
Andersen, 2004; Khut, 2006).
Many contemporary artists are currently working with
audience experience and participation as important
elements of their practice, particularly in the realm of
interactive art. Participatory art practices share with
interactive art the premise that the artwork is brought into
being – or completed – only with the interaction or
participation of people (Winkler, 2000; Bishop, 2006;
O’Reilly, 2009). There is growing interest in applying
OZCHI 2011, Nov 28 – Dec 2, 2011, Canberra, Australia.
Copyright the author(s)
Available online at
http://research.it.uts.edu.au/idhup/workshops/workshop-the-body-indesign/
OZCHI 2011 Workshop Proceedings The Body In Design
ISBN: 978-0-9757948-5-2
26
established methods from HCI to these novel artistic
contexts in order to understand the audience experience
of the interactive artwork (e.g., Höök et al., 2003; Khut &
Muller, 2005; Bilda et al., 2006; Khut, 2006; Muller et
al., 2006)
Methods for accessing and evaluating user experience
such as think-aloud protocols, co-discovery, recounts,
video-cued recall, interviews and questionnaires can
provide artists and researchers with valuable insights into
the audience experience. These methods can be applied in
an iterative process of making and evaluating, so that
understandings of audience experience are folded back
into the developing work. A tension exists for artists as
authors of a work and the audience interpretation of the
work. How the evaluation data is used to influence the
final work may be approached differently by artists and
by interaction designers, depending on what values are
driving the development. Höök et al. (2003) raise
concerns about directly applying traditional HCI
evaluation methodologies to artworks; what is considered
good research practice in a field that traditionally values
objectivity may not fit well with the more subjective
stance of the world of art. They describe how they
adapted existing HCI evaluation techniques to suit artists’
concerns, with a particular focus on fine-tuning and
improving the interaction design aspects of the interactive
artwork. In our project, we were interested to find out
how audience responded to the work and if it generated
responses of a poetic and somatic nature.
Bilda et al. (2006) developed a coding scheme to analyse
audience experience of interactive artworks, containing
the seven categories of physical, purpose, state, object,
perceptual, conceptual and recall. The categories of state
and perceptual are the most relevant to our interests. State
covers the person’s felt, emotional state, the use of their
physical senses, as well as the activities that they are
engrossed in during the interaction. Perceptual deals with
the perception of sound, image and the relations between
them. However, it does not acknowledge how the
perception of external events impacts on the perception of
self and the experience of the feeling state of one’s body.
We conducted research into understanding and designing
for body-focused interactions in an artistic context,
extending the research conducted in the Thinking
Through The Body project (Loke et al., 2011). We were
interested in how people could experience their bodies
and sense of self in new ways, by drawing their attention
to internal processes and sensations, amplified and
externalized through the use of digital technologies. We
were also interested in how we could potentially shape
this bodily focus through the use of the embodied
imagination. We turned to the Bodyweather performance