The document discusses the evolution of interactive art from 1985-2005, when advances in technology enabled new forms of interactivity but theoretical understanding lagged. It highlights influential early works and artists who pioneered interaction concepts now common, like motion control and AI. While technology advanced rapidly, focus shifted from innovation to commercialization. The document argues for grounding interaction in embodied experience and exploring temporality/poetry over functionality. It advocates for AI systems that adapt complexity based on user learning to create more organic human-machine experiences.

1. Simon Penny
Towards a Performative
Aesthetics of Interactivity
Kathryn Hartog
Rhyan Mahazudin

2. 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

3. 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

4. • 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

5. • 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. • Myron Kreuger
– Videoplace
• Machine vision
• Artificial reality
• His work predates motion controls in video games
by 40 years

9. • 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

10. 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

11. • 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

12. 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

13. • 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

14. 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

15. • 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

16. 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

17. • 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

18. 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

19. • 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

20. • 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

21. 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

22. 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