An embodied cognition framework for interactive experience

Abstract

Interactive art is, by its very nature, concerned with audience experience. The interaction is the essence the meaning of the work to the participant. An embodied cognition framework may be used to explore individual's cognition within a cognitive system while he or she is engaged in an interactive art experience. A cognitive system is identified as a system of interactions between the participants, the tools and the environment engaged in the experience. The aim of this paper is to characterize a person's interactive experience of different artworks using an embodied cognition framework in which bodily interaction, thought and perception of feedback are examined. The protocol analysis used to characterize participant experiences is shown to be an appropriate method for investigating interactivity in the art context. The results showed that identifying the presence of interactions between body and feedback, body and thought and thought and feedback provides an effective way to characterize each artwork experience. We discuss how these modes of interactions can be used as a measure for investigating other interactive artwork experiences in future work.

Keywords:

• Interactive experience
• Embodied cognition
• Body
• Thought
• Feedback
• Video-cued recall

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the other artists whose work was studied, Sid Fels and George Khut, and to the audiences that cooperated with the studies. Beta-Space is a collaboration between the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS) and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. We are most appreciative of the support from the Powerhouse and, in particular, for the tireless enthusiasm of curator, Matthew Connell. Lizzie Muller is the CCS curator for the space and has been largely responsible for successful mounting of the artworks in it. She has also made significant contributions to data collection and analysis. Brigid Costello and Shigeki Amitani also contributed to the evaluation studies. The research work was partly conducted within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design, which is established and supported under the Australian Government's Research Centres Programme. Related work was reported by many of the researchers and artists involved with Beta-Space in CoDesign 2(4).