Interrogating Interactive Interfaces: On balance in the evocation of environmental responsibility in the creation of Responsive Environments

Abstract

This Practice Based Research PhD concerns how Responsive Environments may be created to evoke environmental responsibility. As a diverse constellation of practices within Interactive Art, participation, interactivity and responsivity form the poles of Artist-Artwork-Audience relations in Responsive Environments. Within these artforms, responsibility may be evoked to the physical environment of the artwork itself and/or in the social responsibility arising from the interaction between artist, artwork and audience. This study is conducted in two interrelated domains: a dissertation and my solo and collaborative creation of a suite of artworks. Dissertation and artworks form a combined exploratory journey through questions arising from and refined by practice. Both explore context- and content-appropriate approaches for evoking environmental responsibility according to the relationship between an artworks’ responsivity and the responsibility thus created for audiences. The iteratively designed artworks produced for this PhD include a series of sight-specific plastic art installations, a non-linear single channel electronic artwork, a multi-channel semi-immersive performative-installation and a full scale multi-channel immersive installation. They were staged in exhibitions, performances and installations in Australia between 2004-2009. The dissertation contextualises my strategies amongst the broader challenges to creating Responsive Environments according to relevant practitioner-theorists. Both exegesis and dissertation highlight balance as the pivot point for all such strategies, wherein artists negotiate trade-offs between the seemingly mutually exclusive properties of authority-control, determinacy-indeterminacy, simplicity-complexity and narrativity-interactivity. The dissertation discusses three principle ‘ingredients’ that determine the balancing act between these properties: content, form and Interaction Design. How these ‘ingredients’ may be combined with one another to evoke environmental responsibility is explored over the career trajectories of three solo (Garth Paine, Jon McCormack and David Rokeby), and two Interactive Art collectives (Transmute Collective and FoAM). Combining these case studies with the account of my own practice contributes to understanding the challenges intrinsic to evoking environmental responsibility in Responsive Environments. Together, the suite of artworks and dissertation contributes to the small, but growing, interest in bridging gulfs between art, science and technology; analogue and digital art; and environmentalism and Interactive Art.