Interactive art is rapidly becoming a part of cosmopolitan society through public displays, video games, and art exhibits. It is a means of exploring the connections between our physical bodies and the virtual world. However, a sense of disconnection often exists between the users and technology because users are driving actions within an environment from which they are physically separated. This research involves the creation of a custom interactive, immersive, and real-time video-based mark-making installation as public art. Using a variety of input devices including video cameras, sensors, and special lighting, a painterly mark-making experience is contemporized, enabling the participant to immerse himself in a world he helps create. This work illustrates the potential of making the user-technology disconnection more seamless between the physical and virtual worlds. Using unobtrusive interfaces, the user?s physical interactions can be encouraged. The development of this installation progressed through improvements based on user feedback from iterative public displays of the work. This process is to serve as a guideline for other artists working in interactive media who are also exploring perceived intimacy in user interactions.

Through creative art making practice, research seeks to contribute a body of knowledge to an under researched area by examining how key concepts germane to computer based, interactive, three-dimensional, virtual environment artworks might be explicated, potential compositional issues characterised, and possible production strategies identified and/or proposed. Initial research summarises a range of classifications pertaining to the function of interactivity within virtual space, leading to an identification and analysis of a predominant model for composing virtual environment media, characterised as the "world as model": a methodological approach to devising interactive and spatial contexts employing visual and behavioural modes based on the physical world. Following this alternative forms of environmental organisation are examined through the development of a series of artworks beginning with Bodies and Bethlem, and culminating with Reconnoitre: a networked environment, spatially manifest through performative user input. Theoretical corollaries to the project are identified placing it within a wider critical context concerned with distinguishing between the virtual as a condition of simulation: a representation of something pre-existing, and the virtual as potential structure: a phenomena in itself requiring creative actualisation and orientated toward change. This distinction is further developed through an analysis of some existing typologies of interactive computer based art, and used to generalise two base conditions between which various possibilities for practice might be situated: the "fluid" and "formatted" virtual.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wales College, Newport, 1999. / CAiiA Research Centre (Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts) Thesis submitted to the University of Wales for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 400-456). Available in PDF via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: David Gussak, Florida State University, College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance, Dept. of Art Education. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 9, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 164 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Complex System Sciences, as a field of research, has emerged in the past decade. It studies how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviours of the system and how the system interacts with its environment. It approaches the question of how life on earth could have appeared by searching for inherent structures in living systems and trying to define common patterns within these structures. Complex Systems are also often described as systems where the whole is more complex than the mere sum of its parts, and these systems are also considered to be at the point of maximum computational ability, maximum fitness and maximum evolvability. Several scientific models have simulated Complex Adaptive Systems. These try to model the emergence of complexity within computer-simulated environments inhabited by artificially evolving organisms. My objective in this thesis is to study the application of Complex Systems and Complex Adaptive Systems to Interactive Art and to test how one could construct interactive systems that can create dynamic and open-ended image structures that increase in complexity as users interact with them. Ideally, these interactive artworks should become comparable to Complex Adaptive Systems or even become Complex Systems themselves by satisfying some of the key properties of such systems.

Networked Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiment is an exploration of issues surrounding networked public spaces in relation to three artworks created by the author between 1995 to 2000: Virtual Concrete, (1995); Bodies© Incorporated (1996-2000); and Datamining Bodies (initiated in 2000). All three works have several key things in common: each exists on the Internet; each is conceptually connected to the idea of online identity and virtual embodiment, and each required extensive research to inform and inspire the creative practice. The projects are presented within three main sections, each of which attempts to link personal experience and history to a larger cultural context within which the works were produced. The first section, "Breaking with Tradition," provides an overview of historical events that have influenced the changing relationship between artist and audience and argues that the foundations for networked art were laid largely by conceptual artists working during the 1960s and 1970s. The second section, "Distributed Identity," examines the emergence of identity in online public spaces, focusing specifically on issues surrounding the appropriation and use of the term "avatar," and the current cultural preoccupation with databasing and archiving. The third and final section, "Visualizing the Invisible," explores the various efforts to map cyberspace, particularly paying attention to the implicit intersection of network data visualisations and biological systems, and the popular trend toward developing more "intelligent" networks through use of autonomous agents.

This study is about play. It is about some of the forms of play you may have engaged in as a kid and are now integrated in the art practices of three artists, Núria Güell, Jordi Canudas and Nicolás Dumit-Estévez. Their practices defy the traditional conceptions of both art and play as ends in themselves. This study is contextualized as phenomenological research that aims at understanding what role play can assume in socially engaged art practices, and in what ways it provides a dynamic filter or trajectory for carrying each work forward. It is centered on the experiences of three artists who have developed practices that are participatory, presented in public spaces, open to diverse audiences, and whose design seeks at questioning, transforming or experimenting with new forms of sociability. The study presents the artists’ narratives through interviews and intertwined with the researcher’s experience with the data and documentation, acting as a site for shared meaning making. The findings of the study suggest that essential to play is movement, and that play’s integration in socially engaged art practices opens up transitional or permeable spaces in which previously discrete identities become border crossings opening to the potential emergence of new ideas about self and society

In a world increasingly influenced by interactive interfaces, devices and services both in the commercial and non-commercial spheres, understanding interactivity and its underpinnings is essential. We have moved into a state of flux in which both culture and technology are in constant interplay and the only constant is change itself. The only future-proof approach to designing for and dealing with an environment of constant change in these systems and forms is to look for a mechanism and theoretical framework that underpins them all. Drawing upon a range of disciplines – from design, art, cognitive science, linguistics and more – this thesis argues that play is such a fundamental building block of culture, society, technology and cognition that it is the ideal lens through which to examine the interactive experience. It is versatile enough to cross boundaries and fundamental enough to be understood intuitively. Through an understanding of the intersection between movement, embodied cognition, metaphor and play, a set of principles of interactivity are developed that are flexible enough to analyse and be applied to a broad spectrum of interactive experiences, from interactive artworks to services to individual user interface elements. Finally, it is proposed that these principles provide a way to examine the phenomenal growth of social networks and the fundamental cultural shifts we are experiencing today as a result of the friction generated between emerging networked technologies and the industrial age structures they are dismantling.

In a world increasingly influenced by interactive interfaces, devices and services both in the commercial and non-commercial spheres, understanding interactivity and its underpinnings is essential. We have moved into a state of flux in which both culture and technology are in constant interplay and the only constant is change itself. The only future-proof approach to designing for and dealing with an environment of constant change in these systems and forms is to look for a mechanism and theoretical framework that underpins them all. Drawing upon a range of disciplines – from design, art, cognitive science, linguistics and more – this thesis argues that play is such a fundamental building block of culture, society, technology and cognition that it is the ideal lens through which to examine the interactive experience. It is versatile enough to cross boundaries and fundamental enough to be understood intuitively. Through an understanding of the intersection between movement, embodied cognition, metaphor and play, a set of principles of interactivity are developed that are flexible enough to analyse and be applied to a broad spectrum of interactive experiences, from interactive artworks to services to individual user interface elements. Finally, it is proposed that these principles provide a way to examine the phenomenal growth of social networks and the fundamental cultural shifts we are experiencing today as a result of the friction generated between emerging networked technologies and the industrial age structures they are dismantling.

In a world increasingly influenced by interactive interfaces, devices and services both in the commercial and non-commercial spheres, understanding interactivity and its underpinnings is essential. We have moved into a state of flux in which both culture and technology are in constant interplay and the only constant is change itself. The only future-proof approach to designing for and dealing with an environment of constant change in these systems and forms is to look for a mechanism and theoretical framework that underpins them all. Drawing upon a range of disciplines – from design, art, cognitive science, linguistics and more – this thesis argues that play is such a fundamental building block of culture, society, technology and cognition that it is the ideal lens through which to examine the interactive experience. It is versatile enough to cross boundaries and fundamental enough to be understood intuitively. Through an understanding of the intersection between movement, embodied cognition, metaphor and play, a set of principles of interactivity are developed that are flexible enough to analyse and be applied to a broad spectrum of interactive experiences, from interactive artworks to services to individual user interface elements. Finally, it is proposed that these principles provide a way to examine the phenomenal growth of social networks and the fundamental cultural shifts we are experiencing today as a result of the friction generated between emerging networked technologies and the industrial age structures they are dismantling.