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.

This practicum paper looks at the work of contemporary artists: Char Davies, Jen Southern, Wolfgang Laib, Pierre Huyghe and Max Neuhaus. From examining the artists ideas on perception many links and ideas are drawn out. From this examination the author plays with the idea of perception and the training of the senses. Sound becomes an important element. In the end the author designs a strike walk. The strike walk is focused on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. / October 2008

This dissertation identifies a strategy of artistic inquiry within contemporary media art practice. It applies the concept of material that acts in an agential capacity, generating performative acts. It argues that the emergent potentials of materials and their interconnectedness with the compositional layers of a work can facilitate modes of effecting change in the artistic system. Through the theoretical investigation of the production processes of physical structures and environments, the thesis focuses on the compositional dynamics within which materials actively perform. It examines how Lars Spuybroek’s architectural design method of Material Machines (2004), and both the tactile potential as well as tactical uses of materials as generators to the formtaking process, might describe an open and active artistic strategy for employing the experimental capacities of such materialization processes. Building on philosophical and conceptual arguments that trace concepts of agency (Bruno Latour’s Actant-Network theory) and enactment (Karen Barad’s concept of intra-acting), the thesis introduces the two installation works ANI_MATE (described as a performative pneumatic stage machine) and ON TRACK (described as a mechanic-robotic installation). These apply the introduced artistic strategies. The analyses of these two artworks traces the particular capacities of the materials involved (respectively, their elasticity or viscosity) to negotiate forces of physical movement, which effect the system to transiently or irreversibly transform. ANI_MATE is a machine that is artist-operated and that explores the relationship between liveanimation procedures and the transformability and flexibility of its material environment. In contrast, ON TRACK’s performative machine ecology removes human agency. The machines act autonomously, giving rise to chance in the artistic system and allowing agency to emerge from the dynamic interconnectivity between materials, parts, and processes, eventually producing an entropic scenario of spilling resources. The thesis concludes that, in the context of a post digital paradigm in-development, such artistic practice offers a new strategy for an emergent aesthetics within contemporary physical-digital performance.

This practicum paper looks at the work of contemporary artists: Char Davies, Jen Southern, Wolfgang Laib, Pierre Huyghe and Max Neuhaus. From examining the artists ideas on perception many links and ideas are drawn out. From this examination the author plays with the idea of perception and the training of the senses. Sound becomes an important element. In the end the author designs a strike walk. The strike walk is focused on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

This practicum paper looks at the work of contemporary artists: Char Davies, Jen Southern, Wolfgang Laib, Pierre Huyghe and Max Neuhaus. From examining the artists ideas on perception many links and ideas are drawn out. From this examination the author plays with the idea of perception and the training of the senses. Sound becomes an important element. In the end the author designs a strike walk. The strike walk is focused on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

New technologies, such as virtual reality, often draw to itself myths from other fields of interest and discourses. One such myth that has attached itself to virtual reality is the notion that virtual reality can provide a utopia for the mind, or true self, if the body can be cast off. It is this discarding of the body that my thesis aims to investigate in terms of Girardian sacrifice. Girard?s notion of sacrifice is built upon the observation of various cultures throughout history. It stands to reason that in our contemporary, digitally influenced, society, sacrifice, in some form, still persists. I argue that the body, when viewed as disposable, through the use of virtual reality, exhibits the same traits as the selected sacrificial victim. As the myth of a utopia for the mind, or true self, exists prior to the advent of virtual reality, traces of it, as well as the sacrifice I argue it entails, can be found in other texts as well. One such a text is The Chrysalids (Wyndham 1955). This text presents the reader with characters which I argue represent both the mind and body separately. The Chrysalids culminates in the characters representing the mind leaving for a utopian city whilst the character who, I argue, is most strongly associated with the body, Sophie Wender, is killed. It is also argued here in that the notion of abandoning the body is simply a myth since the inability to abandon the body is also discussed in terms of phenomenology, pointing out that the body can ultimately not be completely removed from the making of meaning. This phenomenological acknowledgement of the body, along with a critique The Chrysalids and cyber-utopia?s view of the body, forms the basis of my practical body of work. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Visual Arts / MA / Unrestricted

I am exhibiting several drawings, paintings, and sculptures representing a visual record of my creative research into, and my handling of, snails. Although I depict snails and their environment in a loose representational style, I have begun to incorporate digital drawing to enhance my art in a mixed media approach. I have created illustrative images of a forest floor as I imagine it would look to a snail in a giant, menacing world. Close-up images of grass become unusual jungle scenes, and my once tiny snails achieve a measure of control in this fanciful world. The inspiration for my art is my recollection of the insecurity and struggles I encountered while growing up as a military brat.

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The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the creation of new forms of subjectivities that represent the integration of digital and information technologies into construction of the self and bodies. I argue that to this point there has not been a satisfactory theoretical framework for the experience of bodies in virtual environments that does not default to problematic binaries of physical and virtual, real and unreal, and meaningful and meaningless. These dualistic constructions render experiences of bodies within virtual settings meaningless. In order to examine how this power differential between physical and virtual came to be, I engage with Katherine Hayles' evaluation of information as a disembodied entity. I argue that Hayles' humanist principles prevents her from fully understanding the experience of bodies within virtual spaces as meaningful and important. I then deconstruct the materialist basis of representation in order to demonstrate how information can be reconceived as an embodied force. I further analyze digital media art installations, specifically dance performances, to examine how digital bodies are currently experienced in relationship to corporeal forms. I finally offer two new theories of <reality> and the networked body in order to dismantle the binary between physical and virtual and to make a space for all embodied experiences to be valued. / Master of Arts