Playful Interactions
Through the analysis a series of playful, interactive artworks Tine Bech's doctoral research investigates theories of play and interactive & participatory art, through a range of relevant practitioners. It focuses specifically on developing a play matrix showing the different kinds of play initiated through playful interactive installations in order to inform Bech's own and other artists’ future making of playful and interactive art installations that engage audiences. The research addresses the following questions:
I. How do the affordances of materials and interactive technology frame the work?
II. What is the role of play in creating affective interactive installations?
III. What kind of play happens in interactive artworks?
IV. How can artists conceptualise the role of the body (kinetic, tactile, sensory) in interactive artwork?
Large-scale art projects, which are focused on play and interaction, have been carried out to allow the realisation of ambitious artworks created to address the research questions. Two new interactive artworks were produced: ‘Catch Me Now’, exhibited at Watermans Art Centre and at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A, London, UK) and ‘Echidna ll’ exhibited and presented at SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA). ‘Catch Me Now’ and ‘Echidna ll’ will also be exhibited at The Kinetica Art Fair, Ambika P3 Gallery, London, in February 2011. Both projects were also presented at conferences and recently featured in journals: Leonardo (Journal of the international Society for the Arts, Science and Technology), German interactive design journal Weave, on the radio Resonance Furtherfield and on SIGGRAPH 2010's YouTube channel. Bech has given talks about these works at the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Digital Artist programme and at the SIGGRAPH emergent technology studio. Further, the project Light Research, was developed as a series of workshops with Watershed (Bristol, UK) and designed to explore methods of enquiry when researching specific sites and with particular groups of people. Videos about the project [one | two] can be seen at the Watershed's DShed website.
More broadly, these projects are executed to explore the research questions and follow a process of: hypothesis/make work/adjust design/new hypothesis. This process is part of a continuous iterative cycle. In other words, the research approach here is to implement a formed idea for an interactive artwork rather than developing the ideas through a making process-based method (as in the visual arts process-based work). The process starts with the idea/question (hypothesis) to be explored and tested, and then, in response to the research findings, it is redesigned, so that a new hypothesis is formed for further exploration. The evidence is collected continuously during production.
