Wednesday, November 02, 2005

a/proxy[mate] love

a/proxy[mate] love
I thought Id post the latest version of my PhD abstract - if nothing else to remind myself what I wrote because it keeps changing...The titles a bit naf I know -but thats the hardest bit to try and sum everything up in a line or two - I'll probably change it ten more times. Its pretty heavy reading but all phd abstracts are to some degree - because you are trying to sum up a whole lot of stuff in less than 350 words - anyway here tis..

ABSTRACT:

Incorporating Movement-based Interaction into Dialogic Encounters with Responsive Screen Personas.

Responsive screen personas: human-like digital entities designed to respond socially to a users input, are now a familiar element of the interactive media landscape. While research into ‘socially intelligent agents’ is well established, up until now there has not been a thorough investigation into artist’s responsive screen personas and how they incorporate embodied interaction. The aim of this research has been to provide a greater understanding of this complex art form and to create two new art works ‘In the house of shouters…’ and ‘a/proxy[mate] love’ that incorporate movement-based interaction and dialogic screen content. An initial finding of this study was that while there are many artworks containing screen personas that are designed to respond to a visitor’s bodily actions, these works tend not to include any spoken or ‘dialogic’ content, and, in those art works with personas that do speak, the interaction has tended to be linguistically driven. My hypothesis was that I might enhance the embodied dimension of a dialogic encounter with screen personas by incorporating a movement-based interaction based on social bodily spacing. Using Anthropologist Edward T Hall’s notion of ‘Proxemics’ as a starting point, I developed a new kind of augmented environment for embodied interaction that I call a ‘dialogic event-space’. These spaces connect screen personas dialogic performances to a visitor’s movements. In a ‘dialogic-event space’ visitors can create different dialogues as they move their bodies in relation to the screen personas. This study interweaves artistic practice and theory employing Donald. A. Schön’s ‘reflective researcher’ methodology. Schön’s experimental approach provides a strategy for practitioners to engage in a ‘reflective conversation’ with their own practice and arrive at an interpretive synthesis, in stark contrast to traditional methodologies that insist on objectivity and distance from the subject being studied. This research directly contributes to the implementation of innovative forms of interaction in new media arts and provides important insights into the evolving area of artist’s responsive screen personas through art practice, in-depth analysis of key artworks and a broader contextual investigation of embodied interaction in screen-based arts.


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