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Interaction as Performance: Cases
of Configuring Physical Interfaces in Mixed Media
Abstract
Mixed media, as artful assemblages of digital objects and physical
artefacts, provide distinctive opportunities for experiential, presentational
and representational interaction. In projects based learning of architecture
design, participants staged spatial narratives with multiple projections,
performed mixed objects and artefacts, and exploited bodily movements
in mixed representations. Cases show, how physical interfaces in mixed
media, acquire a spatial dimension, integrate physical artefacts and bodily
movements, and propose configurability as a central feature. A perspective,
based on anthropological concepts of performance, makes it possible to
address these aspects in a coherent way, pointing to sense experience,
to the individuality and collective emergence of expression, and its diachronic
and event character. Under this perspective, interaction is part of expressive
events aimed at generating new insights for participants (interchangeable
performers and spectators) privileging sense experience. Events are the
outcome of configurations of space, artefacts and digital media, and are
characterised by a simultaneousness of doing and undergoing, of bodily
presence and representation. More importantly the performance perspective
suggests a particular temporal view on interaction, based on the concept
of event, addressing a neglected granularity of analysis between the moment
by moment unfolding of interaction and the longer term co-evolution of
technology and practice. Implications of interaction as performance contribute
to a wider program of interaction design providing alternatives to established
human-computer interaction tenets: the notion of event as an alternative
to the notion of task; perception in Dewey’s terms can be privileged
over recognition proposing expression as an alternative to accountability
and usability. Implications include looking at how space can be configured
and staged instead of measured or simulated, how situations can be staged
instead of sensed and recognised, privileging the sensing human to the
sensing system.
CV
Giulio Jacucci, PhD is a senior researcher at the Helsinki Institute for
Information Technology (www.hiit.fi), a joint research institute of the
two leading research universities in Helsinki, the University of Helsinki
(UH) and the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT). The present projects
cover mobile and ubiquitous computing, user experience research, complex
system computation, mobile content communities, semantic computing, and
digital economy. Giulio Jacucci has worked at the University of Oulu where
he is about to complet a PhD applying an anthropology of performance to
the design of mixed media spaces. He has published over 20 journal and conference
papers (some with the surname Iacucci) including technological works as
well as ethnographic studies in the areas of ubiquitous computing, tangible
interfaces, mixed reality applications and mobility. He has participated
in a variety of international research projects including Atelier (part
of the EU Disappearing Computer Initiative) building a mixed media environment
for inspirational learning, where among other things he lead the development
of a location-aware mobile application, eDiary, to support recording and
re-experiencing of remote site visits for architects. His current research
focuses on ubiquitous multimedia and changing practices of configuring-perceiving
expressions in communicative events.
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