I enjoyed working with Lizzie’s methodology today – seeking to better understand the process of audience engagement.  It was interesting to think about why interactive New Media Art requires so much information about the artists intention?  Why is it necessary to prescribe the manner of engagement? is it because the genre is so new that the collective conscious has not yet “embodied” affordances associated with interactive New Media Art (NMA).  For instance it is not necessary when performing a musical concert on a guitar, cello, piano etc to begin by telling the audience how the instrument is made, the mechanisms it contains for making sound and the performance techniques that are going to be brought to bear in generating the musical outcomes.

So, are the words of the artist interventionist?  Are they establishing constraints that lead to a constructed experience that coalesces with or is dictated by the artists stated intention?  Can self-reporting have validity in this situation where the audience has been pre-conditioned by the artists statement?

Given this, does the value of interactive NMA really reside in the personification of experience and not in the physicality and technological wizardryof the installation.  Part of the question we addressed today then is that the value of this experience needs to be reflected in archival material.  How does one reflect on an artwork where by the principle value of the work is in individual experience and not in a tangible object, but in a personal agency

corporeal, material, objective, phenomenal, sensible, substantial, tangible

Notions of corporial experience and distributed consciousness are of particular interest to me – how can we sense these things in a meaningful manner using technology so that we might be able to utilise that data in the generation of realtime sonification and visualisation in the context of an art installation?

Cheer, garth