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Temporal representations in Human Computer Interaction: is a portfolio of peer reviewed papers and media artworks representing several years of investigation, experimental making, and study into the perceptions and representation of time in digital media and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The lived experience of time is fundamental to our understanding of the world and the work investigates the complex and contradictory nature of time and the powerful effect temporal representations have on health, well-being and perception. The investigation, methodology and outputs are based in the traditions of interdisciplinary electronic arts, technology research and digital culture. Practice-led, research through design techniques, are used as a means to explore alternative framings of temporal processes. I discuss the importance of temporal experience as a concern for contextual design and consider the models and lived experiences of time and how system-centric representations alter our perceptions of time. The papers and works (discussed in chapters 4, 5 and 6 and included in full in appendix a) cover three broad areas: Analysis and discussion of practice and language in HCI related to time; Experimental designs for temporal objects and media artworks; Finally through critical artefacts, media art and publications I discuss a new perspective on temporality in design and representation and present a framework for re-assessing how we include time in interaction design. The framework is designed to be used as a tool to support understanding of the temporality of users, or situations of use, and to assist in translating and re-framing insights into practical outputs for improved design of interactive systems. It contrasts system-centric with user-centric temporal representation, and contributes a new design methodology that is aimed at improving contextual design processes. By increasing awareness of temporal context, and the multi-dimensional nature of user’s temporality, designers can better understand user context when creating truly user centred interactive experiences.

This thesis describes my artistic practice as essentially project-based, site-responsive and hypermediating. Hypermediacy—i.e. the tendency of certain media or objects to keep their various constituents separate from their structure—is to be understood as opaque, juxtaposed and after a recurring contiguity with different kinds of interfaces. Accordingly, and within the context of the various projects that constitute this thesis, it is demonstrated how, in response to the particular places I work and to the various people I collaborate with, different kinds of materials and methodologies are incorporated in broader hybrids that are mediated (interfaced) in miscellaneous ways to this way result in original works of art. Materials and methodologies are shown to be intertwined and interdependent with each other as well as with the different ways in which they are interfaced, which accounts for an explicitly projectbased, rather than artwork-based, approach which, on its turn, de-emphasises the finished artefact in favour of process, performance, research and exploration. Projects are, then, shown to be explicitly site- or situation- responsive, as they are not implementations of preexistent ideas, but rather emerge as my original response to the particular sites, materials, people and the various other constituents that are involved in their very production. Interfaces to such hybrids as well as their very material and methodological elements are also shown to be hyper-mediated. It is finally argued that such an approach essentially accelerates multi-perspectivalism in that a project may spawn a number of diverse, typically medium-specific and/or site-specific, artworks that all exemplify different qualities which are congenital to the particular nature of each project.

My practice-based doctoral research explores how I, as an artist, can create conditions and possibilities for playful interaction in and around interactive artworks. Using practice- based research methods four artworks were created, presented and examined in relation to my research questions concerning play. The three key research questions were: 1] How do the properties and affordances of materials and technologies foster play and interactions? 2] How can artists conceptualise physical participation and play in interactive artworks? 3] What kind of play takes place in and around interactive artwork? My inquiry focused on the development of a model for making playful and interactive artworks and the creation of a vocabulary of play, which demonstrates the different kinds of play initiated through my practice and research. The model provides alternative ways to think about the role of play within interactive art and consists of a series of tangible making gambits for eliciting playful interactions from the audience. The model will be useful for future interactive artists, as well as other fields concerned with the creation of playful experiences. Underpinning my process of creating playful experiences were methods of observation of the participants’ interactions, which were used in order to enable change and improvement of the artworks throughout the research process. I argue that by employing a sculptural approach to interactive art, using the visual arts tradition of working with the properties of materials and affordances of technology, an invitation to play was created. I propose that to focus on the material’s affordance, rather than on interactive systems, provides additional ways to create interactivity. I also suggest that by understanding technology as a sculptural and embodied material we can move the focus from the technology to what the art does and says. In this sculptural playful interactivity audience members are allowed and encouraged to touch and physical and immersive participation is invited. I explored the body as a particular mode of interaction that can bridge the divide between doing and looking in the gallery, developing theories of the playful body and how audiences connect through play. I argue that the combination of sculptural, captivating interfaces, where the artwork reacts reliably, enables the audience to develop play mastery and become fully engaged. These playful interactions invite people to be curious and seek to engage audiences into dialogue, thereby opening up the possibility for play. Play is an essential pre-condition for the emergence of possibilities and, as such, it is the flexible structure by which meaningful interaction can arise. These interactions are not about our relation to technology but rather about new ways of experiencing culture. In this context interactive art is part of a wider change in contemporary art, where artists are creating culture to be experienced rather than consumed.

Technoetic and media arts are environments of mediated interaction and emergence, where meaning is negotiated by individuals through a personal examination and experience—or becoming—within the mediated space. This thesis examines these environments from a musical perspective and considers how sound functions as an analog to this becoming. Five distinct, original musical works explore the possibilities as to how the emergent dynamics of mediated, interactive exchange can be leveraged towards the construction of musical sound. In the context of this research, becoming can be understood relative to Henri Bergson’s description of the appearance of reality—something that is making or unmaking but is never made. Music conceived of a linear model is essentially fixed in time. It is unable to recognize or respond to the becoming of interactive exchange, which is marked by frequent and unpredictable transformation. This research abandons linear musical approaches and looks to generative music as a way to reconcile the dynamics of mediated interaction with a musical listening experience. The specifics of this relationship are conceptualized in the structaural coupling model, which borrows from Maturana & Varela’s “structural coupling.” The person interacting and the generative musical system are compared to autopoietic unities, with each responding to mutual perturbations while maintaining independence and autonomy. Musical autonomy is sustained through generative techniques and organized within a psychogeographical framework. In the way that cities invite use and communicate boundaries, the individual sounds of a musical work create an aural context that is legible to the listener, rendering the consequences or implications of any choice audible. This arrangement of sound, as it relates to human presence in a technoetic environment, challenges many existing assumptions, including the idea “the sound changes.” Change can be viewed as a movement predicated by behavior. Amergent music is brought forth through kinds of change or sonic movement more robustly explored as a dimension of musical behavior. Listeners hear change, but it is the result of behavior that arises from within an autonomous musical system relative to the perturbations sensed within its environment. Amergence propagates through the effects of emergent dynamics coupled to the affective experience of continuous sonic transformation.

This dissertation considers oversight and [counter]intelligibility in order to to rethink questions of surveillance and militarism, through media theory and critical art practices. At the center of this work are two media art projects, Operational Character Rendition and Unburning (a collaboration with Margaret Laurena Kemp). Through the creation of these projects, I consider how infrastructural and institutional contexts inscribe themselves into media related to surveillance and its oversight. This dissertation activates both denotations of oversight: as supervision and surveillance, but also the failure to notice. The contradictions of seeing and not seeing inform a close reading of torture memos, aerial surveillance videos, and media art. This work draws from feminist media art due to its investment in embodiment and making hidden labor and abuse intelligible, even if abstracted or otherwise distanced. I read and perforate through this media and meta- data as sites of intelligibility through technologies of making-sense, but also as sites of obfuscation, concealment, and redaction. These are explored through case studies that consider technologies and cultural practices of making-public through interfaces and archives of US Intelligence Community related documents, and also by artists whose work redeploys, countervails (and counterveils) these assemblages.

My dissertation elucidates how art practice can be a useful and helpful model for learning, teaching, and conducting research for HCI and the broader STEM fields. It focuses on “improvisation”, a fundamental strategy and skill often used in the broader genres of arts, including cool jazz and the avant-garde. To achieve this goal, this dissertation provides three main chapters in which individual chapters explore different but interconnected topics about improvisation and aesthetic engagement for HCI. The first chapter, “Intermodulation”, embarks on theory building about improvisation. Based on various studies of improvisation drawn from art, music, HCI, the social sciences, and two ethnographic studies, we identify five key features of improvisational action (reflexivity, transgression, tension, listening, and interdependence). With this theoretical foundation, the second chapter, “Tech-Art-Theory”, explores the implementation of improvisational practice in HCI and STEM education. Based on three pedagogical interventions of our own at Cornell University, we point out three specific pedagogical conditions (socio-material evaluations, multi-sensory practices, and making safe spaces for error) that can support improvisational ways of learning and computing. In the third chapter, “The Electronicists”, we finally build our own research/inquiry framework called “techno-aesthetic practice” that pursues mediated creativity from the situated negotiation of engineering, art, and humanistic inquiries, including through the production of “techno-aesthetic objects” that can travel across and in some measure connect these worlds. The fourth chapter also provides an “Online Gallery” in which readers can find various curated audiovisual data and artworks that our research team has collected and produced during our ethnographic studies in the above chapters. Finally, this dissertation answers the question “How can HCI and STEM practitioners living in the early 21st century to benefit from improvisational art practice as a model of learning, teaching, and research?”

This dissertation considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry, to transform ruinous anthropocentric conceptions of nature. This period matters because it is the commonly accepted historical origination of crude oil as a global energy commodity. The seemingly prosaic question “what is oil?” opens up new conceptual frameworks, ethics, and material circumstances. Oil is a resource commodity; oil is techno-scientific; oil is political; oil is an earthly substance. But what does it mean to think with oil beyond the practices of representation that enact its contemporary form? As new energy regimes and new critiques of the Anthropocene emerge, why does the predominant ontological status of oil as a fossil fuel persist? Given the outsized role oil has played in making the contemporary world, these under-examined questions foreground the guiding inquiry of the project: what kinds of practices can produce new concepts of oil?Utilizing feminist philosopher Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative approach and media theorist Jussi Parikka’s notion of geological media materialism, my dissertation examines the early American oil industry to refigure oil as media. This critical and creative work conjoins media and science studies scholarship with speculative field notes to create a theory/fiction document that reconceptualizes the onto-epistemological status of oil as media. This method accounts for the entangled ways that oil, as a technologically, culturally, and naturally manufactured fossil fuel, has structured how things are and how they are known throughout Western industrialization. The unconventional form of this work proposes that alternative knowledge practices are a pathway towards new petro-practices. The project poses a key question: if oil use predates the concept of fossil fuel, what is the origin of the theory of fossil fuels? The question distinguishes between the science of petroleum, constituted of ancient organisms and biomass, and the techno-cultural assumption that energetic entities should be put to work as fuel. It is taken for granted that the former implies the latter. By scrutinizing some of the most basic—but overlooked— assumptions of oil, my work challenges the orthodoxy of how Western society has come to conceptualize the earth as a source of raw resources.

In the practice of media arts, which resides at the intersection of art, engineering and science, seamless communication between disciplines is crucial to creating work that can make an impact in all three areas. The need for a language that enables effective communication between artists, scientists and engineers becomes more prominent as experts from each field strive to push boundaries in their research. In this master’s project, I propose several approaches utilizing abstract representations afforded by interactive visualizations to translate between discipline specific languages, creating works that are understood and valued by researchers in fields ranging from arts and humanities to engineering and data science. I will introduce two case studies in support of each of the proposed approaches, demonstrating their translating effect in both interactive art and data visualization.

Cities are Critical sites. In my art practice, I stroll through a landscape. I examine the inhabitants of the land, their dreams, and the structures inhibiting those dreams. My aim is to challenge the status quo and imagine new possibilities of existence. Invisible-presence is a series of ongoing art projects aimed at the study of societies through an artistic framework. The project focuses on the confrontations that arise between modern societies and their citizens. Cities control social interactions and behaviors, through surveillance and policies that guide, direct and impede urban planning. Structures of power dictate our direction of movement through the implementation of codes that are as visible as street signage and fences that prevent crowds from congregating. My Artwork looks at the citizens who challenge these parameters.

This practice-based thesis investigates how contemporary artists are using generic artistic strategies and ambivalent affect to inhabit post-digital conditions. It proposes that artists reproducing and re-performing generic post-digital aesthetics both engender and are enveloped by ambivalent affect, and that these strategies are immanently political rather than overtly critical. I argue that ambivalent artworks secede from requirements for newness and innovation, and the exploitation of creative labour that are a feature of post-digital environments. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s affect theory and Paolo Virno’s post-Fordist thinking, I summarise contemporary conditions for creativity as a ‘general intellect of the post-digital’; proposing that artists’ and workers’ relations with this mode of production are necessarily ambivalent. Throughout this research I produced several performance and video works that exemplify this ambivalence. These works reproduce standardised electronic music, stock imagery and PowerPoint presentations, alongside re-performances of digital labour such as online shopping, image searches, and paying rent online. Through these examples I develop concepts for discussing generic aesthetics, framing them as vital to understanding post-digital conditions. I address works by other artists including Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections (2014), which I argue is neither critical nor complicit with generic post-digital routines, but rather signals affective ambivalence and a desire to secede from social media performance. I also discuss works by Cory Arcangel and others to develop the ‘preset’ as a tool for understanding the generic. These works indicate ambivalent affective relations with generic digital tools, and I argue they perform an immanent critique of newness and innovation as cultural values. Lastly, I argue that software-mediated tasks and gestures also produce ambivalent affect, and draw on my curatorial practice alongside Alexander Galloway’s concept of the ‘interface effect’ to read Emile Zile and Kiah Reading’s works as re-performing the ambivalent affect immanent to office software. Overall, this research addresses a gap in art-scholarship around generic post-digital aesthetics, identifying strategies in contemporary art that increasingly speak to questions of standardisation. It analyses and enacts artists’ reproduction and re-performance of generic post-digital aesthetics as indicative of an ambivalent affective engagement that gestures towards secession from contradictions immanent to post-digital aesthetic production.

With a digitally implemented generative system for artistic purposes, controlling a non-trivial number of parameters is one of the difficulties in the process of temporal composition with the system. Unless done manually for every keyframe in the duration of the work, a kind of interface that facilitates the process is necessary. This research proposes an interface for temporal control on parameters of the generative audio-visual system. The proposed interface operates in `state space' formed by a simplex shape of arbitrary dimension with the barycentric coordinate to define the locations inside. Each vertex of simplex represents a reference point in the parameter space of the system. In this manner, regardless of geometric relation between reference points in parameter space, the artist can locate and use any mixed state of the reference states by simple interpolations. This decoupling of the relative coordinate of the states from the specific values of the parameters makes an abstraction for the artist to perform the manual design of the temporal structure efficiently. The state space is a connection between the generative system and the temporal control. With the proposed interface, three artworks are introduced as proof of concepts. Reconstruction is an installation piece, experimenting with virtual geographical shapes. The Reconstruction is a proof of concept that utilizes the state space model for its automatic control, hinting the possibility of a state space model for connection between the generative system and manual composition. Balanced Movement is a fixed length composition, using dynamic equilibrium from the stochastic system as the primary material of the visual. Balanced Movement utilizes state space to define its manual temporal composition. Wavefront is an immersive audio-visual performance using a mathematical abstraction of an ocean wave as visual material. In Wavefront state space is used to spawn entities in performance time dynamically.

This practice-based research project is an exploration of two things: first of the bodiliness of vision around the relationship between the eye, the mind and the body and second, of relational modes of interactivity within new media art. The presence and movement of the body is central to both of these concerns, as are the notions of relation and interplay between a body and its surroundings; the perceptual interplay between a person and their environment and the emergent interplay between a participant and an interactive artwork. Although I have drawn on a range of thinkers from the fields of systems theory, cybernetics, embodied cognition and process philosophy, my aim has been to think these things primarily with the body. The three artworks I am presenting consist of a single channel video, audit (my own worst enemy), and two interactive works, closer: eleven experiments in proximity and metacognition (room with a view). By focusing on small fragmentary moments of everyday life, these works seek to foreground life s immediacy and to bring attention to the moment-by-moment ways in which we inhabit and make sense of the world . My thesis argues, as explored in my artworks, that vision is thoroughly entangled with other, especially tactile and kinaesthetic, sensory modalities, and with the active and skilful movement of the body. I have discussed the interactive works as responsive video , a phrase that reflects a rethinking of interactivity towards an approach that is deliberately simple, understated and subtle. Central to the experience of the interactive artworks is the bodily process of discovering their responsivity, and the relational interplay that might subsequently unfold between a participant and an artwork. The participant and the artwork are not predetermined but co-emerge immanently from their performative encounters within a relational ecology.

This is a project in two parts. The text presented here is the major component. This exegetical document provides the theoretical context for a series of media art works that were produced between 2011 and 2012 in response as much as in parallel to this analysis. The creative work, the online media assemblage Dark Euphoria: Unclassified Media (archived at http://darkeuphoria.info), should be seen in a non-traditional sense – a research-led practice component – contextualised by the broader theoretical narrative. Together, these two components produce a visual communication analysis of historical events, cultural artefacts and media art and the artists who produce them to reveal the nature, attraction and power of the dark euphoric temperament inherent in millennial technoculture. It is important to note however that this is a particular type of exegetical response not a reflective exegesis. This is not an analysis of my practice – the history or technique – rather this is an analysis of the context that informs that practice. Yet this text does include a discussion of several of my key works in relation to specific issues unpacked by the broader thesis and also in relation to the work by other media artists who explore similar territory.

In this thesis, the phenomena of immersion and presence are explored through three bodies of work: a theoretical investigation, the construction of an immersive panoramic virtual reality theatre, and the creation of an interactive immersive artwork. In the first part, the concept of immersive mimesis is introduced to understand the assumptions and ramifications of the very idea that the â being thereâ we enjoy in the real world might be possible in a mediated experience. Drawing on J. J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception, presence is identified as active perception of a light field, a notion which is further refined to the act of creating and detecting invariant structures in multi-modal stimuli. This framing of presence serves as a common basis for understanding the immersive roles of a variety of perceptual phenomena, including the 10 degrees of freedom of vision, ecological optics, stereoscopy, ego-motion, vection and perceptual rest-frames, binding of stimuli into singular percepts, cross-sensory enhancements and transfer, interaction and perception of causality, and the destructive effect of the image when used as a surrogate for the light field. The second part involves the creation of a panoramic multi-user immersive theatre based not only on contemporary virtual reality techniques and technologies, but on the understanding of immersion and presence arrived at above. Four pivotal features distinguish it from its panoramic heritage: omnistereoscopic imagery, spatial audio, real-time computation and interactivity. Finally, in order to explore the immersive and aesthetic potential of this new incarnation of the panorama, a work of art is conceived. La Dispersion du Fils, an algorithmic invocation of the tragedy of Actaeon, takes the form of a never-ending, never-repeating voyage through fields and structures constructed wholly from moving images and sound. In this work, all the elements of the theory of presence developed above are explored, demonstrating that contemporary presence theory can inform artistic creation and that the pursuit of an art of immersion can provide insight into the nature of presence.

My research explores why the abject body is not conceptualised within the idiom of media arts culture. Why is it missing and often edited out of the framework of art and technology? While media arts often rethinks the body and its augmentation and enhancements through new technology, the abject body is often nowhere to be seen. It would appear that the abject body has been disqualified as an aesthetic from the post- humanist paradigm of art and technology. In its place appears to be the transcendence of the body through technology, rather than the base level everyday reminder of our meat bodies. I explore what cultural conditions have led to the erasure of the abject from media arts culture. In addition I look at the cultural history of abject art and the abject body’s relationship to the emerging mediasphere. My own studio work attempts to reactivate, reinsert and reconceptualise the abject body within contemporary media arts.

A commonplace in digital-literary studies holds that narrative, connected to the binary logic of symbolic representation, exists in tension with digital culture. Digital media modes privilege interactivity, simulation, and the epistemological paradigm of "the virtual," understood as the interconnectedness of culture, symbolic systems, material reality, and experience. The dissertation argues that, despite its connection to structuralist binaries, narrative form remains important to identity and cultural memory in complex ways. This complex connection is imperative to investigate in a global, digital age, where cultural memory seems increasingly fragile. The theoretical framework in Chapter One argues that digital texts reject the Oedipal desire for mastery, certainty, or closure, invoking instead a simple desire for connection. The appearance of narrative desire in such texts, because of narrative's association with pastness, implies a desire for connection with an historical other as such-with some "archive" of shared memory. This theoretical framework informs close analyses of the tensions between narrative representation and the virtual modes of new media in three digital and literary texts. These tensions mark the texts' conflicted engagements with history; here, specific conflicts between individual and public memory in Germany from 1945-1998. The chapters analyze a Jewish narrator's attempt to create a public, non-representational art of Holocaust memory in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Tynset (1965); the interplay of Ostalgie and destabilized mediamemory of DEFA Indianerfilme in the western-dominated cultural imaginary of unified Germany in artist pair Nomad's DVD-ROM The Last Cowboy (1998); and the feminist inversion of Derrida's Archive Fever, based in the artist's intimate experiences as immigrant and mother, in Agnes Hegedüs' virtual database Die Sprache der Dinge (1998). These artworks all construe the limit of narrative possibility as an archive of cultural memory, but also as an agential human other. Within the interactive logic of the virtual, the narrative limit these figures embody becomes a zone of ethical engagement, negotiation, or struggle. Offering a nuanced combination of literary and digital analytical methods and modeling a strong orientation to humanistic concerns of cultural memory, history, identity, and ethics, the dissertation contributes to the growing field of digital humanities scholarship.

The Masters of Fine Art exegesis is an examination of the interrelationships between physical and virtual social models, and demonstrates how a body of sculptural work can move between concrete and virtual form. My research reflects on online social networks and offline subcultures, resulting in both artworks that rely on physical outcomes, and others that remain within digital space. Slippages between the virtual and the physical realm that are relevant to my work are contextualised by reference to writers such as Jennifer Allen, who discusses new forms of collective experience that have developed by online communication. I make reference to the artist Seth Price’s text Dispersion, where methods of distribution and networks are outlined in relation to virtual space as an alternate ‘site’ of public sculpture. An analysis of the mechanisms of physical and virtual networks has resulted in equivalent networks being recreated in my multi-media installation work A Room for Emma Goldman. I relate anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman’s social theory model to other social systems evident in subcultures and online communities. The audience is connected to the network by linking Emma Goldman’s text Anarchism and Other Essays with the work’s visual form, which I connect to the Soziale Plastik ideal of Joseph Beuys, and the ‘public sculpture’ of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. A Room for Emma Goldman is examined in detail within this exegesis as it demonstrates through lines across my practice. The overall studio process is exploratory, investigating various mediums, and is important in pursuing visual form to the ideas discussed in my exegesis. The social direction found to proliferate from this practice-lead research is a bridge between the physical and virtual within my work. Specifically, artworks that merge more traditional media, with new technologies that often result in non-fixed and participatory outcomes.

Despite extensive media arts theory focusing on sound, the moving image and the relationship between the audible and the visible, there has been scant research into how the out-of-frame creates a sense of meaning in media art. The thesis argues that the out-of-frame can be conceptualised as an out-offield that creates a novel sense of meaning, in both linear and non-linear media works. It explores the expressive possibilities of the out-of-frame to create such a notion of meaning through the still image, the moving image and meta-data, and thence via a series of media art works that employ a floating frame in their treatment and layering of media assets. It also investigates the possibilities when these notions take place over time. Focusing upon media artworks that are almost exclusively narrative-based, the thesis investigates the representation of an emergent out-of-frame, evaluating the capacity of these works to test the use of an out-of-frame to expressively address such meaningful peripheries. Whilst media arts theory and practice almost exclusively focus on events within the frame, this thesis argues that a critical part of the media experience is that of the unseen but represented, whether it be a place or character. This is an allusive reference, much as the use of motif can be an evocation of narrative elements both seen and unseen in temporal spaces. The thesis proposes that recent digital media technologies offer a revolutionary shift in the expression of the out-of-frame, realisations that will impact on users of media technologies in the future. It explores this hypothesis in a number of ways. Firstly, it investigates how mise-en-scène and montage relate to each other beyond traditional concepts as a basis for understanding the out-of-frame. Secondly, it investigates areas not historically associated with mise-en-scène and montage, but are now interrelated due to their inclusion and convergence in recent media technologies and the out-of-frame. Thirdly, it attempts to understand this concept through an examination of a number of case studies that explore the out-of-frame, in the precinematic, the cinematic, and post-cinematic. Fourthly, the thesis explores two experimental media art works, entitled Eavesdrop and Conversations, undertaken collaboratively as part of the doctoral research, that focus on the out-of-frame. Finally, it will examine a number of current and future media technologies and how the out-of-frame is reflected in digital media and the post-cinema media landscape.

The aesthetics of digital art seem to be inextricable from time and process. Surprisingly though, interaction with digital systems has traditionally been marked by spatial concepts and metaphors, positioning the aesthetics of interaction as a convergence of spaces where data and agents 'meet'. This preoccupation with space has placed restrictions on aesthetic theories that seek to represent interaction with digital systems. Within this dissertation, I argue that questions of time and the more specific questions of the temporal and 'temporalising' nature of interaction have been neglected. Through a process-oriented investigation of interactive digital art works, produced by a range of artists such as George Legrady, Jeffrey Shaw, along with Dennis Del Favero, Peter Weibel and Neil Brown and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, I address this problem and propose a temporal aesthetic theory of interaction. I thus offer a specific understanding of digital aesthetics in which the process of interaction is foregrounded. I work towards this aesthetic theory of interaction by firstly enacting particular tenets of A. N. Whitehead's process philosophy and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time, informed by Brian Massumi, Manuel DeLanda and Michel Serres. These thinkers are used to develop a theoretical framework that centres on an understanding of time, process and the event. Directed by this framework, I firstly investigate several non-interactive works by David Claerbout, Bill Viola and the installations of Dan Graham. This investigation of non-interactive works provides the grounding from which I argue that the digital re-presentation of events produces a particular type of time. Thus, particular processes, such as the technological mediation of events, exemplified in the work of Claerbout, Viola and Graham, can be thought to produce their own type of time. From here I propose that, when the process of interaction is introduced into the aesthetic event, time is both produced by digital re-presentations and also encountered in interaction. As a user comes into contact with a database of information, they encounter a particular type of time. In this event, the database enacts a temporal aesthetic in the sense that it archives various sections of the past, and then these are made available again for the user in the present (or for other users in the future). A user is able to navigate through these sections of past, experiencing them simultaneously, or in a nonlinear fashion, or re-sorting them into a temporal order. Motivated by this Whiteheadian approach and by investigating a set of artworks that utilise archives, such as those of the Atlas Group, Armin Linke, George Legrady, Luc Courchesne and Masaki Fujihata, I develop a temporal aesthetic theory that accounts for the multiple modes of temporality immanent to digital interaction. My understanding of Whitehead's conception of time is modulated by Deleuze's philosophy of the virtual. Enlisting what Steven Shaviro would term Whitehead's "pursuit of univocity" or an object-oriented philosophy, I focus upon the event as a processual encounter. Using the paradigm established by Whitehead's panexperietialism, I view all the digital actants as processes. These processes ¬ software, archiving, visualisation or the physical processes of interaction ¬ all transpire over different scales of time, producing different temporal rhythms. Informed by Whitehead, Deleuze and supplemented by Serres, I thus propose a type of time that is scalar. Here, digital temporality can be seen to yield nonlinear and chaotic temporalities, produced by, and encountered in, interactive events. User-generated occasions are sequential, software occasions are asynchronous, and the temporality of the archive nests within it various levels of the past. The interactive event is the coming together of these occasions an event in which we encounter multiple scales of the temporal; an event that I will describe as multi-temporal in nature.

This dissertation poses and seeks to answer the following question: what are the research processes used by computer technologists to examine the nature of human computer interaction; which processes are used by artists in the creation and experience of interactive artworks; and above all, how might these two research communities most fruitfully engage in interdisciplinary collaboration in order to learn from each other and to generate better outcomes? These questions are examined, first, through a review of the literatures relevant to each of these fields. Examining this literature as it has evolved enables us to see the outlines of the history of each field, as they are both very recent phenomena. Second, detailed studies of two large-scale computer-mediated interactive artworks and one small-scale installation are undertaken. The review investigates the “conflicted convergence” (Sengers and Csikszentmihályi, 2003) between the study of Human-Computer Interaction and the practice of creating interactive art. The three case studies — of Conversations 2004, Biloela Girls 2005 and Day of the Figurines 2006 — enable reflection upon the developmental processes more widely used in contemporary computer-driven new media art. The conclusion drawn is that the most effective developmental methodologies, measured by the degree to which they generate the most interesting HCI experimental outcomes, and by the extent to which they vividly realise the artist’s experiential intent, are those that incorporate feedback — gathered from real-world user testing and evaluation — into an iterative development process.

This thesis examines early videogames in relation to a number of current and emerging topics in videogame aesthetics.

New media forms intensify the effects of modern technology on both artistic production and its canonical scholarly reception. Indeed, advancements in computational technologies may have transcended the perspective of a mechanical era, ushering in new questions of aura and agency as regards new media versus high art. Both compelling and problematic for their largely military-industrial origins, electronics and the digital stretch the limits of art theory, criticism, and practice. This investigation considers the influence of modern technology upon contemporary artistic production, and how scholars assimilate that art into a cogent intellectual history. Chapter One introduces a historical context for the canonical reception of advanced technological media. Beginning with the problem of photography and its split nature as both a mechanical tool for 'scientific' observation and an expressive medium for an artist's unique vision, I identify the reverberations of this dualism on subsequent artistic movements and advanced technological forms. Surveying the reception of art and technology in the American academy, this chapter chiefly considers the significance of high art/low culture debates to prevailing canonical responses. Chapter Two brings the dimension of commercialism to this discussion, through an examination of its role in defining the artistic avant-garde. By analyzing the so-called collapse between aesthetic and commercial objects under the duress of capitalism, this writing elucidates the western canon's theoretical apprehensions around electronics and the digital. Chapter Two also considers the impact of postmodern identity politics and social reality of globalization, relative to the foregoing discussions. Chapter Three analyzes what ideological discord is stirred in the coming together of the socially-defined minority artist and media art, especially as it relates to global movements in contemporary production. Finally, it offers a model of embodied engagement with electronics and the digital that brings the intellectual vitality of new media studies to the rich legacy of art history. This exploration offers a language for art that is deeply engaged with media technologies, and a theoretical bridge that links the resources of recent new media scholarship with dominant western art historical discourses. In analyzing the anxious interface of art and technology, this work acknowledges their symbiotic relationship.