Supportive Methodology and Technology for Creating Interactive Art

A Brief Summary

I completed my Ph.D thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2006. You can download it at the bottom of this page.

I aimed to discover more about how to support creative people who use computers, and interactive art is a quintessential form of such creativity. The idea is that if you can support the creation of interactive art (particularly as part of a collaboration), there’s a good chance of supporting any creative computing.

Download my presentation video here (85Mb .mp4 file)

What’s in the thesis?

I conducted three main studies: the first was an argument about how we make computational media better support creative workers, in and out of collaborations. My answer stems from the roles of constraints which surround people’s conceptual spaces, but which can support creativity only to the extent that they can be changed in response to a change in people’s conceptual spaces. Computation is an attractive medium because potentially supports highly changeable constraints. However, this potential is not realised—there are plenty of constraints within computing today which are neither inherent nor useful for creativity, but imposed as a result of industrial practices which are decreasingly relevant. An example is the constraint around every compiled program preventing any modification of that program. Since these constraints cannot be changed in response to changing conceptual spaces, creativity is limited.

The second study was a grounded theory inquiry into the roles of collaborating experts—predominantly artist and programmer—working in interactive art collaborations. By studying first-hand reports and conducting interviews, I was able to build a rich theory of technology’s role in the collaborative process. Most importantly, I found that non-programming artists prefer to use shared language and so-called boundary objects that are also meaningful in computational terms. An example is when a programmer constructs ‘computational toys’, which sit between conceptual spaces and thus can be manipulated to create technical, aesthetic and computational meaning simultaneously.

My third study, to evaluate these findings, I synthesised the computing recommendations and the toy-making methodology, and examined prototypical examples of them in the light of a real-world art collaboration called Cardiomorphologies v.2. The collaboration involved the development of several computational toys in the Max/MSP computing system, and also a technology for quickly creating toys.