Paper short abstract:

We examine how interactive art offers the underpinning of continuity to empirical questions that integrate art and life, using interaction as medium for its exploration. Interactive art is an art of action, not of vision: its goal is to experience the immediacy of information in real time.

Paper long abstract:

We examine how interactive art continues to offer the underpinning of continuity to empirical questions that integrate art and life, using interaction as medium for its exploration. In interactive art, there is reciprocal activity between the viewer and the artwork where any simple move in the presence of the work can produce transformative reciprocity. Interactive art is an art of action more than of vision: its goal is to experience the immediacy of (in)formation in real time. It seeks to slow down the moment of the encounter so one can experience in "real time" the effects of the artwork on the viewer and the viewer on the artwork. That power of interactive art to sense temporality and enable visibility of the possibilities of the encounter is worthy of attention because, even if limited by the programming, the artwork renders explicit the transformations that occur when work, human and milieu compose each other. The artwork as individuation renders explicit problems, situations, issues as states of affairs pertinent to contemporaneity since the work only comes into being and acquires existence when the relationship is established in the encounter. The artwork seeks to provoke activity in the viewer and gives rise to responses which determine the relationship and subsequent attunement that is established in the here and now generated in the enmeshment. The artwork, the viewer and the milieu become one through the resulting embodied, situated, and enacted forms of cognition characterised by the affects and percepts produced in the aesthetic experience.