Peta Mitchell

The lens of ludic engagement: evaluating participation in interactive art installations

Designers and artists have integrated recent advances in interactive, tangible and ubiquitous computing technologies to create new forms of interactive environments in the domains of work, recreation, culture and leisure. Many designs of technology systems begin with the workplace in mind, and with function, ease of use, and efficiency high on the list of priorities. [1] These priorities do not fit well with works designed for an interactive art environment, where the aims are many, and where the focus on utility and functionality is to support a playful, ambiguous or even experimental experience for the participants. To evaluate such works requires an integration of art-criticism techniques with more recent Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methods, and an understanding of the different nature of engagement in these environments. This paper begins a process of mapping a set of priorities for amplifying engagement in interactive art installations. I first define the concept of ludic engagement and its usefulness as a lens for both design and evaluation in these settings. I then detail two fieldwork evaluations I conducted within two exhibitions of interactive artworks, and discuss their outcomes and the future directions of this research.

Redrawing the Map : An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives

In this chapter we seek to interrogate the methods and assumptions underpinning geocriticism by engaging with and reframing dominant ways of analysing mediated representations of Australian space in cultural narratives, specifically film, literature, and theatre. What, we ask, might geocriticism contribute to the analysis of Australian texts in which location figures prominently? We argue a geocritical approach may provide an interdisciplinary framework that offers a way of identifying tropes across geographic regions and across media representations. Drawing on scholarship spanning Australian cinematic, literary and theatrical narratives, this chapter surveys published work in the field and posits that a refined geocritical mapping and analysis of the cultural terrain foregrounds the significance of geography to culture and draws different traditions of spatial enquiry into dialogue without privileging any particular textual form. We conclude by scoping possibilities for future research emerging from recent technological developments in interactive online cartography.

Building sensitising terms to understand free-play in open-ended interactive art environments

In this paper we introduce and discuss the nature of free-play in the context of three open-ended interactive art installation works. We observe the interaction work of situated free-play of the participants in these environments and, building on precedent work, devise a set of sensitising terms derived both from the literature and from what we observe from participants interacting there. These sensitising terms act as guides and are designed to be used by those who experience, evaluate or report on open-ended interactive art. That is, we propose these terms as a common-ground language to be used by participants communicating while in the art work to describe their experience, by researchers in the various stages of research process (observation, coding activity, analysis, reporting, and publication), and by inter-disciplinary researchers working across the fields of HCI and art. This work builds a foundation for understanding the relationship between free-play, open-ended environments, and interactive installations and contributes sensitising terms useful for the HCI community for discussion and analysis of open-ended interactive art works.

Geographies/Aerographies of Contagion

In this paper I argue that geography, contagion, and the element of air have historically overlapped in interesting ways and that they continue to do so. By tracing metaphors of air, wind, miasma, and contagion through literary works that span nearly three centuries, I argue that the element of air tends to signify, in cultural expression, a more ambiguous, affective form of contagion that is also bound up with the spread of ideas and information.

What Might GeoHumanities Do? Possibilities, Practices, Publics, and Politics

This article draws together seven practitioners and scholars from across the diffuse GeoHumanities community to reflect on the pasts and futures of the GeoHumanities. Far from trying to circle the intellectual wagons around orthodoxies of practice or intent, or to determine possibilities in advance, these contributions and the accompanying commentary seek to create connections across the diverse communities of knowledge and practice that constitute the GeoHumanities. Ahead of these six contributions a commentary situates these discussions within wider concerns with interdisciplinarity and identifies three common themes—possibilities practices, and publics—worthy of further discussion and reflection. The introduction concludes by identifying a fourth theme, politics, that coheres these three themes in productive and important ways.

Never-Never Land: affective landscapes, the touristic gaze and heterotopic space in Australia

ABSTRACT This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmanns Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue that the fictional Never-Never Land through which the films characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Katherine Gorge (Nitmiluk), Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past and the present.

Contagion, virology, autoimmunity: Derrida’s rhetoric of contamination

Threaded through Derrida’s body of work is a rhetoric of contamination, one that is intimately bound to the question of metaphor—that is, to the question of language and communication in general. In his reading of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double in Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida notes that it is ‘metaphor that Artaud wants to destroy’. Metaphor, the manifestation of the schism between words and their referents, and an inescapable reminder of human alienation from the divine, is at the same time a force of contamination. Metaphor is a mark Derrida writes, quoting Artaud, of an ‘infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine’. The publication of Dissemination a few years later in 1972 saw Derrida concretising the links between contamination and metaphor. There is, as Derrida points out in Dissemination, a complex feedback loop between metaphor—the ultimate figure of figurality—and contamination: ‘metaphoricity is’, he says, ‘the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’. In this paper, I map the development and evolution of Derrida’s rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, I read Derrida’s ‘logic of autoimmunity’—a concept that has been considered emblematic of his ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ turn—as an extension of rather than a point of rupture from his rhetorical concerns, and one that is undergirded by the principle of contamination.

Automating the digital everyday: an introduction:

This Special Issue brings together a range of social science and humanities perspectives on the relationships among automation, digital media and everyday life. We have aimed to get beyond the current hype and anxieties around self-driving cars, algorithms and robotics, and to achieve a more precise and grounded understanding of exactly what might be meant by automation, how and with what effects it is becoming entangled with everyday life and how investigating these relationships also helps us in understanding processes of media change in society more broadly.

Redrawing the Map

Space, place, and landscape are long-standing themes in Australian literary and cultural studies and, from the colonial era to the present day, Australian cultural narratives have proven fertile ground for spatial analysis. In his influential 1986 book on Australian film and literature, National Fictions,1 Graeme Turner argues that narrative forms are, in the Australian context, profoundly tied up with national myths of land, landscape, and identity. Moreover, Turner argues, Australian filmic and fictive texts “invite us to accept that the land is central to a distinctively Australian meaning.”2 This concept of the “land producing its literature” has, he continues, in turn influenced both Australian literary and film criticism, though the former more strongly than the latter.3 This carries through into theatre for, as Joanne Tompkins argues in her landmark study Unsettling Space,4 spatial tensions driven by anxieties about contested land, nationalism, colonial settlement, and Aboriginal reconciliation play out as narratives on the Australian stage, where the performance of nationhood and identity is dramatically enacted: “Australian theatre not only contests conventional Australian history and culture; it also stages alternative means of managing the production of space in a spatially unstable nation.”5

Talk2Me : engaging interactive installation environments

In this research I explore what elements there may be in common between tangible interactive-technology works that successfully engage their participants. An exploration of existing methods for obtaining useful evaluations for non-use and ambiguous environments forms a part of the discussion.