Differentiating interaction

As an artist and researcher working with the concept of emergence to create digital, interactive art systems, my interest in the electronic arts began in the 1990’s when I was working with procedural computer graphics and architectural metaphors for creating virtual space. From 2000 I was building virtual reality (VR) environments for immersive and augmented reality systems for a range of applications, but in 2007 I began practice-based PhD studies in order to focus on interactive art. This led to my interest in emergence and participant experiences during interactive art. It has continued to inform my work including the artworks discussed here, a recent monograph on Emergence and Interactive Art (Seevinck, 2017), and my approach to teaching. In summary, my creative practice is largely driven by (1) emergence theory, (2) the conceptual framework or initial problem of a creative work, and (3) the research I do into people’s experience of interactive art. This approach has meant that I’m also exploring interaction in concrete, formal ways. In the first section of this chapter I discuss these three aspects alongside creative work. In the latter half of this chapter I discuss some of the expressive potential of interaction.