Visual melodies : design and evaluation of an interactive art installation for clinical environments

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.Over the past decades there has been a growing recognition of the value of art activities, such as visual arts, music, drawing, dance, poetry and writing, as therapeutic approaches to enhance healthcare settings. Numerous studies have identified the value of art and design in decreasing depression and anxiety and creating a holistic healing environment for hospital visitors and patients, as well as offering a positive working environment for staff. Therefore, I propose that interactive multimedia art offers an important new therapeutic avenue as a service for engaging visitors, patients and staff in hospitals. Visual Melodies is an interactive art installation that engenders feelings of calm and relaxation in users. In this exegesis, I describe the theoretical background, development and evaluation of Visual Melodies. This creative trajectory draws on practice-based research, with the aims to create an interactive art installation, to evaluate its therapeutic potential, and to identify the semiotic dimensions of multimedia art that are most generally effective for producing therapeutic effects. Based on the literature of the different techniques used in art therapy, colour therapy and music therapy, I propose a bridge between these three therapies through a platform of an interactive multimedia installation – harnessing images, colours and sounds. Eight design principles that form the foundation of the practice were developed along with the discussion of the design elements that have been shown to be effective for enhancing relaxation. In line with the design principles, the design practice was then developed as a series of original landscape artworks and interactive animations accompanied by music specifically composed for the researcher. Audience feedback to the installation in a hospital waiting room was studied as a way of assessing its therapeutic potential. The evaluation feedback has been very positive and welcoming from visitors, patients and staff of all ages. Overall, Visual Melodies provides a relaxing and playful experience for the participants. The feelings most often reported were that of being relaxed, followed by calm, diverted, evoking memories and happy. This project demonstrates that it is beneficial to create a relaxing and supportive therapeutic interactive multimedia artwork for promoting holistic healing environments. The practice-based research and findings in this exegesis extend our understanding of how we can fuse artwork and technology, to transform our healthcare settings from sterile treatment spaces, into healing places where ‘care’ is built into the environment itself

Tangible landscapes and abstract narratives

© 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. The Tangible Landscapes range of interactive audiovisual and sculptural pieces offer audiences opportunities to explore abstract landscapes, recreating an embodied experience of the materials, through tangible interaction with found objects. The objects can contain sensors (tilt, orientation, movement, proximity, pressure, etc) which allow the audience to manipulate the video material through the sensors influencing the algorithms in the system. New meanings and new narratives can emerge from the audience interactions, explorations and interpretations, combining the individual and social, as well as the intimate and the spatial. Interactive art in general, and these pieces in particular, encourage and support the audience to create their own unique experiences, allowing for an individual sense of agency. The resulting patterns and images that emerge from the interaction, though these deliberate opportunities, a participative process of co-creating. This paper presents a range of these Tangible Landscape pieces, their relationship with earlier pieces and research, and placed in a context of artistic expression engaging with nature such as Landscape Art

Traces – 'reading' the environment.

This paper looks particularly at informal and implicit sources of information in our environment, how we can read this kind of information, and how the information has come about. The paper focuses on implicit information and ‘reading the environment’, with examples from practice, and presents an art project that investigates this notion through an interactive video installation. This installation, called ‘Traces’, presented interactive videos and photographs of two types of human-made traces, revealing past behaviours and/or intentions. It took, for instance, the skidmarks of cars on roads as input for a process of video manipulation and a recorded sonification

Hanging off a bar

Exertion Games involve physical effort and as a result can facilitate physical health benefits. We present Hanging off a Bar, an action hero-inspired Exertion Game in which players hang off an exercise bar over a virtual river for as long as possible. Initial observations from three events with audiences ranging from the general public to expert game designers suggest that Hanging off a Bar can be engaging for players and facilitate intense exertion within seconds. Furthermore, we collected suggestions for what game elements players believe could entice them to increase their physical effort investment. These suggestions, combined with Hanging off a Bar as research vehicle due to the easy measurement of exertion through hanging time, enable future explorations into the relationship between digital game elements and physical exertion, guiding designers on how to support exertion in digital game

Expressing Tacit Material Sensations from a Robo-Sculpting Process by Communicating Shared Haptic Experiences

A sculptor's sense of touch is paramount because we experience sculpting in the iterative process of making new objects. Making sculpture is a process of expressing the inner 'tacit-self' by way of tangible material interactions that become shared artefacts. The existence of tacit- tactile awareness indicates a natural world of personal haptic experience that this thesis will attempt to unpack. Tele-haptic solutions are presented in the form of two robotic sculptures, Touchbot #1 and Touchbot #2. Touchbots (collectively) are the study objects that this practice- based art-research thesis produced, to ask the question: Is it possible to create a machine that could capture and retransmit tacit-tactile experiences within the artistic act of sculpting, through material engagement, from a sculptor's hand to a non-sculptor's hand? Research, conducted and presented, aims to demonstrate that robotic haptic feedback is a vehicle for communicating 'touch' messages through mechanical transmission during sculptural actions (demonstrated through participant interviews and video observation analysis). Additionally, an epistemological context for exploring 'hands-on' knowledge and practice deficits in machine-assisted object modelling is presented including: Michael Polanyi's Tacit Dimension (Polanyi, 2009), David Gooding's Thing Knowledge (Gooding, 2004, p. 1) and Lambros Malafouris' "Material Agency" and material culture (Malafouris, 2008, pp. 19-36). Intersecting bodies of knowledge weave a common thread to support developing a method of communicating tacit sculptural information using haptic touch experience. Unfortunately, there exists more tele-haptics and telerobotics technology for industrial applications than artworks using the same technology. For instance, 'rapid prototyping' technology—such as 3D printers—is removing human tactile-material interaction from object making altogether. In response to the technological obstacle of expanding contemporary interactive sculpture, haptics is applied to include real-time, iterative, robotically assisted object modelling. A review of contemporary haptic technology demonstrates a gap in our understanding iii of embodied knowledge transference. A shortlist of contemporary artists and their works that address the communication of tacit-haptic experiences is also offered, highlighting the importance of exploring embodied knowledge transfer

Expressing Tacit Material Sensations from a Robo-Sculpting Process by Communicating Shared Haptic Experiences

A sculptor's sense of touch is paramount because we experience sculpting in the iterative process of making new objects. Making sculpture is a process of expressing the inner 'tacit-self' by way of tangible material interactions that become shared artefacts. The existence of tacit- tactile awareness indicates a natural world of personal haptic experience that this thesis will attempt to unpack. Tele-haptic solutions are presented in the form of two robotic sculptures, Touchbot #1 and Touchbot #2. Touchbots (collectively) are the study objects that this practice- based art-research thesis produced, to ask the question: Is it possible to create a machine that could capture and retransmit tacit-tactile experiences within the artistic act of sculpting, through material engagement, from a sculptor's hand to a non-sculptor's hand? Research, conducted and presented, aims to demonstrate that robotic haptic feedback is a vehicle for communicating 'touch' messages through mechanical transmission during sculptural actions (demonstrated through participant interviews and video observation analysis). Additionally, an epistemological context for exploring 'hands-on' knowledge and practice deficits in machine-assisted object modelling is presented including: Michael Polanyi's Tacit Dimension (Polanyi, 2009), David Gooding's Thing Knowledge (Gooding, 2004, p. 1) and Lambros Malafouris' "Material Agency" and material culture (Malafouris, 2008, pp. 19-36). Intersecting bodies of knowledge weave a common thread to support developing a method of communicating tacit sculptural information using haptic touch experience. Unfortunately, there exists more tele-haptics and telerobotics technology for industrial applications than artworks using the same technology. For instance, 'rapid prototyping' technology—such as 3D printers—is removing human tactile-material interaction from object making altogether. In response to the technological obstacle of expanding contemporary interactive sculpture, haptics is applied to include real-time, iterative, robotically assisted object modelling. A review of contemporary haptic technology demonstrates a gap in our understanding iii of embodied knowledge transference. A shortlist of contemporary artists and their works that address the communication of tacit-haptic experiences is also offered, highlighting the importance of exploring embodied knowledge transfer

Location-based Responsive Space for Multimedia Environment Using Ultra-wideband Technology

The rapid advances in Real-Time Location Systems (RTLSs), such as Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology, provide opportunities to realize new types of multimedia environments. Taking advantage of the UWB technology, this research investigates how location information enhances multimedia environments by utilizing the relationship between the physical environment and its habitants. In this thesis, we present an approach, called UWB-based Responsive Multimedia Space (URMS), that combines near real-time location data with multimedia devices. This approach has three main parts: (1) the concept of URMS incorporating multimedia devices for the realization of a series of location-based events, (2) the requirements of the UWB system and multimedia devices for the development of URMS, and (3) the methods for the grid-based event selection, and continuous and smooth adjustment of location-based interaction based on distance. Furthermore, a touch user interface is proposed to define interactively multimedia events. In order to validate the proposed approach, a prototype system is developed and tested in two case studies