Designing performativity for mixed reality installations

Abstract

This article takes up the concept of performativity prevalent in the humanities and applies it to the design of installation arts in mixed reality mode. Based on the design, development and public access to two specific works, the concept is related to a form of research by design. We argue that the concept of performativity may be further usefully employed in investigations (design and research, artistic and public) into digital arts where complex intersections between concepts, technologies, dramaturgy, media and participant actions are in flux and together constitute the emergence and experience of a work. Theories of performativity are related to these two works in an argument that further suggests there is room in research by design to also include 'performative design'. The article is the result of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaboration and aims to convey some sense of that in its reporting style, content and analysis. Keywords: installation art, performativity, research by design, practice-based research, mixed reality, performative design Contexts Art, design, practice & performativity In one way or another, our daily lives are shaped, filtered and filigreed with digital tools and technologies. These are often lodged in our material practices of information search and retrieval, and they are connected to a variety of activities in work and learning, commerce and play. When we think of digital environments we commonly think of desktop interfaces, game worlds or seamless contact via mobile phones. In each of these domains, as users we have direct, active relationships to screen based spaces and the media within them. Alongside such spaces, however, are those realised in and as electronic artworks. Digital art pieces often play with and seek to fissure and deconstruct interface conventions along with our expectations and comfort as participants in which our embodied interaction is central. In such artworks, the aesthetic is often relational. Their poetics is centred on emergence rather than fixity. Self-reflexive qualities often become part of their materiality. They entail performative contributions from visitors as well as ones enacted by the technologies through which they are mediated. Such digital artworks implicate us in the interplay of technologies and the texturing of communication that is made possible by design for participation and through engaged performativity. Many contemporary installation type spaces use a mix of media, static and dynamic, linear, nonlinear and generative. They may be characterized by a type of participative play that involves us as active and implicitly collaborative co-actors and not merely as static, spectatorial audiences. Our embodied engagement is also realised in shifting performativity relations between the immediate context and the distributed character of digitally mediated communication. Andrew Morrison et. al. Designing performativity for mixed reality installations Figures 1 & 2: (Above) Dislocation-on site in the construction of a multi-layered space f...

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