Toward an Affective Aesthetics: Cognitive-Driven Interaction in the Affective Environment of the Mind Cupola

This article presents two interactive artworks that represent a shift in artistic practice in their approach to active spectatorship. This approach to interaction incorporates the cognitive processes of the participant through an aesthetic interconnection between technological effect and affective human response. The discussion of the artworks seeks to demonstrate how this aesthetic interconnection creates a novel approach to an engagement with interaction, while suggesting a new forum for addressing the philosophical problem of the relationship between body and mind. This aesthetic interconnection between technology and human cognition, which will be referred to as affective aesthetics, is stimulated by introducing a novel application of emerging technologies that dynamically effect and evaluate the participant's affective responses through cognitive feedback loops within interactive artworks.