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326 Extended Abstracts A STUDY OF AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIPS WITH INTERACTIVE COMPUTERBASED VISUAL ARTWORKS Beryl Graham, Flat 16, 52 Northumberland Road, Newcastle NE1 8SG, United Kingdom. E-mail: . Web site: . Received 6 November 1997. Accepted for publication by Roger F. Malina. This extended abstract summarizes key points of the paper “A Study of Audience Relationships with Interactive Computer-Based Visual Artworks in Gallery Settings, through Observation, Art Practice, and Curation,” by C.E.B. Graham, submitted to the Univ. of Sunderland, 1997, as a Ph.D. thesis. Full text is available in PDF format at and at . Contact the author for the full thesis. As a curator of interactive computerbased art exhibits (as well as an artist and writer), I became aware of problems that occur when people come across interactive artworks in galleries [1]—the queues, the lurking, the apparent confusion over what to do, etc. Despite talk of the revolutionary potential of interactive art to change the audience-artwork relationship , there is very little practical information available about that relationship . My research and resulting doctoral dissertation, “A Study of Audience Relationships with Interactive ComputerBased Visual Artworks in Gallery Settings , through Observation, Art Practice and Curation,” were stimulated by these perceived problems [2]. My area of interest concerns the exhibition of interactive computer-based installations in conventional public art galleries and museums rather than Internet works or specialist computer-art venues. My research thus assumes the audience to be physically present users/viewers/interactors. As part of my research I conducted conventional observational case studies of some exhibited works in Britain, produced an interactive artwork [3] and curated an exhibition of interactive art [4]. All of these strands contributed to the development of a common-language taxonomy of kinds and levels of interactivity within art. In conducting observational case studies, I drew techniques from some established educational exhibit evaluation methodologies [5] tempered by a keen sense of the ludicrousness of standing in front of an artwork with a stopwatch. The intent was not to define a “good” interactive artwork, but to gain some insight about some very practical queries such as percentage of audience use, duration of use and factors that may affect duration of use. The first case study (of a singlescreen “sit-down-at-a-desk” installation of a CD-ROM [6]) tracked people and their actions while they were in the exhibition room. In order to gather demographic data and some judgments on the artwork, I gave viewers questionnaires as they left the gallery. I discovered that those who used the artwork enjoyed an average hands-on time of around 18 minutes. Use-times did not seem to be significantly affected by gender , age, computer experience or quality judgments. However, an unexpected pattern of use was observed: of those who came to the gallery with other people (“groupers”), many would choose to share a computer even when another computer was vacant. Of the grouper users, those who interacted with each other while interacting with the computer (69%) showed a longer average use-time than those who did not. These results also characterized further case studies (three artworks from the V-Topia exhibition [7]), which continued to display frequent occurrence of collective usage, even when this was physically uncomfortable to do so (for example, when multiple viewers were required to squeeze into the very small individual user “cage” of Grahame Weinbren’s Sonata). This pattern of collective use was the key factor in the development of an artwork intended to be enhanced, rather than devalued, by multiple usage: Individual Fancies is an “interactive teatable ” (Fig. 1). When users sit down, the projected hands of a character appear at their places at the table; the hands can be encouraged to “talk” and show objects by the pouring of tea. Each character has a brief story of isolation, which he/she tries to solve by some kind of collective activity—for example, a homeworker for the textile industry who gets together with other homeworkers to campaign for better pay and conditions. The characters then encourage the real users at the table to talk to each other. The more tea-pouring and interaction that goes on, the more the users are...

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