Interactive art as embodied inquiry : working with audience experience

Interactive arts practice is considered here as a medium for critical enquiry. An experience-centred approach is used to explore how interactive art works facilitate processes of inquiry and reflection. While it is often said that the role of an artwork is to raise questions, my interest here is in art’s capacity to help us develop understanding. Given that it is people and not artworks that are asking these questions, and that meanings evolve through audience experience and interaction, it follows that a more detailed understanding of audience experience can help arts practitioners understand some of the ways these forms of inquiry and experience can be afforded by their works. Two frameworks for understanding user experience, drawn from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and experience-centred-design are used to examine audience experience in Cardiomorphologies, an interactive artwork that explores the experience of subjectivity as a physiologically embodied phenomenon