Thur 26 August 2010
13:00–14:30h
domicil, Dortmund

Convened by Lizzie Muller and Peter Ride (gb)

The importance of the audience as part of the media art event is widely acknowledged, but although interaction and embodiment are well theorised, we are yet to achieve a well grounded understanding of audience experience. It is fundamental to defining the context around which an art work has been made and shown. The panel asks how we understand the concerns of audiences and how they respond to concepts of creativity and innovation in media art.

1. Lizzie Muller (au)
2. Nathaniel Stern (us)
3. Katja Kwastek (de)
4. Christopher Salter (qc/ca)
5. Peter Ride (gb)

ISEA2010 Conference Proceedings | P31 A to X: Audience Experience in Media Art Research (PDF, 46.79 KB)

Lizzie Muller (au)

Lizzie Muller is a curator, researcher, and Senior Lecturer at University of Technology, Sydney. Her research investigates audience experience from a curatorial perspective. She has adapted tools and techniques from Interaction Design to work with audience experience as a material, and was founding curator of Beta_Space, a dedicated “prototyping” environment for interactive art at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. She has collaborated with Caitlin Jones to develop an archival approach to documenting interactive art based on the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the audience experience supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Ludwig Boltzman Institute.

Nathaniel Stern (us)

Nathaniel Stern is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. His research combines traditional art historical trajectories with contemporary understandings of performance, interactivity and embodiment, in order to bring new insight to art and art criticism. How do we embody, perform, and interact with art in the gallery space, and what is at stake in how we move-in-relation?

Katja Kwastek (de)

Katja Kwastek is art historian and worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research from 2006 to 2009. Before, she was Assistant Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (Munich) and Visiting Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). She has curated exhibition projects, lectured and published widely, including the catalogue Ohne Schnur. Art and Wireless Communication (2004). Currently she finishes a book on the aesthetics of interaction in digital art.

Christopher Salter (qc/ca)

Chris Salter is an artist, Associate Professor, Design+Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal and researcher with Hexagram. His artistic work and scholarly research focuses on the ways in which theories and practices of performance can be used to understand the complex ontological and perceptual entanglements between human and technical environments. He has exhibited his work internationally and is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance from MIT Press (2010).

Peter Ride (gb)

Peter Ride is a curator and Research Fellow, University of Westminster, UK. His research addresses how different organisations have a different understanding of their audiences and this is a ‘framing’ device that can affect how a work is encountered and experienced, for example how the audience experience of the same work in a science museum can differ from experiencing it in an arts festival. He also looks at way that audience research can be used to re-define the curatorial scope of an exhibition.