After almost a year in the pipeline, the article that summarizes the installation’s pilot run was finally published in Ecology & Society. Here’s the abstract:
The imaginary worlds of sustainability: observations from an interactive art installation
By: Roy Bendor, David Maggs, Rachel Peake, John Robinson, Steve Williams
We report on preliminary results from a public engagement project based on a procedural approach to sustainability. The project centered on an interactive art installation that comprised a live actor, an immersive soundscape featuring a handful of different characters, an interactive touch-table, and four interactive rooms within which participants wandered, partially guided by a narrative through-line, yet at the same time left to make sense of any larger meanings on their own. The installation was designed to experiment with two propositions: (1) that there is value in public engagement with sustainability based on the exploration and articulation of deeply held beliefs about the world—the worldviews, values, and presuppositions that mediate perception and action; (2) that there is value in replacing the infocentric tendency of most public engagement on sustainability with an approach premised in aesthetics and experiential resonance. Following the installation’s two-week pilot run, our preliminary results indicated that the majority of participants found the experience both resonant and thought provoking, and were mostly willing to critically engage with their pre- existing notions of sustainability.
The full article is available online here. You can find a list of my publications here.
It took much longer, but the lecture I’ve given at SFU’s Institute for the Humanities (in Nov.2014!) now appears as a chapter in the anthology, Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media, edited by Tim Markham and Scott Rodgers, and published by Peter Lang (there’s an accompanying website too).
The essay presents a Heideggerian perspective on art videogames from which I develop what I call ‘Interactive World Disclosure‘. Here’s a scanned pdf of the chapter.