Embodied learning and the exploration of agency and autonomy in environments that merge digital and physical experiences are replacing the technology led concerns of user control and interaction transparency. A new digital practice is emerging exploring the notion of a behaving technology, hybridising the engaged agency of the user with the potential presence of a parallel digital realm. Behaving technologies is the forging of a dynamic and evolving relationship between user and environment. It is the thinking of a performed relationship between the embodied presence of its user and a dynamic and intelligent interactive environment. Here, behaviour is what takes place on either side of the interface, an enacted topology established through playful probing and a mutual process of learning and adaptation.
This project suggests that the performative properties of space are central to conceiving of spatial experience in interactive environments. Here, performativity is a key concept not only in the thinking of the interactive system and its generative logics, but also in the imagining of the user's role and the resulting spatiality of her experience. Addressing an audience from architecture and computer science perspectives, as well as from art, design and dance choreography, this research has consequences for extending the thinking of space as well as for the constructing of new interactive paradigms by which we can embed the consciousness of digital experiences alongside our embodied experiences of the everyday. Questioning the role of technology and the means of user engagement, this research reflects on the possibility of new technology to effect a new sense of agency defining behaviour on both sides of the interface.
The project addresses four arising research themes:
Shaping behaviour, forming the interface
Behaving technologies relies on the making of embodied interfaces
allowing the user to explore an extended sense of agency merging digital
and physical experiences. How can the interface be seen as an open framework
for exploration and playful interaction?
Digital agency
As the digital learns to respond to the actions of the user,
it attains its own dynamic properties reflecting but also departing from
the agency of the user. What is the nature of this shared behaviour of
mutual affects?
Cultural framing
Placing behaving technologies within an architectural context opens
up for questioning both site and program. How does the spatial experience
of the interactive environment intersect and merge with the social and
cultural practices of its siting?
Questioning performativity
This research probes the forming of a performed space of emerging behaviours.
How can the thinking of space become affected by the indeterminacy of
interaction? How can conceiving the user as performer challenge the role
of technology?
The concept of a new discipline formed around the thinking of behaving technologies was coined by artist and robotisist Simon Penny in his talk After Interdisciplinarity: New Pedagogy, New Identities at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA), 2004. Merging ideas of autonomous systems with embodied interfaces, behaving technologies is an emergent field combining research from the fields of Digital Arts, Robotics, Telematics, Virtual Environments, Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. Learning from the contemporary thinking of cultural theorists such as Katherine Hayles and Paul Dourish as well as practitioners such as Joseph Weizenbaum, Craig Reynolds, Rodney Brooks and Myron Krueger, behaving technologies aim to establish a dynamic relationship between user and system. Rather than conceiving the interactive environment as a fixed place of user optimisation, behaving technologies reiterate the possibility of presence, redefining and re-constructing the user's role in a reality which mixes, joins and grafts physical and digital experiences.
Locating the question of behaving technologies within an architectural tradition of conceiving and designing space, this project examines the imagining of space as an enacted condition, coming into being through the actions and interactions of its user. Learning from theoreticians such as Elizabeth Grosz and Sanford Kwinter, the project explores the thinking of an event space of interaction, a fluvial condition whose dimensions and modalities are essentially performative. These dynamic concepts of space are informing a contemporary debate on digital architecture. The emergence of a digital praxis incorporating concepts of change and duration into the design process was recently framed in Frederic Migayrou's exhibition Non Standard Architecture at the Pompidou Centre, December 2003, as well as the Mark Goulthorpe's associated conference at MIT, September 2004.