Art installations: a study of the topology of collective co-located interactions

Art installations designed for co-located collective interactions rarely call the execution of a task or a preannounced goal as a guideline for the activity. If this new configuration, which differs from those of traditional HCI, is revealed, from the perspective of aesthetic experience, to be one of the richest and most 'engaging' ones, it is by no means less complex to apprehend for both the artist and the end-user. Through a case study (with concrete examples of artistic installations), we propose in this present article to examine the topological configurations of existing co-located collective interactions by analyzing the scope of action of the systems' agents and the relations between them. To achieve this, we lay the foundations of a new graphical language (used here to describe the relations between interfaces), which we foresee to dedicate, in the near future, to the modeling, visual representation and taxonomic analysis of topologies of interaction.