Crafting interactive systems: learning from digital art practice

To create digital art, skillsets from a variety of disciplines are combined to form a finished aesthetic product. An artist may engage in hybrid practice, building his/her own technologies, or may collaborate with specialized technicians to form a creative team. This workshop will bring together participants from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, including art, music, design, and engineering to explore how the technological aspects of digital art function not merely in service to artistic considerations but rather, have creative and communicative value in their own right. We will discuss how explicit valuation of technical process in interdisciplinary design affects the experience of digital art creation, and explore how technology itself is and can be aestheticized in digital art practice. We will use these concepts to frame an investigation of how engagement with digital art practice can be used to enrich HCI.