From media art archeology to contemporary interaction design - the term interface culture is based on a vivid and ongoing discourse in the fields of interactive art, interaction design, game design, tangible interfaces, auditory interfaces, fashionable technologies, wearable devices, intelligent ambiences, sensor technologies, telecommunication and new experimental forms of human-machine, human-human and machine-machine interactions and the cultural discourse surrounding them. This book's aim is to give an overview of the current state of interactive art and interface technology as well as an outlook on new forms of hybridization in art, media, scientific research and every-day media applications.

Sensory perception: mind and matter aims at a deeper understanding of the many facets of sensory perception and their relations to brain function and cognition. It is an attempt to promote the interdisciplinary discourse between the neurosciences and psychology, which speaks the language of cognitive experiences, and philosophy, which has been thinking about the meaning and origin of consciousness since its beginning. Leading experts contribute to such a discourse by informing the reader about exciting modern developments, both technical and conceptual, and by pointing to the big gaps still to be bridged. The various chapters provide access to scientific research on sensory perception and the mind from a broad perspective, covering a large spectrum of topics which range from the molecular mechanisms at work in sensory cells to the study of the unconscious and to neurophilosophy.

Scholars from science, art, and humanities explore the meaning of our new image worlds and offer new strategies for visual analysis. We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neuroscience to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis.

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

Artists and creators in interactive art and interaction design have long been conducting research on human-machine interaction. Through artistic, conceptual, social and critical projects, they have shown how interactive digital processes are essential elements for their artistic creations. Resulting prototypes have often reached beyond the art arena into areas such as mobile computing, intelligent ambiences, intelligent architecture, fashionable technologies, ubiquitous computing and pervasive gaming. Many of the early artist-developed interactive technologies have influenced new design practices, products and services of today's media society. This book brings together key theoreticians and practitioners of this field. It shows how historically relevant the issues of interaction and interface design are, as they can be analyzed not only from an engineering point of view but from a social, artistic and conceptual, and even commercial angle as well.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. At present cyberculture is a dominating cultural paradigm and nothing seems to be able to replace it. We globally share the same cyberspace but there is a question whether we all together–the whole humankind–are really living in the same cyberculture? This book proves that we rather tend to define the contemporary state of culture as cybercultures. The process of spreading technologies, trends and ideas is not the same in all parts of the world. The varying speeds of this process and cultural diversity of its forms are created by different social, political, economic and cultural contexts. By representing different perspectives the authors depict a wide spectrum of the most important current problems connected with networked life, global sharing of data, loss of privacy, new meanings of community and developments in narrative structures and social behaviours arising from new communication possibilities, instantaneity of information and global viral sensitivity.

Much as art history is in the process of being transformed by new information communication technologies, often in ways that are either disavowed or resisted, art practice is also being changed by those same technologies. One of the most obvious symptoms of this change is the increasing numbers of artists working in universities, and having their work facilitated and supported by the funding and infrastructural resources that such institutions offer. This new paradigm of art as research is likely to have a profound effect on how we understand the role of the artist and of art practice in society. In this unique book, artists, art historians, art theorists and curators of new media reflect on the idea of art as research and how it has changed practice. Intrinsic to the volume is an investigation of the advances in creative practice made possible via artists engaging directly with technology or via collaborative partnerships between practitioners and technological experts, ranging through a broad spectrum of advanced methods from robotics through rapid prototyping to the biological sciences.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The Digital Musician explores what it means to be a musician in the digital age. It examines musical skills, cultural awareness and artistic identity through the prism of recent technological innovations. New technologies, and especially the new digital technologies, mean that anyone can produce music without musical training. This book asks why make music? what music to make? and how do we know what is good?