I am a media artist that began as a painter moved to writing evolved to filmmaker and now am here to learn the skills and knowledge required for new media. Along with that, hand in hand, over the years, my intention for and ethics in my practice has changed to where I am to today. That is to create art that stimulates empathy to build community.
What is empathy? Aristotle in the Poetics says that it is the mark of great storytelling and feeling as if you are in someone else's shoes and make the choices as the character. How have I done this in the past? Most successfully, it has been through filmmaking. Until most recently, the tools in new media are getting better and better just as technology is getting better across all fields and every application. The most obvious tools for this specific intended manipulation also is the place that has had the most money for research and development and that is GAMING.
You all know my idea for ED, the Empathy Dome. It's an immersive, interactive installation where the participant has an empathy stimulating dialogue with an avatar. No different than any other art, this installation requires both a theoretical foundation as well as the practical tools.
What are games? A quickie answer would be to evoke Jesper Juul with "A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable."
The gaming elements for ED are in the development of a rule based environment that presents situations with characters to emotional engage the participant. This involves constructing the rules of the space that creates a suspension of disbelief so that the participant is more readily available to have an emotional connection. In other words, creating an artificial environment that presents a character with preprogrammed responses in way that is engaging. This begs the question. How does an interactive exchange without human contact evoke a genuine emotional response particularly the "empathy" emotion from a real participant?
A critical component to engaging the participant with the avatar is the interface. Gaming technologies and elements carefully design the interface to make the interactivity more fluid and effective and Hence more engaging. In my paper will define key terms that come to play in this empathy gaming arena that I've created.
The is theoretical part of my project following in alphabetical order:
Who are the artists that are working and thinking in these terms. Luc Chourschesne, Tony Dove, Jill Scott, and Tina Gonzalves.
Luc Chourchesne has worked very similar installations with both round projections and interactivity trying to induce a participant to engage the virtual people or get a virtual girl to go on a date. He has not as far as I know worked specifically on manipulating the participant into an empathetic physiological response.
One aspect that I have not discussed is my architecture involves panoramic painting elements along with the Byzantine copula, the connecting or linking dome. Luc uses and writes about these rudiments.
My final paper for this class is concerned using digital arts and new media tools for the purpose of building empathy. I am concerned with the ability to use the current gaming and psychological/physical oriented technologies for stimulating the "empathy" emotion particularly bridging cultures that have been pitted against one another for political warmongering purposes.
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