The extension of digital sensory devices into three dimensions significantly alters computation from an intellectual, keyboard oriented process to an emotional, full bodied, visceral experience; movement becomes input data: how we walk, the way in which a hand moves, a smile, even eye movement and pupil contraction can be translated into computational data. Action, not information, then becomes a primary component of input, the expressive gesture becoming another dimension to communication possibilities. With the present exponential growth of sensory devices creating an overwhelming presence of data, questions as to the purposes, potentials and design protocols for the meaningful use of gesture arise.

Theatre, a performing art form, is particularly useful in the development of gestural presence in human-computer interaction, in that it is concerned with the manufacture of expressive gesture through manifested action. Actor training, direction, scriptwriting, set construction and ensemble work are some of the artforms and strategies of performance that are useful to observe in developing design principles for emerging technologies. These artforms are located in the Western theatrical tradition of textual translation into action, originating in Ancient Greece with such writers as Sophocles and its subsequent development since medieval times into the practices of modern proscenium theatre and beyond. This translation from text into action is a first critical step of dimensional change in media, an enduring problem where multiple sensory data inputs exist.

Key Texts

Laurel, B., Computers as Theatre. 1991, Massachussetts: Addison Wesley

Jacko, J.A. and Sears, A., The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. 2003, New Jersey: Erlbaum

Summary Written By

Roman Danylak

Creativity and Cognition Studios

Faculty of Information Technology

University of Technology, Sydney