Interactive Digital Art & Societal Health Conference

Interactive Digital Art & Societal Health Conference is a new conference organized by Jin Hyun Kim and Marcello Lusanna at Humboldt University of Berlin taking place December 2-3 2022. The organizer states that the motivation of organizing this conference is to promote the usage of interactive digital art in healthcare and other daily life contexts where societal health plays a role both on a theoretical and practical level. The conference gathered scholars from many diciplines including music therapy, psychotherapy, musicology, music technology, HCI, philosophy, anthropology and somatic interactive design.

I was honored to be invited to do at talk at the conference, which took place at the Kunsthaus KuLe. The title of my talk was Potential for health and well-being effects in interactive sonification of movements.

Abstract: This paper argues how interactive digital art combining aspects from dance and music through sensor and sound generation technologies has the potential of promoting the health and well-being of users of all abilities. Dance and music in a more traditional sense are known to have positive health effects by motivating movement, creative expression and social interaction. Moreover, they can reduce the risk of physical illness by improving aerobic capacity, balance, elasticity and coordination as well as mental disorders by reducing stress and inducing positive emotions. Technologies for interactive sonification of dance movement combines aspects of dance and music at the same time by translating movement sensor data into sound and music, and if designed carefully they can have a considerable potential for many of the same health and well-being effects that music and dance have separately. For example, they often tend to imply feedback loops where a movement first will generate a sound, and then in turn can motivate the user to move as a response to the sound. Through the possibilities of generating and controlling musical parameters on higher levels, interactive sonification of dance movement can afford degrees of inclusion that surpass that of e.g. traditional instruments, which often require years of training to master. This is also why interactive movement sonification can offer people with different kinds of disabilities a way of playing music through their movements, and thereby a way of generating positive experiences of basic psychological need satisfaction as well as other elements of well-being like positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. The paper will show how two different interactive systems/devices using two sensing technologies both afford these kinds of positive health and well-being potential, namely the MotionComposer and the VibraChair, where the author has been engaged in the development of both. Whereas the former is a well-established product in its third version, the latter is still in its exploratory stages of development. The paper will discuss and compare different aspects of the systems/devices, and conclude with some general suggestions for design aiming for positive health and well-being effects.