Net Work: Lessons from Collaboratively Designing an Interactive Artwork

For the last 18 months we have been involved in designing and building the software and hardware for a prototype floating interactive artwork, Net Work, that is constructed from autonomous light-emitting buoys that respond to their physical environment and the state of neighbouring buoys. The completed artwork will be installed at a London location (such as the dockside basin adjacent to Wapping Art) and in further venues across the UK (potentially next to the pier in Herne Bay). The design process has involved the collaboration of artists, designers, programmers and engineers. Although Jane Prophet had an artistic vision of the project, initially there were no clearly defined collective goals or individual roles. Consequently, the project has not employed a traditional engineering problem-solving methodology. The project’s goals, and the means of achieving them, have developed through an open-ended process that has benefited from the contributions of different collaborators. In this paper we describe some lessons we have learnt from using an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to build the prototype of Net Work. It is our belief that this approach could be productively applied a large class of design problems where there is no clear, well-defined goal. 1. What is Net Work? Net Work will be a large scale interactive art installation constructed from 100 autonomous light emitting buoys placed at 1 meter intervals to form a 10×10 grid. The buoys display colours that correspond to their behavioural state, which depends on both the environment (wave motion and light levels) and the state of neighbouring buoys. The artwork will be installed at a London location (such as the dockside basin adjacent to Wapping Art) and in further venues across the UK (potentially next to the pier in Herne Bay – Figure 1). Figure 1: a visualization of Net Work adjacent to Herne Bay pier, UK Net Work will respond to two types of user interaction: one where the audience is physically proximate; and the second, where a remote audience can affect the installation over the Internet. The local audience can shine torchlight on the buoys, activating their light sensors and thereby changing their state and corresponding colour. For the online audience we will provide software for participants to design their own buoy interaction rules, run them in simulation and see a visualization of the behaviour of the installation. We will save these online designs so they can be downloaded onto Net Work and drive the physical artwork. 2. Building an interactive artwork as a case study for interdisciplinary collaboration There are two key reasons why building an interactive artwork is a good case study for interdisciplinary collaboration. First, the skills required are often beyond the expertise of one person. There are many pragmatic and aesthetic challenges involved in building an interactive artwork that can only be solved with a wide range of specialist knowledge. The Net Work project has benefited from experts in the fields of: art; design; engineering; software development; and biological sciences. Second, designing and building a large scale outdoor interactive artwork is not a well-defined problem. There are many unknowns involved in building physical artefacts that need to respond to the environment. In our case the artwork will be situated in a particularly challenging physical environment where it has to float, be autonomous with respect to energy and to keep its structural integrity while coping with all kinds of weather and waves. Just how long the buoys can survive in water is currently an open issue. As Net Work is a public artwork we also have to consider maintenance issues such as how to cope with vandalism. Furthermore, it may be that an open-ended approach is the only viable option when trying to design systems with even minimal agency; that is, where system components autonomously interact with and respond to the environment in which they are situated. This is because it is often not possible to define in advance all the significant parameters of interactive systems and the environments in which they are operating. Consequently it is hard to predict the behaviour that will result from systemenvironment interactions. Penny [1, p.416] describes the advantages of an artistic training for building autonomous, interactive systems where the focus is on what he calls ‘interactive esthetics’ rather than implementing an “externally specified task for the system”; that is, the type of problem that requires an open-ended approach. He argues that an artist is “able to experiment without the constraint of total reliability or a pragmatic work-oriented goal” and consequently they can “open up a wide field of possibilities, some of [which] may ultimately have application or relevance in pragmatic applications”