Uncanny Interaction: A Digital Medium for Unconscious E.motion

Séa.nce: a networked glossalalia is a collaborative project involving a sound artist, visual artist, and a remotely-located interaction designer. The aim of the collaboration was to make a multiuser live performance work that allowed local and remote players to interact in a networked séance environment. The original idea was to create a work that asked how it would look, sound, and feel to interact in an environment that channels the unconscious e.motional relays in the network. The result is site-specific performance event (launched on the ISEA2004 ferry) where local players and remote players interact in a multiuser environment. This paper focuses on lessons learned during the process of designing an uncanny interactivity, dealing with the piece itself and the collaborative process which created it, both of which are tightly intertwined. In the interesting case of Séa.nce the work itself is a creative collaboration, and the process of creating it is an e.motional network.