The aesthetics of interactive artifacts - Thoughts on performative beauty

Nowadays aesthetics and the notion of beauty play an increasingly significant role in interactive art and design products, and consequently in scientific research in these fields. This paper outlines a rudimentary theory of the notion of beauty in interactive artifacts. My argument takes as its starting point Kant's definition of the sentiment of beauty as an act of judgment. This judgment unfolds at two very different but interrelated levels. The first level consists of the participant's physiological aesthetic judgment of the digital system's output. This judgment determines the participant's next (inter-)action and is the basis for performative 'flow'. At the second level beauty is seen as an emergent phenomenon that manifests itself as a reflective sentiment, i.e. as a result of the interplay between already experienced 'flow' and the idea of the interactive artifact's potentiality. The idea of potentiality is on the one hand an intrinsic part of the artificial interaction system (an interactive artifact), but on the other hand is experienced as a transcendental phenomenon that appears to overcome the rigid limits of algorithmic systems. The present paper concretizes my theoretical findings by analyzing two very different interactive artifacts: David Rokeby's Very Nervous System from the early days of digital interactive art and the online community 'Second Life' as an example of a virtual meeting place.