This paper describes an action research project based on the process of designing the visualisation of heart and breath rate data for the interactive artwork Cardiomorphologies. The project aimed to realise the affective goals of the artist as closely as possible by studying the audience experience of the visualisations and incorporating the findings into an iterative design process. The qualities of richness and ambiguity were found to contribute to the achievement of the artists’ two major aims: 1) to create a sense of integrated physical and mental engagement with the work and 2) to create a reflective state in which participants consider correlations between their thoughts and specific physiological states

This paper presents findings from a study of the social and technical roles of programmers in art-technology collaborations. Combined with a review of the supportive and obstructive roles of technology with respect to helping artists to learn programming, we show that programmers can play several roles in such collaborations, both supportive of and obstructive to the requirements of artists, beyond merely 'doing the programming'. Of central importance is the process of 'attuning' between the actors and artefacts involved. All this is used to suggest some high-level ways in which visualisation technology can be employed to aid both the programming process (for artist and technologist) and the art-technology collaboration process.

Artists work with computers and digital media in order to create artworks in complex and varied ways. Collaboration between technologists and artists frequently creates new forms of interaction between artist and computer: it also promotes interaction between technologists and artists. This demonstration shows an example of intelligent interface technology in interactive art.

The paper presents a discussion on the logic of the necessity for investigation into the area of physiological computing and reviews empirical work by some of the authors. In particular, the paper discusses the reliability of information that can be inferred from certain biological sensor data and ways in which positive benefits can be ensured or measured relating to the use of the feedback that can result from its use. One important and emerging application area for physiological feedback in interactive computing is in interactive art systems. In some respects, this application has been making strong progress for the particular reason that the interactive experience itself, rather than more abstract and problematic information handling, is at the core. Another interesting aspect of the applications in art is that they provide informal experimental investigations into these new forms of human–computer interaction, and artists are already devising new applications and interfaces for physiological information. The paper describes an art work employing physiological feedback, including a discussion of how it was built and of the participating audience reactions when exhibited.

Declustering and load balancing are important issues in designing a high performance geographic information system (HPGIS), which is a central component of many interactive applications such as real time terrain visualization. The current literature provides efficient methods for declustering spatial point data. However, there has been little work toward developing efficient declustering methods for collections of extended objects, like chains of line segments and polygons. We focus on the data partitioning approach to parallelizing GIS operations. We provide a framework for declustering collections of extended spatial objects by identifying the following key issues: (1) work load metric; (2) spatial extent of the work load; (3) distribution of the work load over the spatial extent; and (4) declustering method. We identify and experimentally evaluate alternatives for each of these issues. In addition, we also provide a framework for dynamically balancing the load between different processors. We experimentally evaluate the proposed declustering and load balancing methods on a distributed memory MIMD machine (Cray T3D). Experimental results show that the spatial extent and the work load metric are important issues in developing a declustering method. Experiments also show that the replication of data is usually needed to facilitate dynamic load balancing, since the cost of local processing is often less than the cost of data transfer for extended spatial objects. In addition, we also show that the effectiveness of dynamic load balancing techniques can be improved by using declustering methods to determine the subsets of spatial objects to be transferred during runtime.