This is not here : connectedness, remote experiences and immersive telematic art.

In this interdisciplinary research I set out to develop an understanding of the stages in which human participants experience the application Radiomap, an interactive telematic application mapping live radio stations upon a photorealistic live map of the world, developed as part of this practice-based research program. It was applied in two iterative studies, first in a study using a screen-based version of the application, followed by a study using an immersive, telematic environment. Both studies capture and analyse participants experience via interviews in an adapted Grounded Theory approach, resulting in different models of the stages of experience. This includes diagrams of experiential stages as well as telematic set-ups.

A contextual review looks at media theory, media design practice, and relevant dimensions of Human-Computer Interaction research and how this discipline understands and describes telematic experiences. Parts of these dimensions are adapted to inform the methods and methodologies necessary for this research and also to discuss a selection of case studies of interactive art. These case studies, as part of the contextual review, are used to elucidate, establish and analyse the areas of interest Telematic Art, Transformation Art and Global Awareness Art and point to their intrinsic capabilities of not only extending our limited human senses to sense the natural world via remote sensors, but also to create a global awareness, in the sense of an awareness of the planet Earth, in this process. Relevant literature from art theory, philosophy and history of arts complements these examples to form a comprehensive and interdisciplinary system of research methods aided by diagrams and other visual aids depicting crucial experiential characteristics, such as spatiality and medium, which again inform the analysis of data.

The conclusions present a critical theory of the different stages of experience that individuals using the application go through. It suggests that a combination of immersive telematics together with the transformation of data into another sensorial modality can create a platform for technological art that questions our relationship with technology and that this critical distance, as opposed to an overwhelming immersion, may aid this process in leaving space to reflect and contemplate this relationship.