Vitality

Abstract

In this chapter, we now explore the concept of vitality and focus on the way that a playful rhythm can produce vitality, animating both people and interactive systems. Vitality emerges through a process of energy exchange . Energy will travel both into and out from an interactive system during a rhythmic experience and it is the play of intensities, contrasts and durations within this flow of energy that produces rhythmic vitality. We begin with Andrew Johnston , a digital artist, musician and Research Director at the Animal Logic Academy at the University of Technology Sydney. Johnston researches and practices across the disciplines of live performance, digital art and human-computer-interaction. This gives him a unique perspective on rhythm and the role it plays within interactive experience. His collaborations with dancers and musicians to create interactive systems for live performance have given him particular insight into the design of rhythms that generate expressive vitality. As he explains in his interview, doing this is about creating a type of interactive control that has an energy of give and take, and a fluidity that feels conversational. This leads us to explore the questions: what distinguishes a lively rhythm from a mechanical one? How do we create a design whose interactions might allow a user to be rhythmically expressive? And, how do we create dynamic rhythmic vitality? These discussions make connections with several of the previous chapters, bringing together many of the concepts we have developed so far about playful rhythmic vitality and expressiveness.

Even if you start off feeling tired or lonely or bored. It doesn’t matter, because you’re willing to play and you know that any game will do, that any game will get you there. You know that because you know the energy resides not in the game but in playing with people. (De Koven 2013, p. 14)

To be aroused is ‘to be put in motion’ or ‘stirred up’ or ‘excited into activity’, physically, mentally, emotionally. It is synonymous with ‘to animate’. (Stern 2010, p. 58)