Agiles Week 2

This week we started with a question from Eva

Artwork or Digital Health App?

Matt’s response

Back into creative development today, and Eva posed a really important question that caused us to re-focus our activities:

At the end of the day, are we creating an artwork or a digital health app

This simple question cuts to the core of our activities, and prompted a lot of thinking and discussion.

f we were ‘just’ creating a digital health app, I feel we would need to be much more constrained in scope, and understand from a clinical perspective the physical characteristics and therapeutic needs of a much narrower audience. We would adopt perhaps a more rigorous approach to the affordances that will promote movement, and enlist much greater input from a physiological perspective. We of course be driven by scientific evidence and subjected to clinical trials and evaluation. However, this approach often comes at the expense of engaging the visual artists, sound designers, and other creatives that we have in our development process.

If we were ‘just’ creating art, we would be free from some of these constraints and considerations. We would be able to focus more on being driven by our own artistic practice and set to work on the creation of a piece for a specific artistic outcome. An experience, a provocation, or a social consideration. We might possibly attend less to the needs of the audience and more to what we, as artists, are attempting to convey. However, in doing so we might fail to consider the benefits in promoting movement and mobility, or at worse produce something that fails to consider aspects of accessibility.

So the answer is that we are doing neither – but also both…

Our aims revolve around the creation of an engaging, challenging, and beautiful Augmented Reality experience (an artwork) that has at its core the promotion of movement in a manner that can be utilised effectively in a variety of ?clinical or non-clinical contexts (digital health) where increasing physical movement is a goal. From rehabilitation in the context of an acquired brain injury through to promoting mobility in older people. For me, this is the really interesting intersection of multidisciplinary work, and an exciting element of the arts/science nexus.

digital representations

We began the week previewing the digital representations created by Alex in response to KAB101’s painting and art work.

Matt passed us some sound files and Eva and I worked up a few movement scores to work with in our motion capture later in the week.

Later in the week we returned to Flinders to capture the moves. Eva, Alex and I suited up moved through the scores accompanied by live music from Matt.