In the broadest terms, an experiment suggests the staging of some process in order to “see what happens.” Psychological research typically has a pre-arranged dimension of evidence: both what is to be measured and the scale of that measurement are decided in advance. “Experimental” creative practice also involves designing a process or context for a human experience, but “what might happen” is left more open—and is not usually measured in any explicit way. This raises the question of what the feedback loop is in such creative practice – how does the “result” of experimentation feed back into future work?
Katherine Hayles sees literature as transforming implicit (bodily) knowledge into conscious knowledge, but also calling into question conscious knowledge. In this instance, the feedback is not a flow from the participant and apparatus which is then managed by the experimenter (the scientist or artist), but an effect which can presumably be experienced both by participant / reader and artist. (132)
Hayles’s comment is an instance of the way in which critical and theoretical writing on new media practice sometimes applies the language of scientific experiment to the analysis of creative practice, suggesting a convergence in discourse. Other examples are found in the work of new media theorist Mark Hansen, who writes about “cognitive activity” (3) and “the flow of data” (2), and suggests that "by placing the embodied viewer-participant into a circuit with information, the installations and environments [created by contemporary media artists] ... function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images." (Hansen 11)
Katherine Hayles sees literature as transforming implicit (bodily) knowledge into conscious knowledge, but also calling into question conscious knowledge. In this instance, the feedback is not a flow from the participant and apparatus which is then managed by the experimenter (the scientist or artist), but an effect which can presumably be experienced both by participant / reader and artist. (132)
Hayles’s comment is an instance of the way in which critical and theoretical writing on new media practice sometimes applies the language of scientific experiment to the analysis of creative practice, suggesting a convergence in discourse. Other examples are found in the work of new media theorist Mark Hansen, who writes about “cognitive activity” (3) and “the flow of data” (2), and suggests that "by placing the embodied viewer-participant into a circuit with information, the installations and environments [created by contemporary media artists] ... function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images." (Hansen 11)
