Enactive Steering of an Experiential Model of the Atmosphere

摘要

We present a stream of research on Experiential Complex Systems which aims to incorporate responsive, experiential media systems, i.e. interactive, multimodal media environments capable of responding to sensed activity at perceptual rates, into the toolbox of computational science practitioners. Drawing on enactivist, embodied approaches to design, we suggest that these responsive, experiential media systems, driven by models of complex system dynamics, can help provide an experiential, enactive mode of scientific computing in the form of perceptually instantaneous, seamless iterations of hypothesis generation and immersive gestural shaping of dense simulations when used together with existing high performance computing implementations and analytical tools. As a first study of such a system, we present EMA, an Experiential Model of the Atmosphere, a responsive media environment that uses immersive projection, spatialized audio, and infrared-filtered optical sensing to allow participants to interactively steer a computational model of cloud physics, exploring the necessary conditions for different atmospheric processes and phenomena through the movement and presence of their bodies and objects in the lab space.