Software engineering issues in interactive installation art

Abstract

Software engineering has been in contact with new media art for years, although the connections between these fields have rarely been explicit. In this article, we discuss the software engineering issues that appear in one of the new media art subfields, namely interactive installation art, as reported in the scientific literature. Interactive installations are often built in small multidisciplinary teams, including collaboration between artists and software developers, as the artworks are heavily dependent on software. Some of the requirements for successful multidisciplinary work are to share common goals and common language and thus software engineering issues in art context are important to consider and discuss. The goal of this article is twofold. On one hand we provide a road map for artists to the basic software engineering concepts and terms for the purpose of communicating with software engineers or for acting themselves as programmers of their artworks. On the other hand, software engineers who start working with interactive installation art will profit from this summary of relevant reports. Awareness of the software engineering essentials and knowledge of others' experience in similar situations would allow good planning, recognition of problems in early stages, and might simplify the look up for solutions in the right direction