Embodied Multimodal Dialogue in Interactive Art Installations: Toward Sustainable Creative Practices

Abstract

Multimodal interaction has become a central concern in contemporary Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly in contexts where bodily engagement and sensory integration are fundamental to user experience. Interactive art installations constitute a specific domain within HCI in which interaction is exploratory, situated, and often resistant to conventional usability evaluation. Although principles from User-Centered Design (UCD), Interaction Design, and User Experience (UX) are frequently invoked to describe such systems, their empirical application to interactive art remains methodologically underspecified. This paper examines multimodal dialogue as an analytical lens for understanding interaction in artistic installations. Three interactive installations, SandBox, TIDE (IDEArt), and Threshold, are analyzed as qualitative case studies using a unified research design. Data were collected through systematic observation, semi-structured interviews, and audiovisual documentation, and analyzed using thematic analysis. The results identify recurrent patterns of embodied interaction, sensory exploration, and interpretative meaning-making across the three installations. In preference to proposing a new theoretical framework or quantitative evaluation model, this study contributes a methodologically transparent approach to investigating multimodal dialogue in interactive art, demonstrating, through evidence gathered across three case studies, how embodied and interpretative forms of interaction support sustained engagement, methodological reuse, and the long-term relevance of interactive installations beyond technological novelty.