This article is concerned with the design of interactive art systems intended for display in public locations. It reviews approaches to interactive art systems and discusses the issue of creative engagement with them by the active audience. An approach to elaborating a model of creative engagement is described and exploratory work on its refinement is reported.

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This paper explores the idea of the exhibition as a living laboratory in the making and curating of interactive art. It suggests that museums can act as living laboratories where curators, artists and audiences collaborate in real-world settings. Such laboratories are shown to be essential for the study of the audience experience of interactive art, a key part of understanding interactivity as a medium. The paper describes Beta_space: an experimental public exhibition venue and research environment for interactive art. It places this initiative within a historical continuum of transversal cultural display and the use of the museum as laboratory. It identifies an emerging phenomenon of hybrid research, production and exhibition spaces, and argues that such initiatives work to overcome the continued distinctions, within traditional cultural institutions, between art, science and technology, object and experience, creation and consumption.

This article identifies the distinctive nature of arts-based psychosocial enquiry and practice in a public mental health context, focusing on two projects delivered as part of The Big Anxiety festival, in Sydney, Australia in 2017: ‘Awkward Conversations’, in which one-to-one conversations about anxiety and mental health were offered in experimental aesthetic formats; and ‘Parragirls Past, Present’, a reparative project, culminating in an immersive film production that explored the enduring effects of institutional abuse and trauma and the ways in which traumatic experiences can be refigured to transform their emotional resonance and meaning. Bringing an arts-based enquiry into lived experience into dialogue with psychosocial theory, this article examines the transformative potential of aesthetic transactions and facilitating environments, specifically with regard to understanding the imbrication of lived experience and social settings.

The locus of encounter between art, science and the public can be conceptualized as third space—a generative site of shared experience. This article reports on a group-based psychosocial method led by imagery and affect—the visual matrix—that enables researchers to capture and characterize knowledge emerging in third space, where disciplinary boundaries are fluid and there is no settled discourse. It presents an account of the visual matrix process in the context of an artscience collaboration on memory and forgetting. The authors show how the method illuminates aesthetic and affective dimensions of participant experience and captures the emerging, empathic and ethical knowing that is characteristic of third space.