___________________________________________________________We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the 'cultural'. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI.

A new series of molecular dyads and pentad featuring free-base porphyrin and ruthenium phthalocyanine have been synthesized and characterized. The synthetic strategy involved reacting free-base porphyrin functionalized with one or four entities of phenylimidazole at the meso position of the porphyrin ring with ruthenium carbonyl phthalocyanine followed by chromatographic separation and purification of the products. Excitation transfer in these donor-acceptor polyads (dyad and pentad) is investigated in nonpolar toluene and polar benzonitrile solvents using both steady-state and time-resolved emission techniques. Electrochemical and computational studies suggested that the photoinduced electron transfer is a thermodynamically unfavorable process in nonpolar media but may take place in a polar environment. Selective excitation of the donor, free-base porphyrin entity, resulted in efficient excitation transfer to the acceptor, ruthenium phthalocyanine, and the position of imidazole linkage on the free-base porphyrin could be used to tune the rates of excitation transfer. The singlet excited Ru phthalocyanine thus formed instantly relaxed to the triplet state via intersystem crossing prior to returning to the ground state. Kinetics of energy transfer (k(ENT)) was monitored by performing transient absorption and emission measurements using pump-probe and up-conversion techniques in toluene, respectively, and modeled using a Förster-type energy transfer mechanism. Such studies revealed the experimental k(ENT) values on the order of 10(10)-10(11) s(-1), which readily agreed with the theoretically estimated values. Interestingly, in polar benzonitrile solvent, additional charge transfer interactions in the case of dyads but not in the case of pentad, presumably due to the geometry/orientation consideration, were observed.

A study of an interactive artwork shows how artists engaged the public with scientific climate change data. The artwork visualised live environmental data collected from remote trees, alongside both historical and forecast global CO 2 data. Visitors also took part in a mobile sensing experience in a nearby forest. Our study draws on the perspectives of the artists, visitors and a climate scientist to reveal how the work was designed and experienced. We show that the artists adopted a distinct approach that fostered an emotional engagement with data rather than an informative or persuasive one. We chart the performative strategies they used to achieve this including sensory engagement with data, a temporal structure that balanced liveness with slowness, and the juxtaposition of different treatments of the data to enable interpretation and dialogue.

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Since 2000, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has seen a turn to the artistic, looking at more provocative, cultural and social experiences. In doing so HCI is increasingly collaborating with artists who engage with real world data. Much of this work focuses on engaging the public in the spectacle of interactive experiences. In contrast, this paper takes a look behind the scenes by studying a collaboration between artists, climate scientists and researchers as they designed a participatory sensing system to interpret scientific data for public presentation. This paper presents this crossdisciplinary approach from the perspective of an artist/researcher on the project.