Keywords affective computation, affective interaction, believable agents, agent architecture, interactive installations, interactive sound, tangible interfaces, interaction design, critical technical practices DIS2002, London. Affective computation generally focuses on the informatics of affect: structuring, formalizing, and representing emotion as informational units. We propose instead an enigmatics of affect, a critical technical practice that respects the rich and undefinable complexities of human affective experience. Our interactive installation, the Influencing Machine, allows users to explore a dynamic landscape of emotionally expressive sound and child-like drawings, using a tangible, intuitive input device that supports open-ended engagement. The Influencing Machine bridges the subjective experience of the user and the necessary objective rationality of the underlying code. It functions as a cultural probe, reflecting and challenging users to reflect on the cultural meaning of affective computation. 88 | DIS2002 maximally effectively with human beings [30]. While defining, classifying, creating logical structure for, and understanding the relationship of rationality to emotions can be useful exercises, bringing with them the pleasures of both computability and scientific respectability, we believe this mindset is in danger of missing a fundamental point: affect is not just a formal, computational construct, but also a human, rich, enigmatic, complex, and ill-defined experience. Rationalizing it may be necessary to make it computable, but an affective computation that truly inspires and incorporates human emotion must include a broader cultural perspective, in which the elusive and nonrational character of emotion does not need to be explained away. From this perspective, computation may be used, not to acquire and reason about user's emotional states, but rather to create intuitive experiences of affect by the user during interaction. We term this alternative approach to affective computation an enigmatics of affect. This approach does not, however, liberate us from the constraints of computability. In order to function, technology requires us to discretize, analyze, and formalize. A substantial design challenge in constructing a technical system that supports enigmatic, open interpretation,then, is the need to bridge the rational objectivity of the soft-and hardware with the interpretational complexity of users' subjective experiences. Doing this well requires combining technology design in the tradition of AI research with cultural analysis of the meaning and metaphors embedded in the interaction, in the spirit of a critical technical practice [1]. Here, we will describe the Influencing Machine, an interactive installation we built to explore issues in the enigmatics of affect. In this installation, users influence the emotions of an (invisible) artificial agent, which expresses its emotions by generating real-time, dynamic, child-like scribblings and through an emotionally evocative soundscape. For t...
