How to win and loose beyond classifications? Colloborative agency in the Game of Imaginary Beings

Abstract

The Game of Imaginary Beings was an artistic outcome of the Cultural Usability -research project carried out at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki, UlAH, during 2000 and 2001. The collaborative research focused on the questions of how the user is constructed in design of the interactive computer mediated environments and how the critical cross-disciplined theory and the design practice could be brought together. In this paper I am focusing on the question of how collaborative agency is constructed in The Game of Imaginary Beings as a work of interactive art. How the illusion of participation and agency, the role of the user as a designer, is created in the process of constructing an imaginary being and what kind of meanings the aesthetics of these interactive mirror-images suggest?