Represent-ing presence

Abstract

The paper discusses the notion of RE:PRESENT in the light of the concept of presence. Presence is the state of being present and denotes the state of being in a determined or/and a perceived space. The research is focused on the study of interactive spaces and installations that are composed of physical and virtual artefacts, impelling the user to employ his/her body as the medium of interaction. It is proposed that space is perceived as a mixed experience of presence and it is related to the embodied cognition, meaning bodily senses, memory and kinesthesis.

The literature review performed on the notion of presence as well as on the notion of embodiment facilitated the extraction of several parameters comprising a common field for presence and embodiment, orientation of attention, nature of interaction, imagination etc. Following, several paradigms of installations in which the body is (mostly in a dynamic way) the medium of interaction are presented and analysed. The aim of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of the parameters deriving from the literature in order to identify the ones that are strongly related to the sense of mixed presence in respect to the embodied cognition. The ultimate goal is to compose a general framework for the notion of the mixed sense of presence.