DEPARTMENT: ARTFUL MEDIA
Creating Performance-
Oriented Multimedia
Projects as Part of an
Interdisciplinary Teaching
Practice
The authors describe four interdisciplinary
performance-oriented multimedia projects developed
at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and reflect on the
student participants’ experience as well as lessons
they learned as teachers and human–computer
interaction researchers.
A significant part of teaching at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (BUW) consists of semester-long,
intensive projects, usually conducted by groups of students supervised by academic faculty. This
gives teachers the freedom to pick novel topics and to experiment with ideas and approaches.
They can furthermore direct the concept design and create interdisciplinary groups by offering
places to students from other program areas outside of computing, or via collaborative projects
across faculties.
In recent years, the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) group at BUW has developed several
performance projects or technology for artistic performances as an important and creative part of
the university’s teaching approach. These have ranged from a self-scripted theatre play using in-
teractive technology, to interactive costumes custom-created for semiprofessional ballet dancers,
to large-scale public installation-based performances. Some of our projects were completely de-
veloped in-house, whereas others had external clients and funding. In this article, we reflect on
our experiences and consider the advantages and disadvantages of our teaching practice.
We present four of our most prominent projects via short profile descriptions. We characterize
these works as live multimedia performances or public exhibition performances. The outcomes
Eva Hornecker
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Michaela Honauer
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Department Editor:
Aisling Kelliher, Virginia
Tech; aislingk@vt.edu
" © 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current
or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works,
for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”
IEEE MultiMedia Vol. 25, No. 2 April–June 2018 1070-986X/18/$33.00 ©2018 IEEE p.93-103
DOI: 10.1109/MMUL.2018.023121168 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8424829