Digital art, HCI and environmental awareness evaluating play with fire

Play with Fire (PWF) is an interactive installation challenging its participants to ignite generative fires over live streaming video of forests. The installation is designed to raise awareness towards sustainability issues such as climate change and forest fires. PWF initially presents its audience with a mashup of forest fire news, followed by playful interaction with fire and forests through a gestural interface. Finally, it connects to its audience mobile phones granting access to a user specific web application depicting the forest they burnt, regenerating in real-time. The forest will take from some months to years to revolve to its original state, depending on the user's performance. In this paper we address the problem of evaluating whether environmental awareness can be achieved through such a controversial installation, and approach the challenges and benefits of using HCI techniques in Digital Arts. Furthermore, we describe the evaluation of PWF in four different contexts and present preliminary results.