Audience Participation in Interactive Art Systems: Is Instructional Signage a Necessary Evil?

Interactive Art deals with audience participation (visitor-made-interactor), something that the artist devises and incorporates into the piece since its conception. This research deals with the challenges of audience engagement that such endeavor represents. In particular, we address the use of instructional signage as a way to increase visitors' participation, through a field experiment research approach (taking place on a natural occurring environment) combining practice-based research, observation and a questionnaire. An interactive art piece using QR Code technology was created as part of the experimental procedure. Results showed that the interaction using smartdevices and QR Codes was successfully accomplished and audience engagement significantly improved when instructional signage was used.