MITMI Man-In-The-Middle Interaction: The human back in the loop

Résumé En

"The medium is the message" from McLuhan [13] showed and still shows how the medium influences how the message is perceived. This article proposes a new model for computer-human interaction named MITMI for (hu)man-in-the-middle Interaction in the context of digital art. This approach questions the concept of mediated interaction by placing the human as the driver and as the "translator" of the interaction process from a theoretical point of view. Indeed, mediated interaction is based on the fact that two humans are able to interact through a technological device [5]. We develop the idea of putting human back as an intermediary between the user/spectator and the technology. Our model thus introduces a way of conceptualizing interactive digital artworks, where the artist considered as an operator and creator can also take a central position and is no longer the only producer of the work taking thus entirely part of the artwork. We first explore the need to put the human back in the loop, then we will describe how the principles of mediated interaction help in defining the MITMI model. We will stress this model through several installations and interactive artworks based on the idea of shifting the artist position from the creator, to the mediator between the real world and the virtual world. Beyond the artistic approach, this model proposes to redefine and to explore new modes of co-creation or mediation, where digital media supports human-to-human interaction.