Painterly Reality: Enhancing Audience Engagement with Paintings Through Interactive Art

Perceiving paintings entails more than merely engaging the audience's eyes and brains; their perceptions and experiences of a painting can be intricately connected with body movement. This paper proposes an interactive art approach entitled “Painterly Reality” that facilitates the perception and interaction with paintings in a three-dimensional manner. Its objective is to promote bodily engagement with the painting (i.e., embedded body embodiment and its movement and interaction) to enhance the audience's experience, while maintaining its essence.
Unlike two-dimensional interactions, this approach constructs the Painterly Reality by capturing the audience's body embodiment in real-time and embedding into a three-dimensional painterly world derived from a given painting input. Through their body embodiment, the audience can navigate the painterly world and play with magical realism (i.e., interactive painterly objects), fostering meaningful experiences via interactions. The Painterly Reality is subsequently projected through an Augmented Reality Mirror as a live painting and displayed in front of the audience.
Hence, the audience can gain enhanced experiences through bodily engagement while simultaneously viewing and appreciating the live painting. The paper implements the proposed approach as an interactive artwork, entitled “Everyday Conjunctive”, with Fong Tse Ka's painting, installed in a local museum which successfully enhances audience experience through bodily engagement.