This paper outlines a research agenda that addresses the question of how contemporary interactive arts practice can evolve new strategies or ways of facilitating the development of subjective experiences that elicit an embodied, felt sense and awareness of our co-evolution with intelligent systems and digital technologies. Drawing upon and extending a phenomenological model of intentionality, we introduce the concept of the “symbiogenic experience” in relation to interactive or technologically-mediated artworks and discuss early research explorations that exemplify it.

This paper brings together multiple theories regarding the role of the senses in the construction of embodied experiences. Embodiment, we suggest, is not a visual or auditory phenomenon, but rather an ontological one, that is, one of being. Employing accounts from cognitive science, existential phenomenology, and interactive art, we argue that the inner senses have a special role in the construction of these ontological experiences.

We present an interactive artwork titled Taro(t)ception designed to elicit an embodied aesthetic experience and heighten awareness of inner states. As well as being an artwork, Taro(t)ception is an exploration: the system provides a tool through which we can explore proprioceptive illusions in order to develop methods for transforming viewers' experiences of their own bodies and their own movements.

Our approach attempts to bridge the gap between third-person investigations, which rarely take in to account the quality of experience, and first-person accounts, which are easily dismissed as anecdotal.