Art has a power different from all other human actions; it can produce a variety of human emotions like nothing else. The main purpose of this chapter is to study the relation between media arts and emotions. Virtual environments are increasingly being used by artists; the use of immersive environments allows the media art artist to go further than express himself, allows that through contemplation and interaction the participant also becomes part of the artistic artefact. Immersive environments can induce emotional changes capable of generating states of empathy. Considering an immersive environment as a socio-technical system, where human and non-human elements interact, establishing strong relationships, the authors used actor-network theory as an approach to design an immersive artifact of digital media art. The use of neurofeedback mechanisms during the participant's exposure to immersive environments opens doors to new types of interaction, allowing to explore emotional states to generate empathy.
TopThree strong words: media, art, and emotion! An era of industrialization of emotions arise. A person gets emotional, seeks emotion, is satisfied with emotion. Perhaps the seventh art has become the maximum exponent in triggering emotions (for the time being): with engaging narratives, and transmedia in some cases; with complex and realistic animation effects, whether they are two-dimensional or three-dimensional; with sound effects ranging from stereo to 8D sound; in short, a whole range of manipulations and expressions (techno artistic) that the digital treatment of audio visual came to allow.
If the information is processed digitally, at some stage of the process we will be faced with the use of a processing machine - the computer. We can consider only the production of content, taking advantage of the tremendous processing capacity of machines that are increasingly evolved, to the point that it is not possible to distinguish the real (filmed) from what is virtual (generated by the computer). But we can also think about the new world that opens due the fact we can interact with machines and they can respond in real time, entering us in such domains like virtual reality and augmented reality. It should be noted at this point that, due to technological constraints, the first one has been more concerned with visualization at the detriment of interaction and the second one more concerned with interaction at the detriment of visualization.
In the context of human-machine interaction, the input and output of the computer have been quite asymmetric. The amount of information or bandwidth that is communicated from the computer to the user has generally been much greater than the bandwidth from the user to the computer (Jacob, 1996). This imbalance influences the intuition and performance of the user's interaction, and the tendency is to improve the bandwidth from the user to the system.
A computer presentation through several channels (output) has become familiar under the designation of Multimedia, a topic that has been extensively explored, e.g. in (Marcos, Bernardes, & Sá, 2002). Input channels or sources, also known as input modes or modalities, are the basis for the type of applications that support the human-computer interaction designated by Multimodal Interaction (Sá, Malerczyk, & Schnaider, 2001).