How Interactive Media Shape Aesthetic Experience and Visual Perception of Art in Museum Contexts

This paper investigates how media modalities shape aesthetic experience and visual perception during encounters with art in museum contexts. Rather than treating artworks as objects of direct and isolated perception, we examine how interpretive media such as text, audio, video, and interactive simulation mediate viewers’ experience of art. We conceptualize the museum as an interactive system in which media modalities actively influence attention, engagement, and perceptual processing.Across four experiments, we examine whether different media modalities systematically affect users’ aesthetic experience and whether interactive simulation of artistic production changes how viewers visually engage with paintings. In the first two experiments, text, audio, video, and interactive painting simulation conditions were compared on measures of presence, flow, and memory. Results indicate that richer and more sensorimotor forms of mediation, particularly video and interactive simulation, increase reported presence and flow, with interactive media producing the strongest and most consistent experiential effects.In the second two experiments, we investigated whether interactive painting simulation alters visual attention and perceptual engagement using eye-tracking measures. Participants who engaged in full-body painting simulation were compared with control participants on time to first fixation, fixation count, scan distribution, and pupil dilation while viewing both self-produced and other paintings. The findings suggest that interactive art experience can alter how viewers scan and read paintings, encouraging more exploratory visual patterns and, in some cases, patterns resembling those associated with greater artistic familiarity.Taken together, these findings suggest that media modalities are not merely supplementary channels for interpretation, but active components of aesthetic experience. Interactive and embodied forms of mediation may deepen engagement with artworks by altering both subjective experience and visual-perceptual processing.