UC San Diego

The conundrum of interactive time-based content implies a clash of three distinct temporalities: The timelined playback of music and film, the temporal characteristics of the technological components of a media system, and last but not least, the temporality of the involved participant--the user, observer, recipient of the message and massage provided by the mediated content. In order to analytically untangle these relationships, this dissertation follows two guiding lines that are centered around the concept of temporality and participation: on he one hand we will discuss the temporality inherent in computer-based media, on the other hand we will place the temporality of participation in the the center of our inquiry. Both aspects run in parallel, and long the way, we will pass a large number of detailed aspects and discuss them from these two perspectives. We present a new conceptual framework for the relationship between the human participant and the technological extensions of the body that is based on temporality. Principle impulses for this work came out of the writings of Martin Heidegger and Marshal McLuhan through a derived model of media as extension of man, and technology as an extension of the body