Installation art emerged in the 1960s/70s and is—broadly conceived—a spatial-temporal and site-specific art form (i.e., works are custom-made for indoor or outdoor spaces) using a wide range of materials. This often involves a rather large presentation that visitors can enter, move around in, or at least circumambulate. As such, installation art is often not only one individual “object” but an ensemble or environment. It is, therefore, often described as “theatrical,” “environmental,” “immersive,” or “experiential” (Bishop, 2005, p. 6; also see Noë, 2000, p. 128, 131), creating conditions for bodily and interactive experiences. From its mid-century inception, installation art has become a major focus of artists and contemporary museums and received increased visitor interest (Pelowski et al., 2018, 2020; Spence, 2022). Many contemporary installation art exhibitions attract thousands of visitors to wait in long lines for often short times inside the installations (Collier, 2016; Noveck, 2017), as well record visitor numbers (e.g., 160,000 visitors saw one of the world's top-selling artists, Yayoi Kusama, “Infinity Mirror” installation; Peck, 2017, also see Neuendorf, 2018).

Installation art has been widely noted to evoke and require the use of the body in various capacities, above and beyond the consideration of formal properties of the art (Reiss, 1999; Best, 2002; Farkhatdinov, 2014; Caldarola, 2020; Vial Kayser and Coëllier, 2021; Kessels and Schrenk, 2022):

First, installation art generally evokes a phenomenological focus on the viewer's bodily experience and overall body awareness (Bishop, 2005; Petersen, 2015). More specifically, installation art is suggested to be often intended to increase bodily awareness and presence (Oliveira et al., 2003; Bukdahl, 2019). Such conscious experience of one's body in interaction with the installation is argued to be central to the reception of installation art (Oliveira et al., 2003; Kessels and Schrenk, 2022). For example, in response to Olafur Eliasson's large-scale installation, The weather project at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2003 (see Figure 1), which consisted of a large semi-circle of 100 mono-frequency laps, visitors laid down on the floor as if the installation was an actual sun, sensing the heat and brightness of it and observing themselves and others in a huge mirror hung at the ceiling (May and Eliasson, 2003; Bukdahl, 2015). In Olafur Eliason's installation artwork, Your rainbow panorama (ARoS, 2006–11), visitors could experience what it feels like to walk around inside the installation (Bukdahl, 2019; Ruiz, 2021). Yayoi Kusama's participatory mirror room installations (e.g., Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern, 2021–2023) immerse visitors by engulfing their bodies in patterns such that they become one with the artwork (Rosenthal, 2021). Plastique Fantastique's site-specific installation Blurry Venice at the Venice Biennale in 2019 gave visitors the sensation of walking on a liquid surface in a tunnel while their movements change the shape of the tunnel itself (Myers, 2019). Fujiko Nakaya's participatory installations use fog (e.g., Nebel Leben at Haus der Kunst, 2022) that envelops visitors allowing for a sensory connection to the fog (Sone, 2019). Bennett (2019) described their whole body feeling floating and weightless while experiencing James Turrell's Ganzfeld installation Perfectly Clear (1991).

Second, the participatory audience is expected to play a significant part in generating the work and its reception. The immersive and enveloping character of installation art often achieves this. Such dependence of installation art on the literal presence of the spectators has been reflected since the early 60s under the notion of “inclusion of the viewer” in art historical writings (Rebentisch, 2012, p. 248; see also Hobbs, 2001), according to which the spectator becomes “integral to the completion of the work” (Reiss, 1999, p. xii). Thus, installation art often falls under “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud et al., 2002), where emphasis is placed on the visitor's role in the artwork's realization and reception. Bukdahl (2019) even argued that the appreciation of being participants of the artwork is part of its experience.

Last, the often-large scale and lack of perspicuity (i.e., it cannot be taken in in one glance) of installation artworks require physical activity, active exploration, and spatial movement to be able to fully explore and engage it (Noë, 2000; Bishop, 2005; Manresa, 2020). This becomes especially salient compared to paintings, which could be argued to be taken in, at least for recognition of content and visual properties, more instantaneously. As such, art experience of installation art depends upon bodily investment, which is essential for its experience. It has been argued that corporeal movement during the experience of installation art “activates [the visitors'] physical and psychic responses” rather than the art object alone (Weingarden, 2014, p. 416). Art critics also assigned new importance to this physical mode of experience: “How one saw became as relevant as what one saw” (Mondloch, 2007, p. 23).

In turn, on the basis that the body is part of its reception, there are multiple arguments that the body plays a key role in the nature of the experience and the appreciation and evaluation of the art.

Both components are intertwined. Bodily engagement and experience might be considered important elements of aesthetic interaction with artworks that “de facto contribute to our appreciation” (Fingerhut, 2018, p. 84). Best (2002) suggests a constitutive role of the body for the appreciation of installation art in that the body expands the modes of apprehension in addition to more common ways such as vision and the intellect. Furthermore, another important characteristic of installation art, participation, has been argued to be vital for appreciation: “the viewer has to be physically present in the work or a performance of it and has to behave in the prescribed manner while there, so as to enhance his or her appreciation of it” (Novitz, 2001, p. 154). In terms of the participatory role of the visitor discussed above, as opposed to a passive “recipient,” in installation art, the participatory visitor is invited to contemplate their role in the installation, which might lead to a more self-aware and reflective state, and thus heightened art experience (Rebentisch, 2012).²

Regarding the role of active movement in appreciation for the experience of architecture, which parallels installation art, it has been argued that the sequence of experiences consequent on movement through a building may be essential to its effect on the viewer. “The feeling of our bodies moving through a building, reaching out and touching its surfaces, listening to its echoes, and so on is a crucial part of appreciation in its own right” (Robinson, 2012, p. 338). Shifting our awareness to our body or general capacity for body awareness could also magnify bodily sensations, which in turn could heighten our aesthetic experience (Montero, 2006; Lanzoni, 2009; Shusterman, 2012). Oliveira et al. (2003) argued that the degree to which our sensory faculties are stimulated in the experience of installation art is linked to the impact that an experience can have on us.

Again, to give an example with architecture, Shusterman (2012) suggested that “If the appreciation of architecture is so strongly linked to somatic experiences [such as proprioception], then heightening somatic consciousness could improve our architectural experience” (p. 14; see Montero, 2006 for a similar argument regarding the enhanced experience of watching and performing dance though shifting awareness to the body). These arguments further amplify that bodily awareness and experience may play an aesthetically relevant role in the receiver's experience with the addition that more bodily awareness/experiences might heighten art experience, especially of installation art.

Beyond the proposed role of the body for the appreciation of the artwork, installation art has specifically been argued to cause profound and complex emotional involvements (Bishop, 2005; Vial Kayser and Coëllier, 2021) or even to have transformative potential (Weingarden, 2014, 2015; Sherman and Morrissey, 2017; Yoshitake et al., 2017; Vial Kayser and Coëllier, 2021).

To name a few examples, Carsten Höller said about his participatory installations that “they offer the possibility of unique inner experiences that can be used for the exploration of the self” (Bukdahl, 2015, p. 179, Interview with Carsten Höller by Vincent Honor, op. cit.). The immersive Ganzfeld environments created by artist James Turrell caused visitors' perception to “become the object of reflection, and led some to a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationship to the external environment, deepening their conception of themselves as embodied beings” (Sherman and Morrissey, 2017, p. 6). Similarly, in discussing his works, Eliasson (2019, p. 19) suggests that increased self-reflection through the awareness of the body and processes of perception “leads to a more reflective attitude toward the world outside the artwork.” By what means people have profound, life-changing experiences within installation art has received increased interest (Pelowski and Akiba, 2011; Weingarden, 2014, 2015; Pelowski et al., 2018; Sadia, 2021).

In fact, a factor that potentially makes the encounters resonant may be the heightened physicality itself. The basis for heightened physicality is the temporal, spatial, and immersive scale of installation artworks, which has been argued to allow reflection on how the spectator feels inside it (Bishop, 2005) or in their presence: “the works make us reflect on how we feel, […], in their presence” (Noë, 2000, p. 131), which in turn facilitate self-awareness and deeper consideration (Pelowski et al., 2018). Body awareness, in general, arguably plays a central role in all subjective experiences (Berlyne, 1971; Djebbara et al., 2019) in that it heightens our awareness of what is around us and ourselves, thereby making us aware of what we are feeling (Brinck, 2018).

One prompt for a switch to an inward reflective mode has been specifically argued to be aware of one's body. Theoretical writings have drawn the notion of the body/self as a “modality of reflexivity” (Jones, 2000, p. 335), and awareness of the body has been argued to be one of the crucial elements in the process of also becoming aware of oneself (Berlucchi and Aglioti, 2010; Pelowski, 2011; Jelić and Staničić, 2021). In a museum study involving Mark Rothko paintings, which covered all gallery walls in a particularly immersive manner, Pelowski (2015) showed that the body could play an essential role in inducing more self-reflective responses. The author reports that contextual sensations (e.g., feeling watched, hearing one's footsteps, getting chills from the air conditioning system) may shift attention to one's body and current actions, especially when facing particularly engrossing or challenging art. This awareness may induce meta-cognitive reflection about one's experience (Pelowski et al., 2017). Altogether, bodily awareness might function as a crucial trigger for making people more receptive and reflective.

To take the discussion a step further, besides the capacity for general increased body awareness through the spatial character of installation art, installation art often evokes direct and powerful corporeal relations by, e.g., intervening on our balance or posture (Bishop, 2005). By foregrounding certain spatial features or leading/disturbing the visitors' movement through them, installations serve to force an awareness toward one's body and responses which were taken for granted in non-art spaces, and “individuals may even come to deeper appreciation by juxtaposing visual and proprioceptive sensations (awareness of being in an [installation])” (Pelowski et al., 2018). Such a specific interaction of interoception and exteroception could also be a hallmark of aesthetic emotions that can lead to more reflective modes of engagement (Fingerhut and Spee, forthcoming).

In architecture, switching visitors' attention to the body has been successfully employed by architects throughout history to immerse a perceiver into the spatial situation. In moving through space, the body schema is responsible for the continuous tracking of bodily states and positions as we move by integrating interoceptive, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive information and having an awareness of ourselves as embodied beings (Jelić et al., 2016; Jelić and Staničić, 2021). Rupture of this habitual body schema, such as when engaging architecture (or installation art), then activates an attentional switch that allows “the visitor to consciously experience the […] setting and oneself as an experiencing and bodily subject” (p. 7). For example, the architectural design of Carlo Scarpa's stairs at the Brion Cemetery in San Vito d'Altivole, Italy, is argued to afford each step to be performed with specifically one of but not either the left or right foot, which “ruptures” one's usual stair-walking behavior to allocate an attentional switch to the conscious experience of one's body (Jelić et al., 2016). Thus, strong bodily experiences might be crucial triggers to make ourselves more receptive and make the whole experience more profound and meaningful (also see Robinson, 2012, 2021).

In sum, the above review provides a large number of items that could be related to art experiences with installations and with art, in general, relating to aspects from the basic requirement for engagement with our bodies, to modes of interaction/participation, to various ways of being aware of our bodies and movements, as well as to corresponding or interrelated emotions and cognitive or other responses. Each of these could be treated as potential hypotheses that might individually, or in combination, play a key role in individuals' reported art experience (see also Table 1, and further discussion in the methods).

Looking at past studies on installations, however, only some of the above aspects have been considered. A few studies have started investigating other relevant parts of the engagement and experience of installation art besides the role of subjective bodily experience and awareness. For example, Gulhan et al. (2021) found that gaze behavior inside an installation artwork vs. a virtual reality reproduction did not significantly differ. Another study found that a contemporary critical art exhibition, including installation art along with other mediums, received higher aesthetic appreciation when experienced in a gallery as opposed to a laboratory context (Szubielska et al., 2021), as well as was better understood when a curatorial description was available (Szubielska and Imbir, 2021).

Other studies graphically showed that the spatial arrangement of a sculpture affected visitors' movements and physiological responses during a gallery visit via maps of movement paths and where on the paths physiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance) were stronger (also see Tröndle and Tschacher, 2012; Tröndle et al., 2014), or assessed more complex emotional/cognitive experiences in combination with viewing behavior (Pelowski et al., 2018). A series of studies started to specifically compare art experience between interactive art installations and non-interactive versions of them, while the authors agree that more research is needed because results on this comparison remain mixed (e.g., Jacucci et al., 2009; Vi et al., 2017; Savaş et al., 2021; Szubielska and Imbir, 2022).

Regarding the body, one study assessed how installation art could have a measurable, objective impact on the body. Kapoula et al. (2014) showed that Richard Serra's Promenade installation improved visitors' balance after walking around and alongside the artwork's laterally tilted monumental elements that play with depth and verticality (see also Nather et al., 2010; Kapoula et al., 2014; Vernet et al., 2018 for examples of how representation of movements or depth in visual art has been shown to modulate posture control). Kapoula et al.'s (2014) study did suggest that spatial properties of installation art can have an objective, measurable impact on the body, and the importance of ecologically valid testing.

However, none of the above studies considered viewers' subjective experience of the body and how this relates to installation art experience and evaluation. We (Kühnapfel et al., 2023) previously used self-reported bodily items and found that on average participants were generally aware of their body and movement in front of a painting, their distance from and approach to it and that the room/space had influenced the way they encountered the painting while also showing variability in these responses. To our knowledge, only one study with installation art has included assessments of subjective body awareness in a self-report questionnaire. Pelowski et al. (2020) recorded individual's experiences with three different installation artworks to assess whether they matched what the artists intended. After engaging each installation artwork, participants reported their emotional and phenomenal experience based on a list of 37 self-report items, each rated on an 8-point Likert scale. One item out of these was “awareness of the body”. The mean ratings on “awareness of the body” were among the highest noted ratings in the reports on two of the installation artworks (i.e., second highest rating out of the 37 ratings after “feeling stimulated” for artwork two, and fourth highest out of the 37 ratings after feeling “a sense of confusion,” “stimulated,” and “absorbed” for artwork three). This study suggested that body awareness could be one experience dimension that is rated as considerably high, compared to other emotional and phenomenal experience factors. However, this study did assess only this single item on “awareness of one's body” and did not relate it to other experience factors, missing to capture or address important nuances of bodily experience and interactions, as well as related to other aspects of art experience.

The review so far suggests that relatively more awareness of one's body also modulates our bodily experiences, which in turn shapes the experience of an artwork. One further question should be who becomes aware of these bodily experiences. Interpersonal differences in awareness of one's body might translate to different impacts of body awareness or even general responses when engaging in art.

However, to date, no study in empirical aesthetics using visual arts has assessed the role of individual differences in body awareness in art experience. Regarding the experience of dance, researchers found that the ability to accurately detect interoceptive signals (i.e., to count one's heartbeat in given time windows accurately) modulated the relationship between physiological sensitivity (in terms of Galvanic Skin Response) to dance stimuli varying in expressivity and rated expressivity of the stimuli (Christensen et al., 2021; also see Christensen et al., 2018).

We involved a final sample of 235 participants (142 female, 89 male, 2 other, 2 preferred not to answer, M_age = 33.82, SD = 14.36, range = 18–72 years). The researchers tried to invite as many museum visitors as possible to participate in the study in the time the museum gave. These individuals constituted a convenience sample of museum visitors. Participants were eligible to participate in the study if they were older than 18 and proficient in English or German. Participants received a museum visit voucher (worth 12 €) as participation compensation. The final sample was derived from an initial collection of 236, with one individual not meeting the participant criteria (under age 18). The study was conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki and the University of Vienna Ethics Committee. A signed informed consent was completed before participation.

The stimulus was the installation artwork in orbit by Tomás Saraceno (^*1973), exhibited at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen (K21) in Düsseldorf, Germany, curated by Marion Ackermann and Susanne Meyer-Bser. The installation (see Figure 2) is composed of a 2,500 m² (880 m² walkable area) three-layered net made from 3 mm-diameter stainless-steel cable spanned horizontally at a considerable height of 25 meters over the atrium of the K21, upon which visitors could enter and explore the different interconnected layers of the net or sit/lay while suspended in space. The net's three levels were spread apart from each other by five air-inflated PVC (3.5–8 m ø) shells in the form of spheres made of PVC. The installation was part of a larger project called “Cloud Cities,” which addresses the ideas of flying cities or living clouds (Ackermann et al., 2011). Like a spider/web, visitors can feel the movements of others in the net, echoing Saraceno's artistic practice and research on hybrid and interspecies forms of communication (Kunstsammlung NRW, 2013). Visitors had to bring their own sturdy footwear (e.g., hiking boots, no sneakers) or borrow suitable footwear from the museum. The museum also provided overalls to wear on top of one's clothes as protection. Visitors were not allowed to bring any objects into the installation, had to take off jewelry or watches, and wear an FFP2 mask (due to COVID-19 protocols).

This installation artwork was chosen because it matched several of the above-discussed aspects, such as audience participation, bodily engagement, and awareness of one's body in general and various bodily experiences, which are argued to be integral to the reception of this installation, as well as its connection to profound/self-reflective experiences. The installation in orbit is participatory in that visitors must enter it to experience it fully (Putnam, 2014⁴). The role of the participatory audience in completing the work especially becomes apparent in this statement on the installation by artist Tomás Saraceno: “If there is no person in the work, you don't see the work. It is invisible.” (Kunstsammlung NRW, 2013).

According to anecdotal reports, visitors routinely report experiences related to the body in terms of proprioceptive (e.g., awareness of one's movement or sensing tension of one's muscles) and interoceptive sensations (e.g., awareness of one's breathing or heart pounding) (Putnam, 2014; Hanz, 2019; Wattolik, 2019; Kessels and Schrenk, 2022; Spence, 2022). in orbit also provides a perfect example of how bodily experience is triggered to make the art encounter resonant (Jelić et al., 2016): as visitors enter the participatory installation, their bodily experience is stimulated or even ruptured in terms of altering visitors' posture, balance, or perception of body weight (Frank, 2013; Trailer: Tomás Saraceno—In orbit, 2013).

Engagement with the installation also offers profound/self-reflective experiences as reported in anecdotal reports and interviews with the artist. In the exhibition trailer, the artist, Tomás Saraceno, describes his intentions: “I want to provoke feelings, make people more sensitive to the installation, other people, or even the weather. And who knows, maybe this sensitivity will lead to more peace. […] I am interested in how this installation generates new ideas” (Trailer: Tomás Saraceno—In Orbit, 2013). The text about the installation on the museum website states the following intentions: “In orbit is a methodological attempt to achieve an ethical sensitivity, becoming aware of the many phenomena that shape our possibilities of being-in-the-world and our role in it, making them perceivable through a unique synesthetic experience.” Visitors have anecdotally reported such experiences of self-reflection and perspective change (e.g., Chin, 2013⁵; Divisare, 2013⁶), as well as other thought processes, argued to be triggered by the environment created by the artist (Prinsi, 2013).

Data were collected over 10 days from the 9th to the 19th of March 2022 (11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.). This ending time allowed us to stop collection before sunset so that the presence of daylight and/or artificial lights was relatively consistent for all participants. A maximum of seven people were allowed to enter the installation for approximately 10 min for safety reasons.

We employed a collection design whereby participants were stopped by a researcher immediately after they had exited the installation and asked to participate. This allowed us to assess the experiences spontaneously had by participants without prior priming or fore-knowledge that individuals would be participating in a study.

Participants were asked to read and sign the informed consent if they agreed. The survey was administered via the online commercial survey tool Qualtrics (Qualtrics Int., Seattle, WA, USA). It could be accessed via a QR code, allowing participants to answer questions on their own smartphones or via tablet computers provided by the researcher. Participants could take the survey in German or English. The survey lasted about 20 min. After the experiment, participants were debriefed about the purpose of the study and handed the museum ticket voucher as compensation.

For an overview of the descriptive statistics of the dataset, see Table 2. We found a wide range of responses for most of the appraisal scales, with means generally above the midpoint, indicating that participants found the artwork relatively interesting (M = 4.37) and meaningful (M = 4.61) and particularly liked the artwork (M = 6.03). The reported experiences of Awe and Perspective change were also positive. For Transformation (M = 3.29), Self-reflection (M = 3.87), and especially Wonder, did we find notably lower average ratings (M = 1.77) with suggestions of a floor effect. Participants generally enjoyed their overall bodily experience (M = 5.51).

Descriptive statistics of the means and CI intervals of the different scale-based answers to the body-items are shown in Figure 3. Note that we excluded the item “absorbed” because, during data collection, many German-speaking participants indicated that they did not understand what the term meant in exit interviews, resulting in 28 items. As can be seen, the mean for most scales tended to fall around the midpoint of most scales, with a rather high variance across the participants, and, notably, little indication of major skew or ceiling/floor effects.

The highest noted terms were awareness of movement, balance, participants' overall body, and temperature. The least noted items were feeling grounded, disoriented, and immersed, indicating that participants reported mostly experiences directly related to the awareness of their own body rather than how their body specifically felt or how it felt in relation to the net/other visitors.

For subsequent analysis, we then computed network scores per participant to represent each individual's placement in each community, based on each node's strength within each Community (i.e., factor) in the network using the net.scores function from the EGAnet package. These values are used as network “factor loadings” for the weights of each item (Christensen and Golino, 2021). Notably, network analysis allows nodes to contribute to more than one community, i.e., the network scores account for cross-loadings in their estimation of scores. These loadings are considered in the network scores.

To assess the role that the communities of bodily experiences had on art experience, we then used the participants' network scores in multiple regressions to predict specific art experiences (Awe, Wonder, Interest, Liking, Meaning, Self-reflection, Perspective Change, and Transformation) (see Table 4 for following results). There was no substantive multi-collinearity in any of the models (all VIFs were < 3.70).

Regarding the emotional experiences among them, the combined model significantly predicted Awe [F_{(4, 225)} = 8.95, p < 0.001, R² = 0.13, Radjusted2 = 0.12]. Specifically, high scorings on Community 3 (Disturbance) significantly predicted higher Awe (t = 3.00, p = 0.002). The ratings on Wonder had a strong floor effect, with more than half of the participant sample (N = 116) not experiencing any wonder, i.e., rating “1” on the Likert scale. Only 11.3% of the sample gave Wonder experience ratings above the midpoint of four (N = 26). Given this extreme pattern of ratings and a small sample of participant rating it above the midpoint, we did not compute the regression with the Wonder ratings.

The art appraisals, Liking [F_{(4, 224)} = 10.66, p < 0.001, R² = 0.14, Radjusted2 = 0.12], Meaning [F_{(4, 223)} = 8.69, p < 0.001, R² = 0.14, Radjusted2 = 0.12], and Interest [F_{(4, 225)} = 11.31, p < 0.001, R² = 0.17, Radjusted2 = 0.15], were significantly predicted by the combined model. Liking (t = 3.47, p = 0.001) and Meaning (t = 3.13, p = 0.003) were significantly predicted by higher scorings on Community 2 (Proprioception). Interest was also significantly predicted by high scorings on Community 2 (Proprioception) (t = 4.05, p < 0.001), but also Community 4 (Interoception) (t = 2.39, p = 0.018).

Finally, we ran two multiple regressions looking at the self-reflective/transformative experience factors. We found a collective significant effect between the four communities and Change in Perspective [F_{(4, 225)} = 10.6, p < 0.001, R² = 0.16, Radjusted2 = 0.14]. Higher scorings on Community 2 (Proprioception) significantly predicted higher Perspective changing experiences (t = 4.27, p < 0.001). Self-reflection [F_{(4, 225)} = 8.48, p < 0.001, R² = 0.13, Radjusted2 = 0.12] was predicted by Community 2 (Proprioception) (t = .83, p = 0.005) and Community 3 (Disturbance) (t = 2.12, p = 0.035). In the same way, Transformation [F(4,225) = 15.11, p = 0.001, R² = 0.21, Radjusted2 = 0.20] was predicted by Community 2 (Proprioception) (t = 5.64, p < 0.001) and Community 3 (Disturbance) (t = 3.47, p = 0.001).

The combined model assessing the impact of the network dimensions on the enjoyment of the overall bodily experience was also significant [F_{(4, 225)} = 0.71, p < 0.001, R² = 0.42, Radjusted2 = 0.41] (see Supplementary Table 3 for full results). Specifically, enjoyment of the bodily experience was predicted by Community 2 (Proprioception; t = 5.53, p < 0.001), Community 3 (Disturbance; t = −3.01, p = 0.003), and Community 4 (Interoception; t = 2.02, p = 0.045). These results indicated that participants enjoyed interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences, but not the experiences that were grouped as disturbing.

To explore the relationship between the enjoyment of the overall bodily experience and art experience, we ran correlations between them [with a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of 0.008 per test (0.05/6)]. We found a significant positive correlation between overall bodily enjoyment and Liking, r_P(221) = 0.41, p < 0.001, 95% CI of correlation (0.29, 0.51), Meaning, r_P(220) = 0.37, p < 0.001, 95% CI of correlation (0.25, 0.47), Interest, r_P(222) = 0.24, p = 0.001, 95% CI of correlation (0.12, 0.36), Self-Reflection, r_P(221) = 0.16, p = 0.022, 95% CI of correlation (0.03, 0.28), Perspective change, r_P(221) = 0.29, p < 0.001, 95% CI of correlation (0.17, 0.40), and Transformation, r_P(233) = 0.23, p < 0.001, 95% CI of correlation (0.11, 0.35), indicating that participants who enjoyed the bodily experience also liked the art more, found it more meaningful and interesting, reported that it made them reflect about themselves and their perspectives and that their experience was transformative.

As a last step, we looked at the open-ended answers to further address our first research question regarding what bodily experiences visitors report.