Interactive Art
A Child Could Do It
One of the most amazing works of art I've experienced was in an art gallery in Rome. It was a mirrored room with mirrors on all the wall and ceiling. That would be interesting enough, but this room added 4 rotating double sided mirrors in all the corners. This was my first encounter with art as a meaningless experience - meaningless in the sense that it didn't represent anything; it just was there to experience.
Years later I visited an installation of interactive art. It was a table that would produce different sounds and lights depending on where it was touched. This is old hat to us now with our touch screens and it was a technical tour de force at the time, but it left me cold. Mostly the experience wasn't very interesting. The artist's idea was to provide an environment that anyone could explore and try to understand.
For a few years I was a sickly kid. I spent a lot of time in bed and home from school. I remember enjoying paint by number pictures. You'd get a canvas divided into color regions identified by a number, and a set of paints labeled with the numbers and a paintbrush. It was a fun way to pass the time and I was pleased with the result. It was an interactive way of making pictures but nobody really called it art.
I've found that local community centres embrace interactive art and lots of artists make their living by organizing interactive art groups. A friend teaches people how to make musical instruments from found objects and then organizes them into a performing group and then has concerts.
For years I participated in big lantern processions as a volunteer. There would be months of workshops building lanterns and then the finale of parading them at dusk in a beautiful setting.
My own definition of art came from Clive Bell iirc. A work of art is something that you know was created to engage your attention. I think the 'engage your attention' part means that the viewer falls into a feedback loop where a look causes a thought which causes a fresh thought which causes a fresh look . . . One measure of art is how strong that loop is - some works of art resonate in your mind for a very long time, and others you forget right away.
I think that a lot of people define art as A) a picture or score or text or sculpture and B) made by a famous artist. The art world of rich collectors is rife with that sort of thinking. Art is a possession that has money value that you think of as an investment. This kind of thinking devalues the memories that ring down through the decades that a lantern procession can stimulate.
Lately I've been associated with a group of teachers banding together to present a course about critical thinking in cyberspace. I'm not a teacher and so I've been a fly on the wall. To my great interest I find that a lot of teachers see their teaching as creating an interactive art environment that teaches this or that subject. So they set up interactive environments in SL. I saw the same idea when Elaine and I and The Nurses from South Carolina were building a virtual nurse training facility.
For an artist the whole experience of making art is interactive. I like Jasper Johns' description of how to make art. You do something and then you do something else and carry on like that until you are done. This is the artist's perspective on the feedback loop that engages a viewer with a work of art.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.