Interaction in Art
March 21, 2017
What is interaction in art?
Could a comic book, or could some sort of mechanized artwork be considered interactive?
Is an artwork only interactive if it can move, or can it be static?
Static Interaction
Comic strips are one of the most interactive forms of art to have ever been conceived, and young men and women have poured countless hours over them with complete concentration. But what makes them so interesting?
‘ Static: The art object does not change and is viewed by aperson. There is no interaction between the two that can beobserved by someone else, although the viewer may beexperiencing personal psychological or emotional reactions.The artwork itself does not respond to its context. ‘
– Ernest Edmonds, Greg Turner, and Linda Candy. 2007. Approaches to Interactive Art Systems. Available at: http://bit.ly/2nG1svN.
According to this quote ‘static art’ (art that doesn’t move) finds its interaction in the viewers personal reaction to the work.
This means that interaction, in the context of work that doesn’t move, hasn’t much to do with materials or colour, and has more to do narrative and the emotions of the viewer.
So comic strips are extremely interesting and interactive, because they contain narratives that are very appealing to a young viewer, and contain strong feelings of nostalgia for the more mature viewer.
But what about art that moves?
Dynamic-Passive Interaction
George Ricky created many ‘Kinetic Sculptures’ that respond to the slightest air currents and move with them. These pieces are considered ‘Dynamic-Passive’, because the viewer is passive and the art changes by itself. The reason this is considered interactive is because the viewer is watching something that is interacting with the environment, and is experiencing the change it is making.
Dynamic-Interactive Interaction
‘Dynamic-Interactive: All of the conditions of the dynamic-passive category apply with the added factor that the human ‘viewer’ has an active role in influencing the changes in the art object. For example, by walking over a mat that contains sensors attached to lights operating in variable sequences, the viewer becomes a participant that influences the process of the work. Motion and sound capture and analysis techniques can be used to incorporate human activity into the way visual images and sounds are presented. The work ‘performs’differently according to what the person does or says.’
– Ernest Edmonds, Greg Turner, and Linda Candy. 2007. Approaches to Interactive Art Systems. Available at: http://bit.ly/2nG1svN.
So ‘Dynamic-Interactive’ art is something in which the viewer has an active role in manipulating the work, such as in Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass, and Stuart Wood’s – Rain Room
In the ‘Rain Room’ the viewer enters a room that is raining inside, and while they are moving through it the rain doesn’t touch them because it stops wherever they are going. Therefore they walk through a raining room without even getting wet.
This artwork would be considered ‘Dynamic-interactive’ because the work changes as the viewer interacts with it, and performs differently depending on where you go in the room.
Conclusion
So this short analysis on Interaction has found few things: It has found that Dynamic-Interactive Interaction is where an artwork is manipulated by the viewer, and performs in different ways depending on what they do, It has found that that Dynamic-Passive interaction is where the work is manipulated by the environment, and the viewer observes this passively, and it has found that Static Interaction is an artwork that doesn’t change, has a narrative, and only changes in the viewers perception of the work.
Joe Teather
