Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, then Shut Up and Listen:

In an amusing way, the publisher of this blog post Tigoe opened up his discussion about the differences between a descriptive or testimonial and an interactive work of art with the single line “Don’t interpret your own work”. Even if I didn’t read the entire post, I would’ve known what his debate was about already because interpreting your own work as an artist is what artists have been taught to do for several centuries. Tigoe argues that if you want to make something interactive, you should not tell your audience what the artwork is about – just let them figure it out. I would also like to add that the old tradition of teaching artists to describe and present the meaning or lack of meaning (which is also a kind of meaning) of their own work has taught the audience to look at these artworks in the same way. And some viewers continue to approach work of art looking for a meaning and then get frustrated and turn away when they don’t find one. Even if a work of art is interactive, people sometimes still don’t know how to look at it. So the problem of handling artworks as statements and not personal experiences is actually a two-way trap, where artist and viewer is taught to “read” every artwork as a statement.

Also a remark on Tigoe’s likening of interactive work to performance: I think it’s important to make it clear that even this type of thinking can have traps. For example, even though the audience completes the work, if they do it through a set of instructions, they still don’t interact with the work. So there’s gotta be a place or time where the audience can actually manipulate the artwork – the artwork then needs to really change, and either stay that way or perhaps be able to reverse, awaiting the next viewer’s reaction.

Physical Computing’s Greatest Hit’s (and misses):

I found a few very interesting projects in this blog post. Firstly, the not so interactive video mirrors could in my opinion be upgraded to include more interaction. Taking the Text Rain example, I could imagine the audience being able to pick letters and form words of their liking , which then they can pass onto another member of the audience who’s in front of the mirror or back to the computer to reply something to it. Another thing I really liked was not included in Tigoe’s post. I followed a link to Dan Shiffman’s Coding Train Youtube channel, and I found an example where he made 2D water ripples in Processing. You could make ripples with the touch of the mouse or draw continual ripples by dragging the mouse. I think both of these examples are great examples of physical computing precisely because they’re actually bad examples. They present a basic idea that doesn’t offer much interaction but can be developed into an interactive piece. Often what we think of as interaction is actually a very limited form of interaction or just a reaction. The most challenging is realising that not every person’s body is capable of doing the same movements. If something is truly interactive, it should offer that interaction to someone whose senses are limited in one way or another. I think that in interactive media, the closer we get to optimal levels of interactivity, the more we need to keep discussing the ethics of the field and especially the inclusion people with limited sensory perception.