Both of the readings had me thinking more about the power and effectiveness of the human body in interactive art/installations, despite being an IM major I found myself looking back at my past projects and my lack of utilization of the human body.
Seeing as the definition of what interactive art is, is always debated I found myself wondering if we use the human body to interact with the work, does that make the work interactive? And if so, would a scripted interactive work make it less of an interactive piece and more of a displayed project? i.e How do interactive performances fall under this category if the audience is not part of the performance and is just viewing it from the outside? What if an entire performance is scripted to look like an interactive work but is instead entirely choreographed, does the perceived interactivity by the audience then define it as an interactive work?
I don’t really have any answers for these questions myself but I couldn’t help asking them when going through the readings and I thought they would be interesting to share.
I also found the part towards the end of Nathaniel Stern’s excerpt on page 6 about the affordances of Interactive art to be interesting; especially talking about how the tools don’t create the interactive installation rather the situation it creates. Thinking of interactive art in terms of situations and experiences/emotions rather than just thinking of whether it is “interactive” in the technical sense is something I hope to keep in mind as I continue with IM.