Chapter three of Nathaniel Stern’s book Interactive Art and Embodiment describes his framework for designing and qualifying interactive art in relation to the body and how a viewer of an interactive instillation or performance uses their body to interact with it. In chapter one of the book, Stern wrote: “I pose that we forget technology and remember the body.” I believe that Stern’s Implicit Body Framework follows this sentiment, focusing on the body in a “sensorial context,” before delving in to the specifics of the technology. I believe this is because in order to know what to build or how to design your technology, it is necessary to design your user experience. Stern breaks this experience up into four parts:
- Inquiry: The framing of the work in the way the artist sees it, as well as its presence in the world and online, such as its name. This also includes the design of the artist the artist approaches and critiques their own work. In a way it is the idea.
- Description: The feeling of the work on the flesh. How it is built, where it is, and how it responds to the body. (Stern claims that in most publications on interactive art, this is as far as the study of interactive art goes.)
- Interactivity: The way that the body responds to the work, moving away from technological descriptions in order to study the person using or observing the work, allowing them to then to form a sense of relationally.
- Relationally: The way the user processes the material relationship of the artwork, and connects it with their own experiences, ant to the world around them, giving the work a more significant context.
In the chapter, Stern describes each of these in order though his through analysis of a work by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman titled “Messa di Voce.” I think it effectively breaks down the entire work, without taking away from the magic of the interactivity. It is interesting to note that the last two sections of the framework are a little bit less concrete, and are explained in, I believe, less specific terms.
After reading the section, I decided to look up “Messa di Voce,” which I believe I’ve seen before (in Intro to Interactive Media), and found that the magic described in the book just wasn’t there. I believe that this goes back to something that Stern described in section 3 of his book.
“I can point to videos that show what a piece looks like and does with the participants who engage with it, but the interaction itself will always be absent. How we move, sense, and thing-feel, and even more importantly, what this highlights in doing and making, how we relate and perform, , the work of the art , the inter-activities that are integral to it, and how they attune us to embodiment, can never be sufficiently captured and presented.”
This is the thing that I found most interesting and compelling about this reading, and may or may not be one of the reasons I changed my major to Interactive Media. 🙂