From my perspective, telling something impressive and creating infinite possibilities while interacting are the two important factors that contribute to a successful interactive experience.
I consider telling an entire story about the main theme which is actually expressing something and thus can really influence human in an interactive project as a vital element. As Ernest Edmonds argues in the article “Art, Interaction and Engagement”, the key issue is that a system as complex as a human (or animal etc) must have internal states that represent memory, mood, state of development etc, therefore, an interaction, be it with another human, an artwork or a game, can influence internal states (Edmonds 7). By stating this, Edmonds demonstrated that the interaction itself may include something impressive that can simulate memory, mood, state of development of users. In the group research project, our project is not that satisfied because I think it did not actually create an interaction which deliver deep feelings about human society or trigger any impressive experiences of people. While other group inspire their projects by the themes of three stories and they also deliver the message of either making a satire to social issues or present interesting facts about human nature. In another project named Shadows of Memory, Jay Borgwardt create a space where users can control a flashlight to shine around the room and reveal the shadows of people who are dancing on the white walls. All the dancing movements being revealed on the white wall connect together and unfold a romantic love story. Jay Borgward believes that every couple of lovers creates something secret and new in their love, and this project is aimed to reveal that secret love interactively to other people. By revealing secret love to users, Jay Borgward wants to remind people of their memory of most important moments, which is a really fantastic way to create interaction.
Generating infinite possibilities in one interaction form is another important factor in building interactive art project in my opinion. In the project named Messa di Voce created by Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman
with Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara, it creates an atmosphere where sounds made by users can be transformed into patterns on screen accordingly and then users can play the patterns to make sounds. Through the entire process, this project create a cycle of interaction between user and computer, which also provides users opportunity to create different kinds of patterns by their sounds. The project also includes several modules that offer three types of basic patterns, which adds more possibilities in the interaction. As Ernest Edmonds mentions in the article “Art, Interaction and Engagement”, “Dynamic-Interactive (Varying)” is the definition of works that changed as a result of audience actions but were also influenced by other factors, so that users’ responses varied(Edmonds 2). This also hints that when users have different actions, the project will respond to the actions in different ways. During in-class exercises, I found that even by using the mouseX and mouseY to draw lines and patterns in processing can be used by people to create fantastic outcomes.