The visit to the Chronus Exhibition is a delightful experience which shows me various creative interactive designs and inspires me a lot. The exhibition is located in M50 where holds a lot of various art exhibitions, and I also get the chance to visit many more exhibitions besides the Chronus Exhibition. However, it is the experience of seeing other non-technology exhibits that let me realize the charm in the technology-based art pieces in the Chronus Exhibition. Compared to the traditional exhibitions that only display some pictures or sculptures to the audience, technology-based exhibits allow the viewers to make interactions with the exhibits. These exhibits are dynamic, rather than motionless, which gives art a brand new “moving” dimension that is more vivid and lively. Technology is realizing something more complex than images can do, and thus, express more information to the audience. And the completeness of some of the art pieces cannot exist without the intervention of the viewers. It means that the art pieces include the viewersâ interaction as part of its body. This kind of enhanced involvement increases viewers’ sense of participation, makes them more immersed in the visit and better understand what the air pieces want to deliver to them.
For example, these paintings are good, but I will simply miss them if I pass so quickly because the painting is just so “quiet”. It is not calling for my attention.
However, things go different when I see the first exhibit called “Artificial Intuition” in the the Chronus Exhibition. “Artificial Intuition” is a kinetic sculpture that interacts with human motions. When we see these tentacles, we are curious about what will happen next. So we stop, we touch them, we observe how it works, and we get to feel the vitality inside the machines, which is exactly what the artist want to show to us — this kind of presence of living created by lifeless machines. I guess the working principle of the work is similar to what we learn in the class. The sculpture uses a kind of distance sensor to detect the existence of the audience, and then the computer controls the tentacles to get close to audience and interact with them.
Another interesting work called Beholding the Big Bang, we are just curious to see how fast will the gears rotate. In this case we are not part of the artwork, but the dynamic process just attract our attention. The last gear will take 13.82 billions years to rotate once, which is the estimated age of the universe, which indicates the immutability of the universe. I cannot imagine how this idea will be expressed in pictures without highlighting the stillness of the last gear by the help of technology.
After the field trip, I start to research more to find inspirations for my final project. In the midterm project, my biggest problems are the usefulness of the project and the lack of interaction. It is a little bit vague in the difference between interaction and responses. For the usefulness part, I start to consider that I used to simply define usefulness as â getting people’s life easier”, and I guess I am a little bit too pragmatistic. This kind of interpretation makes my project work harder because there are countless companies that are now designing products to fulfill people’s needs, and actually, as a student, I am not that capable to create a product that haven’t appeared in the market. I reckon, usefulness can be understood in other ways. How will my work change people’s mind? Can my work reflect something happened in the society? Can my work amuse people or cure their broken heart? Can the project express my ideas to others? Can they be art? These are all “useful meanings” that can exist in an interactive project. So, I start to find some interactive projects which are aesthetic rather than practical, and I want to see these projects focusing on engaging the audience into the process of producing to create a successful interactive experience.
The first project I find interesting is “Seeds of Hope”. It is a sort of interactive art installation. Each picture of the seed represents an audience. The art work wants to encourage immigrants to share their wishes or dreams. In this case, new immigrants and those whose families have been here will be interwoven into one integrated whole. It is interesting that the project doesn’t use any digital technologies. But it is not just a simple display of a list of pictures as I have criticized before, it is interactive. The installation itself is created by the audience. When a person views the art work, he or she adds one more seed to it, which is an input, and the whole project is refreshed (processed) by the action. Then the project shows a new image to the observers as a response. Audience are involved in the creating process, and the project helps audience deliver their hopes or wishes to more audience, which makes the experience successful. I can see this project as a symbol of immigrants’ collective hope, which gives powers to those who are leaving their home and working hard for their future.
The second project I find is one of the graduation project in our school called âBook of Privilegesâ by Jianghao Hu. “Book of Privileges” maps individual privilege identities into different color patterns. The audience’s social identities (gender, race, etc.) was interpreted into a distinctive color pattern, which was then printed on semi-transparent paper and bound in a book by woodblock printing. The interactive experience sheds light on how interactive projects help interpret social identities. Recently, I learn from my GPS course that media has the function to reinforce social images. Hu’s work help us have a clearer understanding of individual differences, and intuitively conceive the diversity of the society by interacting with the book. What is very successful in the project is that it is the participation of the audience that reinforces the diversity.
However, there is one project that I am not so satisfied with. Itâs the “Crystal”. Although the installation will change its appearance when the audience come close., the audience are not changing the the project itself, which makes the process look much more like a response rather than interaction. From my perspective, the interactive experience is not so successful.
In my first group project, I state that interaction is a dynamic conversation between two actors or more, and interaction requires the process of input, process and output. After my research and personal experience on my midterm project, I find that the significant part of interaction is the participation of both the performer and the audience, especially the audience. And the process must be a continuous loop. If there is only one procedure of “input, process and outputâďźthe process will be responsive rather than interactive. That is exactly the problem of my project “Library Noise Sensor” . “Artificial Intuition” serves as a good example that the machine never stop interacting with the audience and the audience is the key factor that affects its movement. “Book of privileges” is also good because the book keeps on evolving since there are more and more audience adding pages to it, and the audience is always receiving a brand new version of the book, thus having a deeper understanding on identity diversities shown by the book.
In “Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut up an Listen”, Tom Igoe writes that “So if youâre thinking of an interactive artwork, donât think of it like a finished painting or sculpture. Think of it more as a performance. Your audience completes the work through what they do when they see what youâve made”. An interactive work is not just displaying something to the audience, it invites the audience’s involvement. Without it, the artwork is incomplete. The similar idea that emphasizes the involvement of the audience can be supported by a Chinese article called “The Future of Media Storytelling: Immersion, Interaction and Integration”. In this article, it is stated that “A more open and diverse two-way communication has been dominating the narrative mode, and the traditional author concept has been weakened”. The producer and the audience share the same importance in an interactive process.
Reference:
https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUbhFWJOYC4
https://www.sohu.com/a/282797095_677585
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsOEOLnym9
Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listenby Tom Igoe
https://www.ifanr.com/137901