Presentation Reflection – Chloe(Yuqing) Wang

  Interaction and interactivity can be defined as two actors responding to each other. That is, with every input, there is an output in response. After reading Tigoe’s “Making Interactive Art”, I believe interactivity is more than that. There’s a sentence in “Making Interactive Art”:” Let the audience listen to your work by taking it in through their senses.  Let them think about what each part means, which parts afford contact or control, and which parts don’t.  Let them decide how they will interpret the parts, and how they will respond.  Let them speak through their actions”(Tigoe). Then I believe interactivity must emphasize on the receiving end. Interaction should convey a message that is differently understood by each person. Interaction makes one feel unique, cared about and as an individual human being. 

    It was quite impossible for me to find an art or installation that is considered not interactive. Just as stated in The Art of Interactivity: “we make it possible to accept that anything can be interactive and simply discuss the degree of interactivity subjectively”(Crawford). I was interested in two installations: “Visually-Striking Collages of Man Gazing into the Abyss” and “I Spent a Month Learning Guitar on the Internet and It Actually Worked”. If the second one has a degree of interactivity of high interactivity, the first one then has a low degree of interactivity. The collection of collage is a form of visual art. It sparks new ideas, thoughts, and different understandings in each person. However, it does not necessarily generate a higher degree of output unless someone creates another art in response to this one. The Guitar one introduces Fender’s online course, which should be highly interactive since the users would actually play along with the tutorial and receive a set of skills as the lessons are treating each student(user) individually. 

    Our design is called Knowledge Transmitter 2.0. At first, we envisioned it to be something that could instantly transmit information of a book to a person’s brain, so we wouldn’t need to read books anymore. Since it is something that will be used in 100 years, we want something that seems impossible now. We have a 2.0 after our Knowledge Transmitter and show that there were malfunctions in the 1.0 version to signify that even after 100 years, taking an easier route in things is still impossible. 

    Our Knowledge Transmitter 2.0 has an input of which book the person want to read, and an output of knowledge directly into that person’s brain. It can align with my definition of interaction also in the sense that the knowledge is actually being transmitted to someone’s brain just like what they would actually experience reading a book- reading and forgetting, and forming new ideas. This design emphasizes on the receiving end – the individual users, and can somehow make one feel unique since that person using the device is the only one who receives the information unless they are sharing the information with others. Individual device means individuality. However, our product is designed to make money for the company and would not be perfect for the users if they actually want to actually remember something forever.