Final Preparatory Research- Sarah Chung

The Chronus exhibition helped me bridge the gap between technology and art. Beforehand I thought of them as two very separate things as in other museums I have visited such as The MET and other traditional galleries most of the artworks consisted of paintings and sculptures. In this exhibit, art was not only a think to look at and to appreciate but to interact with as well. Often in traditional galleries, the art can’t be touched or even come close to. However, in this particular exhibit it was encouraged for viewers to come close, test and admire the pieces. I believe this was more impactful for me than typical galleries. Instead of paintings hung on a wall in which I was the only one reacting, it was two-sided. This was especially the case for Zhang Hua’s “Artificial Intuition,” in this piece it predicted where people would pass and moved to block them.

When researching interaction projects I came across Minecraft Earth. Made by the owners of the popular game Minecraft came out with a new augmented reality spinoff of the game, Minecraft Earth. In Minecraft Earth users can make a virtual world just like in the video game, however it appears in their surroundings when looking through their phones. The best part is that other playing the same game can also see the world and build onto of it. This allows for users to make the world around them a canvas and to share their creations with others using the game and for them to build and add onto it. A project that I think is less successful as an interactive project is ‘while nothing happens’ by Ernesto Neto. In this exhibition sacks filled with spices and aromas hang from the ceiling, and as the name states, nothing happens. The point of the project was to “evoke memories as we interact with the sculpture,” however I do not see it as a two sided exchange. There is no level of processing on the art’s half. Viewers can walk by and smell but altogether it is mostly just human interaction with no real response and no real processing from the art.

In my group project I simply defined interaction as data being inputted, processed and an appropriate answer outputted. With this project we imagined a machine that took a person’s temperature, symptoms and other data and gave them the correct medication and dosage. For my midterm project my partner thought past this form of just machine to person interaction and thought of ideas which also encourages interaction between people. I believe that interaction is not only a cyclic process but more. A good interactive project should invoke thought not just from the machine, but from the person using it as well. Interactivity can be as mindless as inputting data and just waiting for a response from a machine but it can also invoke conversation with others around making human life not only more convenient but also brings people together.

In Minecraft Earth we see and input (users designs), processing(the game making the images in real time) as well as output (a design that stays in the location for the user and other users to see).This project also supports my new idea of interaction because user interact with each other and mesh their designs on the landscape. In ‘while nothing happens’ by Ernesto Neto I don’t see any data processing happening on the art’s side of things.I don’t see the interaction as cyclic but only as one-sided on the human’s part. Once the viewer smells there is no real input that the art processes.

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