Interaction in digital arts
Instead, or in complement of dealing with assets as parts of S, of the work itself, we can see them as communication abilities with our four poles of the creative process : matter, spirit, public and author.
With “matter”, interaction is the “incarnation” of the work into the natural world, and a capacity to perceive the promising, constraining and sometimes threatening… or simply artistically interesging features of places and times. You can find that in some kind of robotic arts, or even in network applications like Google Earth, if you take the formatting and presentation in the browser as a (not so) rough form or art. Great hopes, and limited results have been tied to connection with weather and general time conditions, for instance the Cybernetic tower of Pierre Schoeffer in Liège (Belgium). It is also a facet of the multimedia work “Mechanics of emotions” based on web data transformation into 3D objects/
With “spirit”, interaction has a meaning if the sponsor of the work (or the artist himself), is put in position to see the realization progress and can give more details, change some points, of his/her original “idea”. That applies, in particular, to architectural projects or to events preparation.
With the artist, interactivity has two different kind of implementations and operation :
- in plastical arts, interaction may be taken simply as part of the Wysiwygdesign interface, a way to progress more effectively in the creation process ; but the interaction is not properly part of the work ;
- in performance arts as VJing for instance, and so more in collective arts (music, choreography), the work may interact with some or all of the performers and impact strongly on their virtuosity or expressive creativity.
But of course, it is with the public that interactivity in art has been mostly sought for. Its evidently a constitutive part of games, but until now, games stay out of the proper Art gamut. Public reactions have always been important in performance arts, and every actor will insist on the importance of audience reaction to the quality of the play, would it be only the quality of its silence. . In the sixties, interactivity could even be desired as a form of more “democratic art”, breaking the wall between the dictatorship of authors and actors on one side and the submissivity of the lay spectators, heretofore called to be “spectactors”. That can apply not only to on site performances but on TV and so more on blogs and social networks. The results seem more convincing in technical discussion groups than in collective art. Did the digital communication add really much to the grand traditional meetings (religious and sports events in particular) where the public is indeed called to take his part, and possibly a large part, but along well marked tracks and traditions ? A lot of interactive works of Art, shown in digital art events, do not give to the public a real free space to take its part, and look more like a way of showing the creativity of the artist than to imply actually the public into the creation.
Anyway, the desire to “take part” is not shared by everybody nor a permanent attitude. Art is most of the time taken as an entertainment, be it a well deserved rest before the TV screen after a days work, or a collective pleasure to be shared with friends along with social behaviours before and after the show, like hugging, dining … “and more if affinity”. Did not Artists have excessive expectations from this side of the creation ?
Things are perhaps changing rapidly now. Some years ago, high level interfaces were simplistic (joysticks at best) or heavy and costly (tables, large screens, markers for motion capture, plus high level professional software to make proper use of the signals). Today (around 2010), WII, Kinect, markerless capture, and probably a lot more to come, enter everybody’s homes, along with the appropriate software for games, anyway using powerful machines). On the other way round, sophisticated interfaces like immersive goggles and caves or haptic devices can be dispensed with, since our mind is powerfully gifted to take us fully into action. Just look at kids involved in a game around the home computer ! As for global audiences and, so to say, collective or cooperative playability, its importance and development are stressed on and taken into account by innovative curators (see the book of Graham and Cook []) as well as theater professionals (see the collection of texts gathered by Garbagnati and Morelli []).
What Art has to do now is to climb to another level.. To take a step above the basic instincts of games : kill or die, win or lose, step on the top scale of the podium. Art requires less animality and more soul. How shall we achieve that ?
Differenciation of interaction according to arts :
- live performance
- TV
- games
- archicture. Here we can move in, put ligts, decorate, temporary panels, make noise/musis.sing , just move in to "give life",