on "interactivity?"
some thoughts on Ashley’s query and the discourse it has generated:
“…Interactivity is the cycle where both the artwork and the audience listen, think and speak to each other. Such a capability for art was unachievable until the advent of the computer...
For an artist to create a conversational interactive artwork means to give the audience an interface to speak with…
By applying techniques from artificial intelligence and artificial life the artist can attempt to harness the potential of emergent behavior to generate new content...
People by nature want to be able to express themselves. In artworks where the audience can only click on links or press buttons they are forced to conform to the work instead of the work opening itself up to them…”
Written by Andrew Stern.
His full essay entitled "Deeper conversations with interactive art, or why artists must program", published in the Spring 2001 Vol. 7 No. 1 issue of Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, can be read at:
http://home.netcom.com/~apstern/interactivestory.net/papers/deeperconversations.html
Comments
Speaking as an artist who programs, I most emphatically do not agree. Artworks have spoken and artists have engaged in dialogue long before the advent of computers. Why restrict interactivity to the digital/computational realm?
Why this need to define interactivity? Is a tree interactive?
I would argue yes.
Posted by: peggy | April 29, 2003 2:57 PM