todd

The building circular

A lot of sketching, inking, and scanning last night. All told, the roughs of four sections of "Panopticon" have been scanned in. A more macabre portion of them posted here:

Ashley brings up the age-old question of "What's Interactviity?". To me it's more a question of convention than semantics. When I use the word I mean a few things:

-An "Interactive" work must consist of a text, something that exists and provides content beyond the person who may use it. A game, a computer program, an installation, all of these can be considered "texts". Phone conversations and e-mail would not normally fall into this category, as you there is no content save what is brought by the user or users.

-An "Interactive" work provides an oppurtunity for agency, or the ability for the reader or user of a text to manipulate or change the text. This change need not be premanent, or even particularly original. By this definition a book or film would not be interactive, as they will not change by the user reading or seeing them. A game is interactive as the players actions directly change the game. Branching fiction, like "choose your own adventure", is a limited form of interactivity, as the reader can alter how they read the story, and are encouraged to do so. One can start reading "War and Peace" in the middle, but convention of linear books expect that the reader start at page one and continue to the end. The reader is not expected to change the story and text (although, hopefully, the text can change the reader).

I guess the short answer for "What is interactive media?" would be "Any medium or text within that medium that questions the "passive" relationship between the reader and the text." While I wait for people to start disputing this truncated definition, I'll say a few cents on the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

I've visited the Museum before, and I'm glad to see some of its new exhibits and expansions. More than just a simple museum of half-truths and hoaxes, th museum calls into question the idea of knowledge and how one builds a working mythology or system of viewing the world. The museum also demands a critical eye. Simply believing everything you see is a bad idea, and casually discounting everything equally as short-sighted.

I'm also led to question what I see in more conventional museums. This does not mean I seek to embrace pseudoscience, or deny that scientific or historical information is useful. I merely think about what I read and believe, and know how malleable a fact can be. As a child I read trawled science and history books, taking in accounts of astronomy, natural history, physics, archaeology, etc. Over the past few decades I've seen so much of the knowledge I took at face value altered or changed, and often changed back. This has happened throughout human history. Nevertheless facts and beliefs determine the actions of society, the progress of science, and the way one sees the past and future. Human knowledge is not something to be unilaterally ignored or embraced, but rather seen as an organic entity.

All that said, I found Ricky Jay's eroding dice collection an exquisite combination of illusion, entropy, art and media history, the exhibit itself the tip of an ideological iceberg.