I think that the reading “Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen” captures what all art is about and how all art works regardless of whether it’s explicitly interactive or not. After the artist publishes their work for other people to see, a process of interaction between the artist’s thoughts and the thoughts of the audiences starts to happen. This is where the magic of meaning happens. Each viewer has their own perspective towards anything they encounter and with each interaction a new meaning is formed. Sometimes, the new meanings are quite vastly different than what the artists originally thought of when making the art. For example, the robotic arm that sweeps hydraulic fluid by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu called “Can’t Help Myself” was originally intended to be about migration and sovereignty but viewers largely interpreted it to be about being depressed and trying to hold oneself together.
I think for me personally, I learn a lot and connect a lot of dots while I’m having conversations with people rather than when I’m with myself. So this idea of putting an artwork out there and then let people interact with it and have conversation with it is something that makes a lot of sense to me. As I think about capstone, I want to integrate more of this two way conversational aspect so that I learn more about myself and ideas and also how other people think about them.