Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen
In this class, it’s easy to present our artworks as static pieces with instructions for the participants and a statement of how we want them to interpret it. The author of this piece, however, believes that this defeats the purpose of interactive art. He wants interactive artists to think of their artwork as a performance rather than a painting; you don’t go about narrating the plot to the audience in a performance – you let the audience perceive the performance through their own senses and interpretation. In the same way, we shouldn’t present our interactive artworks on a canvas with instructions and interpretations – we give them the basic context so they know what they’re getting into, and then we let them explore for themselves. We have to trust our audience to discover their interpretation through a ‘conversation’ with our artwork with merely a suggestion of what their course of action should be – unaided by our own directives – because only in this way can we offer an authentic emotional experience to our audience.
Physical Computing’s Biggest Hits (and misses)
This one was just a list of some of the most common project themes in interactive artwork projects. It’s funny because a lot of us will be revisiting these themes many times ourselves for our own artworks, but I don’t think there’s something deeply wrong with that. I think finding our own twist on things that have widely been done before is still our own thing. After all, it is easy to feel like everything worth doing has already been done. Not that that’s true, but I think we may just come closer to originality by stumbling upon an idea no one’s heard of before while first doing stuff that has been done, countless times over.