I was very surprised by the opening sentence of this week’s reading as I had an Understanding IM class with Professor Shiloh just this Thursday discussing how the word “interactivity” loses so much meaning when applied to works that are at most immersive and not at all actually interactive.
“Here’s a key point about the interactive process: There are two actors, not one” was a quote from page 5 that I noted down. Some of my fellow classmates in UIM defended the popular claim that the Mona Lisa is interactive because her eyes “follow you” as you admire the artwork; they defended it because they themselves feel the magic of their favorite paintings. However, I think interactivity as a term often gets confused with “immersion” yet seems to almost be used interchangeably for so many people.
Another thing I noted down from the reading was “We tend to think of interactivity as a Boolean like virginity. But why not think of interactivity as a continuous variable with relative measures?” Although the phrasing of this comparison was a little bizarre on my first read, I actually found myself agreeing with it a lot. Crawford’s three emphasis on three characteristics of Listening, Thinking, and Speaking may naturally apply to human conversation more, but could apply to our artworks as well.
I really liked this next section on the thirteenth page– where Crawford essentially provokes the reader on the topic of books as an interactive medium. Crawford says that if you think books should be considered an interactive medium then say the word, although he’s possibly thousands of miles away and unable to ever perceive your opinion, oops! “…if you’re frustrated, you are welcome to throw this across the room, but even then, there still won’t be anybody listening to your frustrations or thinking about them.”
Overall, I thought Crawford had some good points with great ways of expressing how frustrating the nothingness burger the word “interactivity” has become and will become. And to answer his question listed at the end– “Are rugs interactive? Explain in your own words why or why not?” – I believe that rugs fall near low-interactivity at best on the interactivity spectrum. This is because some party games, such as twister, could use a rug with complex designs to form a set of rules and a gameplay loop.
