Crawford’s reading has spiked my questioning of what we deem is an interactive system and in general interacitivity. Because if I am honest, I do not agree with Crawford’s take on his definition of interactivity. He comes at it from a more simplistic and dumbed down view of the definition, and frankly, doesn’t seem to me is a proper way to define it. Crawford defines interactivity through the following defintion:
I choose to define it in terms of a conversation: a
cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think,
and speak. ~ Crawford, 1950
I mean firstly, isn’t everything we see, hear, touch, smell and feel a “conversation”. Every body of work, is a communication, between the author/publisher and the reader consuming the information. It is quite literally a transfer of information like any conversation. Now for this cyclic process he talks about, there are many holes with it.
I mean, he mentions that two actors are supposed to listen, think and speak. But any program, and especially AI, cannot think independently on its own accord. And the other point was him dismissing the fact that books and movies are not interactive by nature. I’m sorry, but what does Word or Powerpoint or hell, even me writing this article on WordPress, constitue as?? You cannot say, okay if I know what to expect with a book, that it’s a think object with words, that any computer program is much more interactive. I know what to expect when I type on the keyboard in Word or drag around images in Powerpoint. Any interaction I have with a computer program, to similar degree I’m interacting with a book by reading it. Even movies too, they make us think about the characters thinking what action to take given the event in the movie. So it is the same thing and both actions are the same degree of interactivity.
Rant out of the way, what would I define interactivity as in terms of characteristics? I would define it in a way where any action we do with a program, creates a reaction. And no, not where the computer thinks, but where we are actively thinking what the outcome is. I would also say here that interactivity is definitionally having multiple art forms and elements coming together in one. Games are the perfect example of this notion, as they compile together multiple elements, such as text, images, music and user input, in order to form a complete intaractive experience.
In terms of my own p5js sketches, I will add more interaction in terms of keyboard and mouse input and dedicate different functions for different keys. Such as if I did an artwork of some sort, the user would have different effects happen depending on the keys pressed. Another potential option is exploring face tracking or body tracking software, but that might be a challenge in of its own haha.