Physical Computing’s Greatest hits and misses
I really enjoyed going through the different themes of physical computing in this article. I felt that I got a lot of inspiration and ideas about possible project ideas, and the explanations provided for each concept really simplified how implementing this idea in practice would look like. Looking through these examples felt like when I would look through past student’s projects on this WordPress. And I’ve also felt that everytime I see an idea that’s been done, it feels like I can’t do that idea anymore either. However, as the author pointed it out, it’s always nice to re-imagine ideas in new contexts, think of new interactions, and as a lot of us did for our midterm projects, link it back to our identity and cultures.
Some themes especially stuck out to me from this article, and I hope to be able to implement them in some way in my work in the future. First, Floor Pads! I love it when a coding project goes way beyond the screen or the usual hardware of wires and buttons. Especially when something is more prominent and unusual, it definitely captures more attention. And something like Floor Pads where there’s movement and a lot of viewer interaction involved can be especially fun. Likewise, Body-as-cursor and Hand-as-cursor are two other themes that stuck out to me for similar reasons. Finally, Things You Yell At was another fun theme, and something I’ve seen a lot at previous IM Showcases. I feel like another common aspect among these themes is that there is no learning curve to understand how it works, you kind of just experiment with it till you get it, usually it’s pretty straightforward.
Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen
This article made some great points, throughout this class, we’ve spoken a lot about interactive art, what makes it interactive and how to guide users through these interactions. I really appreciated the points it made about allowing your viewers to experiment with the art, rather than force them into the interactions you’ve planned out, allowing them to discover it themselves can be more fun. As the author states, an important part of interactive art is to listen. I think it can be eye-opening to see how viewers look at your art. Especially as most artists spend hours and hours just looking at their work, editing every little detail, and creating everything from scratch, it can be hard to zoom out and see the bigger picture and experience the art through fresh eyes. Hence why it’s important to see how others interact with your work, take it as feedback, maybe just by watching how others interact, you can get new ideas and make edits to your work.