Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen
I strongly agree with the author of this text especially about the fact that the artist should let the audience to experience, interpret, and feel the artwork without any instructed guidance.
“Ideally they will understand what you’re expressing through that experience“. I really believe that if the artist wants the audience to really engage with the artwork on a deeper level, they should give them some space. Through the interaction, through emotions and reactions most of them who really make this interaction thoughtful will get the feeling or at least abstract idea behind the artwork, while still having their own interpretation and emotional feeling attached to that. Instructions kill the emotions, and personally I believe that artworks in the first place should make people feel.
What I noted down, it is really important to set up and design the experience in the way that will make people do the interactions that you want them to do. It goes back to our previous readings, and having this concept mentioned again only amplifies its importance.
Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses)
“What’s great about the themes that follow here is that they allow a lot of room for originality”
I believe that the “core” concepts that are used in many physical computing works are just like the core concepts and principles of any science or form of traditional art. “Everything is a remix” is basically telling the same thing: core concepts that artists are inspired by becomes the basis to which they add new unique ideas.
As for the works provided in the text, I really like “gloves” concept. I really like the idea of interacting with art and tech with your body, either it’s a projection, or something else, but I find this idea of just using your limbs to produce something without any additional “parties”. I know a lot of projects that are dependent on this technology, or that use kind of similar technique, not only for art but for more practical use. If I recall correctly, in NYUAD at Professor Eid’s Lab around a year ago I saw a project that was basically some training for children with CP transferred from offline to online VR experience. To keep the “senses” in the hands while completing the exercise, they made a technology that sends vibrations to the fingers when you touch something in VR, and depending on the touch, the vibrations frequency and power was adjusted. This is just another example of how the “gloves” concept was used in physical computing, even though it’s not really about art. However, I believe that the same “vibration” or mimicking a certain touch-sense technology can be really wisely applied in immersive and interactive art — letting the user to interact with the object while also letting them “feel” the object even if it’s not real is a really strong and impressive idea one could apply.