Act React, looking at interaction on both a concious and unconscious levels!

ACT !!!!!!!! React


Act-react. The idea of being able impact authored work has fascinated me for a long time. Video games were the first interaction I consciously made on a piece of authored work.

You may be wondering what I mean by consciously. George Fitfield’s article Act/React dealt with personal interaction across several mediums of art across many decades. He starts this discussion by referring to the interaction of the viewer on a two-dimensional painting. Fitfield described this in his article, “The artist operates like a medieval God, creating a deterministic world in which the receiver’s route is ordained.”

Back to my point on consciousness, looking at a painting and following the “ordained” path is unconscious. You may not know what the path is, which can lead to different interpretations of a work, or there may be multiple paths to take in understanding an authored work. These paths can be brought into consciousness when they are talked about with another person or in a group, but in a personal individualistic environment, at a young age, many aspects of viewing art were driven by personal thoughts and perception; not by knowing that a artist was striving for a specific reason or other conscious technicalities.

At this young age, somewhere between five and ten, video games was an art form that I could have an effect on. Not only was this a conscious effect on that environment, but also the effect changed the picture as a whole. Both forms of art though, paintings and video games, still had a path that led you to final interpretation or conclusion.

The difference in viewing a painting is that we are making an unconscious inferences onto the meaning just by looking at the medium, and in video games we are moving into a conscious direction, but also has no meaning in a single frame or still. Both forms are subject to incomplete or distorted meanings similarly, you could give up on the finding the true meaning of abstract painting or just put down the controller.

Further, in age and perception of our world, we could come to make conscious inference on a piece of art. Whether this be empirical personal interaction, or group discussion were we are verbalizing our reactions to a medium and thus growing in realizing the multiple paths of the author or possibly the singular path of the author.

This brings me to another point that Fitfield made of interaction and the evolution of interactive pieces of art. The second part of the quote above is the way we interact with interactive mediums, “In interactive art, the artist can give the visitor free will, freedom to explore a world of the artists imagination, and to find (or miss) all the wonders that might lie within it.”

Along with many video games and many of the interactive art in Fitfield’s article stilled followed a path or multiple paths. Pressing buttons to direct a film will always end in the same way(s). Fitfield was right in saying that interacting within an interactive medium will put the viewer in the authors world, but until recently this has been limited by both our imaginations and our technology.

This, finally, has brought me to our recent interactions with some of the most recent pieces of interactive art. Interaction was based, in the past, on using a controller or interacting with an object to manipulate the medium. With past interactive art and the furthering of technology artists are able to imagine a world with an endless number of possibilities.

Take for example the 1999 piece by Daniel Rozin, The Wooden Mirror. A person or an object is placed in front of hundreds of wooden spheres and is reflected by those spheres. This is another conscious interaction, we need to think about what is going on to experience this piece, a single frame of the work by itself will not bring any meaning to it. These conscious inferences are infinite and thus can create an infinite number of possibilities of what can be reflected, limited by each viewer’s imagination. The one thing that remains the same is what is projected. We are now switching the roles of author and viewer, the viewer become the artist. Though we are still in the author’s imaginary world, we create the image both to accompanying viewers, and ourselves but also take an image with us as we leave. In this case of interactive art we are the controller that has its own buttons that are pressed, one may start jumping around while another may just stand there.

Another piece is part of the evolution of interactive art though technology and imagination is Camille Utterback’s work with painting through body interaction. Once again we see the infinite possibilities in being a author within a thee author’s world. This time it can be more personal like a video game, a single person can create the infinite possibilities. As like recent work in video games, a mechanic is being manipulated by the viewer and thus creates the final image or conclusion. One of the aspects of focus by recent video games is multiple plots, paths, and conclusions that could be created by the player. Games have been created that lead you to be able to explore every environment in the first minutes of starting the game. You can skip parts of the story, you can complete it at your own pace, you can align yourself with good or evil and thus changing the final outcome, and many recent games have combined many of these aspects or focused on a single “ground breaking” creation. Like Camille’s art piece, we are involving much more when we interact with these new forms of art. Not only are we consciously identifying the mechanics of these mediums we look for how we can manipulate it to our own ends.