Response Chapter 2

            For this reading, it was a little hard to read and follow for me. I honestly didn’t understand the first part of this reading. What I did understand was that the body can be used as performance. Which isn’t a new concept to me. What really intrigued me but I didn’t really understand was Zeno’s arrow.

            What I understood from the chapter was that the body can be used an another level of interaction with art. It can be on the surface level of just body movement or something that is higher up. Emergence seems to be an active term that is used a lot in this chapter but every time its brought up, I makes it even more confusing for me.

            One work that I really enjoy that I have seen before is Brian Kneps, I really love the aspect of biology he adds to his worked title Healing Pool. I think it most resonates with me because I was a pre-med student so it incorporates biology and technology into an interactive piece. We also watched some of the videos on his others works, such as the Harvard installation. I was in the very building that the installation was installed in. I was not there when the work was being shown but I can sort of imagine a very deep conversation between the art and the location and by a third entity of the viewer and his or her interaction.

            With working with the first project, I really appreciated this emotion that came out of the work because its something that so difficult to do. I have realized that coming up with a concept then executing it in a space with technology is so hard.

Nathaniel Stern Chapter One Response

            This blog post response is going to be a little tough for me to write. I strongly agree with what Nathaniel Stern says about interactive art. Last semester I took the interactive performance art with Sean Miller and was thrown in the deep end with interactive art. It was a rough start at first because it took me a few months to visualize what it was I wanted to display. Then I had to trim down or add to my piece according to the time constraint, space and the ability to be able to do something that I found entertaining or satisfying. That was the time I was exploring the idea of vision, audio and touch as an art form with the help of computer code.

            Since I have either endured or conquered most of these topics through self discovery, I will point out some of the works or ideas that really stuck with me. I was really impressed with Theodore Watson’s piece, audio space, it seems so intricate and cool. I did some research on this piece and since it was created in 2005, there doesn’t seem to be much information in writing on the piece on his website. He does give small video talks about it and an informative explanation of how he did it but not much specific details are given. It would be cool if he could recreate this piece and included either VR or another aspect of human sense that gave a new “visual” feel. I also want to note that I loved when Stern quoted media theorist Richard Grusin. Grusin introduces the idea that seeing with one eyes is touching the world, hearing with your ears is touching the world, tasting something with your mouth is touching the world and smelling something is touching the world with your nose. He claims that all our senses are different manifestations of touch in a non contact way. Although one can argue that each sense is touching something in a way or another. Such as the chemicals and molecules that make up taste and smells coming in contact with the mouth and nose, or the light photons that hit our retina to make an image in our brain.

I also love Char Davies’ osmose piece and how it incorporates VR and different tactile sensors to manipulate the 3D world. It’s cool to see that this was being done even back in 1995. I did some research on this piece and wonder if it would be possible to recreate this piece with the technology we have now. This piece was done with 5 people and I wonder if technology has advanced far enough to let anyone with the time and knowledge to be able to complete this.

            Overall, the start of the book was a little boring just because I self discovered a lot of these different philosophies with interactive performance in the past but it gave good insight on artists and their work in the field. Now that we have gotten through the introduction of interactive media and its different meanings to different people, we can continue to read on and see the different techniques that Stern uses to extend interactive art into the embodiment of data and the tangible world.