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.
