>Too Interactive: Physical installations for groups.
>Due to the non-arrival of artificial intelligence, these artworks can
>offer the richest forms of interaction between audiences and
>programmed artwork possible with current technology. Why then, do
>they appear in mainstream art museums and galleries so infrequently
>(net.art being currently much more common)?
>Are they just too difficult to install? Have they gone out of
>fashion? Are museums frightened of audience input? Are artists
>frightened to relinquish 'control'? Are these artworks doomed to
>remain in the "Turing Land" of 'electronic art' rather than the
>"Duchamp Land" of art museums?
Large-scale interactive works of the kind discussed at the symposium
can, of course, be extremely difficult to install and maintain. But if
art museums and galleries can manage the logistics of, say, a flying
steamroller or a Mike Nelson installation, this kind of thing shouldn't
be entirely beyond their wit.
Beryl asks: "Are museums frightened of audience input? Are artists
frightened to relinquish 'control'?" Quite possibly, on both counts. But
the questions presuppose - I think - that to do so is necessarily a
desirable and artistically (and socially/politically?) progressive move.
I'd like to question this implicit hierarchy, which places the radically
democratic interactive artwork (with AI as paradigm) at the top, and the
stable, 'traditional' art object - a painting or photograph hung on a wall,
for example - at the bottom. This hierarchy suggests a kind of
technological determinism to me, reminiscent of Benjamin's belief that
mechanical reproduction would strip the art object of its aura. It also
smacks of a modernist teleology - albeit somewhat displaced - in which art,
hand in hand with science, pushes humankind inexorably towards future
emancipation.
Do interactive artworks really offer richer forms of interaction between
audiences and artworks, or just different ones?
I'm not trying to diminish 'interactive' art, just to question some of the
rhetoric that so often accompanies it. Maybe we should be more interested
in how good it is than how interactive it is, and make our arguments about
inclusion/exclusion accordingly.
Patrick Henry
Curator of Exhibitions
National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, UK.
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