At 12:13 19/11/2001 +0100, Josephine Bosma wrote:
>The term 'interactivity' is so unclear and questionable of course.
>Having a discussion about something being 'too interactive' is
>interesting though. I am not a curator but 'too interactive' seems to
>mean two things to me: first the work is in danger of being changed,
>stolen or damaged by the audience; second the work has an interactivity
>level that is 'intimate' or highly involving for a small group of people
>only, creating an unpredictable outcome.
we're producing Tim Etchell's 'surrender control' SMS project again this
week for the ICA, and that definitely meets your second description of
interactive (its a series of 75 instructions sent via text messages over 5
days. there are 161 participants this week). Its exciting to be working in
this medium, but we do feel a loss of control, as we have no real chance of
getting feedback from the audience. in fact we deliberately decided not to
include more obvious feedback mechanisms when we were developing the UI for
the piece, as they stood out as being too obviously 'interactive' in
relation to the curt, but thought-provoking messages that make up the project.
in fact, it feels more like a kind of technologically-enhanced fluxus piece
than anything 'new'. we've got the same problems of exactly how to
represent the piece retrospectively, or even how to represent it at all
(which makes it very difficult to enter for prix arts, baftas or other peer
events that might better enable us to place it in a historical context or
canon). In fact, the most significant artefact the project has accrued so
far is a brief flurry of opinion from people posting to news article forums
on metafilter and bbc news online. I quite like the fact the only record we
might have of the piece is the knee-jerk opinions of people who hadn't
actually participated in the project...
matt
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