Dear list members,

I had been asked to respond to last month's theme and here are my two
Mexican pesos, --depreciated to just a few centavos by my delay in
sending these notes.

1. As Simon Biggs, Josephine Bosma and other list members emphasise,
the word "interactive" may refer to very disparate
behaviours/properties of an artwork. In my opinion, unless the word
is narrowly defined it is as vague and useless as "postmodern" or
"virtual". Duchamp said "the look makes the picture"Š and when we say
that everything is interactive, like Gary Hill did recently in a new
media symposium, the word is not that interesting anymore.

2. Work that has been associated to the word "interactive" often
depends on very obvious causal, predatorial, 1-bit, personalised,
push-button, surveillance aesthetics. Like in the failed neo-humanist
promise of "being in the centre of the digital world", the
participant is policed and yet made to feel like he/she is in
control. Of course, I am only referring to pieces with very lame
interactivity, but unfortunately my feeling is that many
"establishment" curators only pay attention to this kind of
interactivity because anything more complex would take too much time
to understand (OK I'm being a bit cynical, but last year I asked
Harald Szeeman about electronic art and he dissed me saying "I can
walk into a studio and see a painting or sculpture and know in one
minute if the work is interestingŠwith an internet or interactive
piece I would have to spend too much time and it is not worth it"
Š.HELLO!?).

3. I have been using the word "relational" for 8 years because it has
a more horizontal quality than "interactive",  --it's more
collective: events happen in fields of activity that may have
resonances in several places in the network. Of course, the term is
not mine, I first encountered it in Maturana and Varela's studies of
the brain and also the word has been used since the 60s to describe
cross-referencing databases. The great Brazilian artists Lygia Clark
and Hélio Oiticica, precursors of electronic art, also used the term
in the 60s to refer to their user-activated objects and
installations. Of course, "relational" is also quickly becoming
widespread and will probably become annoying soon (if it isn't
already).

4. As Beryl says, my work is mostly performance-oriented. In general
I see electronic art as being closer to the performing arts than the
visual arts. Since I don't really create objects that may be bought
and sold, commercial galleries have no use for my work. A feasible
economic model is based on a fee that is charged to a festival, art
centre or museum in a similar way that they might book a play for a
couple of weeks. This technique helps curators understand that the
work is not being exhibited as it waits to find a buyer (i.e. it is
in the artist's interest to show it) but rather that the event of
showing the piece is the work itself (i.e. the artist interest is in
getting paid per show).

5. The above notwithstanding, I disagree with the idea that
interactive art is time-based. You cannot apply the rules of video or
cinema, for instance, to interactive installations that may not have
time-constraints, or that do not have a predefined start and end.
Except for a few pieces, such as Char Davies' Osmose, participants
may interact with an electronic artwork for as long as they want and
in this sense the pieces are not "art rides" with theme-park
statistics such as "client throughput per hour". Instead, some people
call electronic art "event-based", i.e. the piece unfolds according
to user and program exchanges. My own description is that electronic
art is "relationship-based". Any insertion of electronic art into a
museum or art centre has to factor in the time and space needed for
new relationships to flourish. Of course, this may be inconvenient to
some institutions because they may prefer to show art objects where
the relationships have already been well digested and regurgitated by
the experts. For many "authorities" it is threatening that a work may
provide completely different experiences to each participant as this
undermines the "last word" exhaustive analysis approach, the presumed
objectivity of which is the basis for them calling themselves
authorities in the first place.

6. In my work I try to look for collective interaction, pieces where
several people may participate simultaneously. I have seen two
strategies to achieve collective participation. The first one I call
"taking turns". You have one or two sensors so people take turns to
use them, and the rest are spectators. Examples include Jeffrey
Shaw's "Eve", where one person controls the point of view of a
virtual world projected on a large dome, Toni Dove and Michael
Mackenzie's "Archaeology of a Mother Tongue", where a tracking glove
is used to navigate a narrative, and our "Displaced Emperors" where a
participant wears a tracking system to transform the Linzer Castle.
The other popular strategy for collective interactivity I call
"taking averages". This is what you have in interactive cinema
experiences or in game shows: a voting interface where input gets
statistically computed and the outcome is directed by the majority of
votes. This can be very frustrating and problematic because it's so
democratic, it makes you feel that your discrete participation goes
nowhere. The challenge is how to open a piece for participation
without taking averages or taking turns. In a way, my recent piece in
Rotterdam "Body Movies" is an attempt to address this.

7. Successful pieces that feature "interactivity for groups" are
usually out-of-control. For me, a piece is successful if the
behaviours and relationships that emerge from participation manage to
surprise the artist/designer...in other words, the outcomes have not
been pre-programmed. In my opinion installations must foster
uncontrollability and welcome --and even be energised by-- what Beryl
calls "moronic input".

Hmm. Rereading my post I realise that I am making many
generalisations. Sorry about that. Many museums have accepted Douglas
Crimp's 80s challenge that Museums should not be Mausoleums. But a
lot of work still needs to be done. For me Museums definitely have a
role for work that is "too interactive" but they must match their
interest in preservation (of objects or documents) with that of
perpetration (of new relationships).

Saludos,

Rafael

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