Anyone in The Notion Collective could probably summarize my relationship with interactivity in art as well as I could myself. I’m a vocal person - what can I say? The truth is that I’m as critical of the practice (or premise) as I am excited by it. And in spite of my occasional fandom, I still hold high Sarah Boxer’s scathing review of the 2005 Boston Cyberarts festival. For me, it’s the most succinct critique of everything wrong with using interactivity as a premise for making art.
With that baggage in tow, my friend Ken and I took a tour of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program’s Spring 2010 show in May. Expecting a small room with only a handful of projects, we instead feasted on a whole floor of (what ken described as) “nerdfest”. There were over a hundred student projects that fell somewhere between tool and art - ITP is, after all, a telecommunications program hosted within an art school. We were tourists at a buffet.
There were some clear successes in the show, especially amongst the more functional projects. The kids at NOAH created a simple site for tracking ecologies with a super-clean UI design and a google maps mashup. The RapidFTP team built a “family tracking and reuniting” database solution for organizations like Unicef for when they go into disaster areas (very similar to Google’s Relief Project). And Chris Allick’s Parasitic Suit concept for wind-powered charging was somewhat less practical, but exciting nonetheless.
Finding compelling art pieces was somewhat more difficult. Sue Syn’s Prism won major form points for projecting onto ultrasonic-generated fog, but otherwise struggled with a clear concept. Like many of the projects I saw, Shahar Zak’s Z Scanner used a fairly involved digital workflow, but fell short in aesthetics and relevancy. Andrea Wolf’s The Afterimage re-imagines the film-loop projection machine — something I already find infatuating — by revealing individual photo frames on a slow loop; I loved this piece in spite of (or because of) its apparent lack of both interactivity and telecommunication.
The embedded video serves as a sort of capstone to the experience. The piece is a motion-sensitive mechanical display that uses hundreds of rotating wood pieces to manipulate light and shadow, thereby producing a mirror image of what it sees through a camera. That’s the idea, anyway. Having drooled over video of a similar piece only weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to play! But try as I did, I couldn’t coax the piece into producing a recognizable image.
Interactivity is certainly here to stay, but it seems five years after Boxer’s article, the struggle is still how to make the work artistically compelling.
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