Category: Digital and Interactive Art

Interactive Matter

imatter logo

The Interactive Matter group that I and Lynn Hughes lead met this Monday and Tuesday, May 5th and 6th, 2008, to talk about theories and methodologies of interactivity. A series of excellent short papers were presented on Monday that surveyed the literature and practices of research into interactivity. Some of the presenters were Chris Salter, Sara Diamon, Ron Wakkary, Cindy Poremba, Stéfan Sinclair, Liss Platt, Shirley Madill, Susan Brown, Glen Lowry, and Jutta Treviranus. (I’m sure I missing someone.) I’m still processing this, but some of the highlights for me were:

  • Interactivity matters because it is such broad term that is used as if we understand it. There is the material dimension of interactivity, the ethical and social matters around interactivity, and the issues that matter.
  • It is time now for the digital arts and humanities to recover interactivity from scientific approaches like HCI, computer science and software engineering. While they yield interesting insights into cognition, efficiency and the engineering of interactivity – we want to look at hwo interactivity is embodied, how it has human contexts, how it has histories, and how it is imagined. That is what the arts and humanities can contribute.
  • We are interested in much more than the interactive work. We are interested in its history of production and design. We are interested in its context and reception. We are interested in how it might evolve over time and be maintained, preserved, exhibited again, or disappear.
  • We are interested in practices that approach interactivity not as something to be observed and critiques, but something that is learned through interaction. We imagine practices that bridge the practices of discovery of art, design and the humanities.

bleuOrange: revue de littérature hypermédiatique

Image from Sodome@homent2 has launched an online review in French, bleuOrange | revue de littérature hypermédiatique. The review has a number of effective new media works including a French version of open.ended and the disturbing Sodome@home. Bravo to the folks at nt2 for this new site for the publication of hypermedia literature.

Hoberman: Cathartic User Interface

Image of CUI How can art engage interactivity? Perry Hoberman’s work Cathartic User Interface (1995, 2000) is mentioned in Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media as a work that draws attention to the computer interface which is supposed to disappear. The CUI has a rack of keyboards at which viewers can throw balls as if at a carnival. Depending on what input they hit they get different images projected onto the work. For Zielinski, the logic of interface design is to become transparent (so we can do work) and artists like Hoberman remind us that the man-machine symbiosis is not that easy. Hoberman develops “dramaturgies of opposition.”

In an interview in the defunct art orbit, “Loosen Up the Loop”, Perry Hoberman talks about interactivity and seems to be taking issue with Manovich’s view that a painting can be interactive,

“I am happy to argue with anyone who says a painting is interactive because each person thinks different things when they look at it. I think the word becomes meaningless if you use it too broadly.”

Hoberman has a fairly open view of interactivity and nothing resembling an agenda. Rather he deals with the computer with humour, notably through his various alerts. But I could be in error.

Image of Error

SET 26

Image of GROCK

SET 26 is a Swiss design company that sells furniture shaped like letters from the Roman alphabet. Each letter costs about 1,500 Euros and has doors that open revealing shelves. They have a Konfigurator so you can see any combination of 5 letters in the available colours (like the GROCK above.)

I read about this in a strange online Facsimile Magazine while reading a reproduction of a 1970 Time Life Books’ Nature/Science Annual article on “Art’s New Ally – Science.” The article documents a number of technological arts projects including the Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) cooperative founded by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg.

20 sites

I just stumbled on this remarkable art project by Tom Phillips (his Humument project was mentioned here earlier by Geoffrey in connection with emergent/altered texts). He has created slideshow galleries of 20 locations around London that he has photographed once each year for the last 35 years. Watching, we see some sites barely change while some are dramatically altered.

Oddly, what struck me most was the transformation of the cars: abstractly I remember those generations of cars (or their north american relatives) from my childhood on up, though I can no longer place them in any visual context in memory, except in a sort of cinematic way.
site 17 first
site 17 last

netzspannung.org | Archive | Archive Interfaces

Image of Semantic Map

netzspannung.org is a German new media group with an archive of “media art, projects from IT research, and lectures on media theory as well as on aesthetics and art history.” They have a number of interfaces to this archive, for an explanation see, Archive Interfaces. The most interesting is the Java Semantic Map (see picture above.)

netzspannung.org is an Internet platform for artistic production, media projects, and intermedia research. As an interface between media art, media technology and society, it functions as an information pool for artists, designers, computer scientists and cultural scientists. Headed by » Monika Fleischmann and » Wolfgang Strauss, at the » MARS Exploratory Media Lab, interdisciplinary teams of architects, artists, designers, computer scientists, art and media scientists are developing and producing tools and interfaces, artistic projects and events at the interface between art and research. All developments and productions are realised in the context of national and international projects.

See The Semantic Map Interface for more on their Java Web Start archive browser.

Image of Semantic Map

Texto Digital: a-writings

Image of Text Animation

Humanist posted an announcement for a new issue of the Brazilian journal Text Digital that includes some interesting animated experiments (like the image above) including a series a-writing by Gerard Dalmon. The address “To the reader” starts with,

To weave, write and inscribe thoughts on the digital medium is the purpose of this journal that reaches its fifth number with a somewhat different content. It is the first time we publish an issue with more creative than theoretic interventions.

The Most Unusual Books of the World

Image of Sculptural Book

Shawn sent me this link for the The Most Unusual Books of the World. Loyal readers will have seen my Text in the Machine experiment on Flickr (where there is a photoessay).

McMaster’s archives actually have a number of English fore-edge painted books that were, apparently, popular gifts in their time.

I’m trying to imagine a visualization tool that would show you selected passages cut sculpturally out of a 3D book.