Quotes from "Transforming Mirrors", a text by Canadian artist David Rokeby (emphasis mine):
"Itsuo Sakane, the Japanese journalist and curator, suggests that interactive art is simply art that involves the participation of the viewer. But he goes on to remark "all arts can be called interactive in a deep sense if we consider viewing and interpreting a work of art as a kind of participation," an echo of Marcel Duchamp's famous declaration, "The spectator makes the picture.""
"McLuhan often referred to technologies as 'extensions of man'. But in fully interactive technologies, the flow of information goes both ways; the apparati become more like permeable membranes."
"Television expands the reach of our vision, while at the same time, filtering the content. We trade the subjectivity of our personal point of view for centrally collected and broadcasted images and information. Interactive media have the power to likewise expand the reach of our actions and decisions. We trade subjectivity for participation and the illusion of control; our control may appear absolute, but the domain of that control is externally defined. We are engaged, but exercise no power over the filtering language of interaction embedded in the interface. Rather than broadcasting content, interactive media have the power to broadcast modes of perception and action."
From this text, some questions arise for me:
How can VJs cultivate this "permeable membrane" between art and audience?
At what level do VJs give up this notion of control over material, and how can the audience figure into this?
If "the spectator makes the picture", how is this transformed in a context of live, dynamic creation?
(Read the full paper by Rokeby.)
3 comments:
i should like very much to read sakane his statement of interactive echoing a truism echoing not only Duchamp but much older traditions.
the present surge of art in occidental culture aside from expressing a basic need ( excluding the crass commercialism) of human existence seems to me a natural reaction to the centuries old artificial seperation of art and ritual from everyday life.
as for quote relating to McLuhan:
in which fully interactive technologies are
information flows reciprocal ?
i think that vjs and all artists can cultivate
that permeable membrane by first penetrating
that impermeable membrane of the
cerebral cortex, and the labeling part of brain .
the ancient metaphors of narcissus and echo are appropiate in this context.and spectator does indeed make part of the picture.
seer-seeing-seen all parts of the equation of necessity must be taken into account.at least for any kind of evolution to happen. and most certainly for real interaction of any type,especially the live dynamic creation.
in transforming mirrors Rokeby refers often to Duchamp and the Bride stripped bare.
this work is above all a work of refraction not reflection and indeed is among so many things a criticism of the false mirror image which one point perpective , generated in western art. vain and self absorbed like narcissus giving soley an inferrence of reflection ...never a real one.
one of the hardest things to really crystallize in words is that membrane
between performing and the audience.
There is at peak times a circuit, a conduit, and it is something very powerful and almost some sort of non verbal communication of the deepest kind as it purely emotional, immediate....exhilerating....with far fewer barriers as athena mentioned that we so carry in our labelling,indexing and contextualizing brains
the shifts in the crowd's connection, mood, collective or near collective moments or periods of a unified feel....these are palpable while performing ..(for better or worse depending on how it shifts in or out ) it is as though information and communication in depth has been looped from performer to audience back to performer and again.....
some performers lose the organic simplicity of this conduit's formation and narcissus is on stage...lost in not just his reflection...but exaggerated and rehearsed gestures, unnecessary (and sometimes not even plugged in or in volume range..) dramatic knob twirls, posturing as though it bleeds portent while the music and vjing is really where this comes from...... in the man machine......cybernetics...what kraftwerk so understood 30 years ago...not as we musicians call "lead guitarist disease" (the urge to be all flash and technique to wow the crowd...not flow with the music )
You could almost say that the true peaks in performer to audience interaction or playing intuitively another instrument....and playing it well.....the instrument being that space in the air between the vj and the audience and in tiny increments of time...those few feet and milliseconds in which to feel, intuit, react.....collaborate
I think the problem with modeling a definition of interaction based on perception alone is exactly that everything becomes interactive. In my opinion the user/viewer/participant's perception is important, however the Sakane/Duchamp quote seems to refer more to INTERPRETATION not INTERACTION.
I am leaning toward a definition of interaction that includes both function AND perception. Scholars, such as Bucy- http://organicode.net/Bucy04.pdf, also argue that interaction should be used to describe a mediated environment and I tend to agree with this notion.
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