ART399 - Response Assignment 1

In Jim Campbell’s paper, Delusions of Dialog: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, we are introduced to many concepts in interactive art. We can use these concepts to compare and contrast with other digital artwork to give us a breadth of knowledge with regards to computer-generated artwork. Here we will also compare the framework of the arguments with the secondary artwork, and evaluate how effective and informative the framework was.

The first major argument in Campbell’s paper is the notion that interactive art can be compared to the structure of a computer. He says that a computer is like an empty structure in which a concept can be inserted. The programmer must know the language of the computer as well as the dialect of the user or audience. This concept can be formulated to suggest that our chosen work of art currently being considered, Sawtooth by Christopher Burns, has also been started from an empty structure in which the programmer built and devised an interactive projection of colors and sounds that change with the movement of his arms and hands. Burns must have had the audience in mind, if only slightly, when he set this work in motion, since the music was not very melodic, nor did it change very quantifiably with the movements of his hands. He could have set the threshold higher to make more drastic changes in the display with his movements.

Another argument made by Campbell is that there are problems inherent with reducing the artist’s concept to a mathematical representation, a transformation that is necessary to allow a work to be implemented on a computer. He elaborates by saying that the subtlety of the artwork is lost by having to define that with mathematical precision. We see in Sawtooth that the programmer had a quite limited range of outputs to select from, or which was implemented, because the video only shows abstract lines and squares in the display. It might have included some realistic pictures or even stylized animations to spice it up. The music was also limited to squeaks and squeals that hearken to the days of 56K modems. The programmer could well have been inspired to make a more provocative show just by taking from the beloved old Winamp plugin called Tripex 1.1.

Finally, Campbell wants us to know that he is looking for new and untouched directions for interactive art by discussing the potential of the computer to allow a work to be able to change and grow over time through extraction and storage of information. Specifically, he created a program that puts a second cursor on the computer screen. This was a change and growth that seemed trivial at the start, but proved to add randomness and volition to the inputs. In Burns presentation, likewise, the art being displayed had a strong sense of randomness to it. It is not like Burns was directly controlling the action on the screen, but merely hinting the program along to make shapes and colors come alive. Conversely, he could have programmed the art to strictly follow his movements, paying strong attention to direction and distance of his engagements, to make a more structured exhibit. The Xbox Kinect interface would have been done this by default.