ART399 - Response Assignment 2

In the art that was given to be appraised, it is here that we will consider the direction of each piece as it pertains to the article written by Erkki Huhtamo, Trouble at the Interface, or the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art. The art pieces include Listening Post by Mark Hansen, The Messenger by Paul DeMarinis, and Park View Hotel by Ashok Sukumaran of Sun Microsystems. Each piece of art has a meaningful direction and essential features and will be compared to Huhtamo’s framework.

Listening Post is questioned in Trouble at the Interface as being truly interactive. The piece is a collection of text displays that supposedly show and speak chat room banter. It can be argued that the piece is not truly interactive because the audience does not affect any change in the action. The phrases are created by the unwitting entries of pseudo-participants in the scattered chat rooms around the world. It should be clear that, though the piece is not by definition interactive, it does have outstanding features such as text capture and speech synthesis. The physical presence of the piece is directed towards an audience of a lucky few, since the installation is in a small room, the screens are relatively small, and the voice is somewhat quiet.

In a similar fashion, The Messenger is also questionable as to whether or not it is interactive. The example again extracts words from the internet, but this time it presents them one letter at a time in tones from bowls and lever pulls with letters. An audience watching this will be inspired by nostalgia, but will not be able to discern the messages sent from the great beyond. It is in this way that the direction is toward pure art rather than voyeurism.

Park View Hotel is strictly an interactive piece of art. A person looks through a telescope that makes rooms and accoutrements of the adjacent building light up and resound. The direction of this piece is virtuous if the scopes can be made to be permanently affixed. It may also be advantageous to make a spray function, which would paint a wide swath of lighting rather than just single shot changes.

Fulgurator by Julius von Bismark is quite ingenious if not actually a work of art, interactive or otherwise. It hijacks surrounding flash photography and injects images into it. The unsuspecting photographer then gets a surprise when he looks at the pictures when he gets home. This could easily be used by companies to add logos and ads to personal photos and therefore should be proceeded with caution.

The Nemo Observatorium by Lawrence Malstaf is a simulated typhoon and has actually been done in the public. One can go to the Medford Mall and pay two dollars to stand in a virtual hurricane machine. It is indeed interactive art which should be repeated.

The current work of making the public interface of interactive art is contemporarily reposited in the rigorous hands of artists such as Hansen, DeMarinis, and Sukumaran and can be summed up by the framework proposed by Huhtamo himself when he says, “The answer may have consequences for the very definition of interactive art, and perhaps even to its raison d’être.”

In conclusion, it is well to propose that the interactive art such as that which we have considered above, continue to push the boundaries of human imagination but specifically make improvements such as permanence and largess.