11 Diversities of Interaction
Ernest Edmonds
11.1 Introduction
Art becomes interactive when audience participation is an integral part of the artwork. Audience behavior can cause the artwork itself to change. In making interactive art, the artist goes beyond considerations of how the work will look or sound to an observer. The way that it interacts with the audience is also a crucial part of its essence.
The core of such art is in its behavior more than in any other aspect. The creative practice of the artist is, therefore, quite different from that of a painter. A painting is static and so, insofar as a painter considers audience reaction, the perception of color relationships, scale, or figurative references is most important. In the case of interactive art, however, it is the audience’s behavioral response to the artwork’s activity that matters most. Audience engagement cannot be seen just in terms of how long they look at the work. It needs to be judged in terms of what they do, how they develop interactions with the piece, and whether they experience pain or pleasure.
Interactive art is distinguished by its dynamic responses to external stimuli, such as people moving and speaking. For artists, this means that observing people interacting with their works provides a way of understanding exactly how the work performs—that is, how it responds to the gestures, sounds, and other features of audience behavior in the immediate environment. Observing the responses of an interactive work can reveal unexpected effects that may or may not be predictable from the artist’s point of view. Understanding how people feel about their experience with interactive artworks is an altogether different matter. It is impossible to directly observe the inner feelings of the audience, but for some artists, this is critical to the artwork. In that case, being able to explore the interaction space involves some form of evaluation with audience cooperation.
However, whatever the level of interest that artists take in the audience’s interaction with the work, they will typically see the physical artwork and the participating audience together as a unified system. It is impossible to understand an interactive artwork by considering just the art object unrelated to its audience and the audience actions. Hence, the artist’s focus will be on a combined artificial (artwork) and human (audience) art system.
The aesthetics of interactive art include the nature of the behavior of this total system. The aesthetic experiences of the audience include experiences of action and response, as well as experiences of perception as in the case of a static work of art. The aesthetic decisions made by the artist include decisions about the fine details of the behavior of the artwork as much as its appearance. The growth in interactive art as a form has, therefore, extended the range of aesthetic considerations being employed. This extension of artistic form and extension of the scope of aesthetic decision making, as discussed by Boden (2010), are the backdrop to this chapter.
11.2 Interaction and the Art System
An interactive artwork can be described in terms of its behavior, the mechanism by which it operates, and the means of its construction. It can be helpful to see the interactive artwork in systems terms. A system is a collection of elements, or objects, that relate one to another: a change in one implies changes in others according to the relevant relationships. A static system is one in which nothing changes. An artwork such as a painting is essentially a static system, “essentially” because the nature of light that falls on a painting, the color of the wall on which it is hung, and so forth, certainly change how it looks. Physically, however, the painting does not change. By art “system,” I mean an artwork that consists of a system that changes within itself and in which that change is apparent to an observer. The physical art system itself can also be seen as an element of a larger system that includes the audience; this was referred to as “the matrix” by Stroud Cornock and me (Cornock and Edmonds 1973, 12).
Art systems are systems of interrelated and interacting parts that change either by virtue of their internal mechanisms or because they are responding to the environment around them. The distinction between an art system that has an internal rationale that alone determines how it responds or behaves and one that is affected or stimulated by external factors, such as the degree of light or the presence of a moving human being, is an important one and distinguishes the two primary kinds of art systems.
The first is known as a closed system because it is not subject to any external influence. It is like a clockwork mechanism that moves and changes within itself according to its own logic. The second is known as an open system because at least some of the elements can be changed by external forces, be they the wind or human intervention or something else. We can further distinguish between open systems that are influenced by the general environment, such as wind or temperature, and those that are (or are also) influenced by the audience. Kinetic works that respond to wind or temperature change are at one end of a spectrum and interactive installations at the other. Gina Czarnecki’s Silvers Alter interactive art system, for example, makes sense only with human participation:
The installation takes the form of a large scale back-projection on which human forms “live.” These figures are changed by the audience’s presence and movement within the space. Interactivity is very physical. It encourages a social, physical and verbal interaction between people before the interaction with technology. (Czarnecki 2005)
By “interactive art system” I mean the category in which human actions, or measurements from human bodies such as heart rate, affect the behavior of the system. In this chapter, the term “art system” refers to this interactive case.
Computer components are frequently used in the construction of interactive art systems because of the speed and flexibility with which they can control responsive devices. Computer technology is fundamentally general purpose and at the same time readily adaptable for whatever form of interaction is required. Today, almost any interactive system, from a washing machine to a car to an art system, is controlled by computers and realized through software.
The use of the computer as a control device that handles interactions according to complex and possibly changing rules has transformed participative art. By programming the computer with the rules that define the artwork’s behavior, the artist is able to build significant dynamic interactive art systems that would otherwise have been impossible to construct and very difficult to conceive in the first place. The computer programs that act as controllers of interactive art can be quite complex, however. This means that considerable effort can be required to understand them, and it is often difficult to be sure about the behaviors that can arise in all the expected and unexpected circumstances. Thus, the artist often experiments as a work is made, to be clear about what its behavior is. The alternative perspective is to treat the work as one full of surprise, even for the artist.
11.3 Early Interactive Art
It is possible to debate at great length about the origins of interactive art but, for the purpose of this chapter, I start with Marcel Duchamp. In 1913, excited perhaps by the new technology in bicycle wheel hubs, he took a wheel, fixed it on a stool, and placed it upside down in his studio. Today it is seen as a significant work of art, but Duchamp said,
Please note that I didn’t want to make a work of art out of it. The word “readymade” did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a “readymade” or anything else. It was just a distraction. (Cabanne 1971, 47)
Part of the distraction was in spinning it, so, art or not, it was interactive in the simplest sense. When, later on, he made Rotary Glass Plates, this work was intended to be an artwork. It was also interactive in an extremely simple sense: the viewer had to turn it on and hope not to be injured it seems! According to Duchamp, the first version “nearly killed Man Ray” when he started it and the glass shattered (Naumann and Obalk 2000, 91–95).
Much later in the century, in 1952, John Cage composed 4.33, his famous silent piano piece. Although not exactly interactive, this work was, like the Duchamp pieces, incomplete without the actions and attention of the audience; 4.33 encouraged the audience to listen to the ambient sounds around them.
Then, in 1953, Yaacov Akam started making what he called Transformable Reliefs: artworks that could be rearranged by the audience. He also made other pieces that were play objects of a sort; they had to be stroked or touched in some other way for the audience to experience them as intended. His interest, according to Günter Metken, was “to release the creativity of the art public, to encourage people to enter into the spirit of his work and change it according to their tastes” (Metken 1977). This interest, put this way, probably captures the intention of many artists who explored interaction in the early days. Akam went on, beyond the transformable works, to try many other ways to have the audience participate in the creative act.
The kind of work that Duchamp, Cage, Akam, and others were making became known as open works once Umberto Eco’s 1962 essay on the subject became known (Eco 1989). Largely based on an analysis of modern music (but not mentioning Cage), this paper articulated a growing concern for “an open situation, in movement. A work in progress.” Eco stressed that an open work is not one to which the audience can do what they like.
The possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations. As in the Einsteinian universe, in the “work in movement” we may well deny that there is a single prescribed point of view. But this does not mean complete chaos in its internal relations. What it does imply is an organizing rule which governs these relations. (Eco 1989, 19)
Eco distinguished between a performer and a member of the audience, “an interpreter,” but argues that, in the context of an open work, they are in much the same situation. Looking at, listening to, or interacting with an artwork is in essence a performance in his terms. This point is relevant to the work of Andrew Johnston (Johnston, Candy, and Edmonds 2009). The audience for his virtual instruments consists of performing musicians but his consideration of their interaction with his systems is close to other work that considers members of the public as audience. Involving the audience actively in the art work had many advocates, such as GRAV,1 and was part of the development of Happenings,2 in which participation was also prevalent. M. Kirby described rather basic examples of participation in Allan Kaprow’s Eat: “Directly in front of the entrance, apples hung on rough strings from the ceiling. If the visitor wished, he could remove one of the apples and eat it or, if he was not very hungry, merely take a bite from it and leave it dangling” (Kirby 1965a).
Participation in the artwork, by becoming part of the art system and interacting with whatever the artist provided, was becoming a familiar experience, whether it was typing at a keyboard or eating an apple.
Jack Burnham, an influential writer concerned with a systems theory perspective on art, saw the importance of understanding artworks in their environment and that all things that process art data “are components of the work of art” (Burnham 1969). By that definition, the audience is part of the artwork.
Stephen Willats has also worked from a systems’ point of view and on audience participation in art since the 1960s. He explains that the function of his work is
to transform people’s perceptions of a deterministic culture of objects and monuments, into the possibilities inherent in the community between people, the richness of its complexity and self-organisation … the artwork having a dynamic, interactive social function. (Willats 2011)
In 1965, Willats published the first issue of Control Magazine; it has included many contributions on socially situated, participative art and on interactive art systems. In the first issue3 he states that the artist provides a starting point for the observer4 as shown in box 11.1 (Willats 1965):
The observer is
given restrictions inside
these restrictions are
variables, with which he
determines his own
relationship.
This captures a significant aspect of many artists’ attitude to their work at that time. The artist set up a system, with restrictions, that the participant could operate in a way that led to their own completion or resolution. For some, like Willats, ignoring those restrictions was also welcomed, so that the possibilities become “limitless,” in Willats’s term.
A significant pioneer in interactive art was Nicolas Schöffer, who developed the concept of cybernetic sculpture through a series of innovative works (Schöffer 1963). In 1956 he presented CYSP 1, a dynamic sculpture that interacted with a dancer and the environment using photoelectric cells and a microphone as sensors.5 Another early innovator was Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1959 made the combine painting Broadcast, which had three radios built into it that members of the audience were free to tune as they wished.6 It was not his only excursion into interaction. John Cage recounts,
(I cannot remember the name of the device made of glass which has inside it a delicately balanced mechanism which revolves in response to infrared rays.) Rauschenberg made a painting combining in it two of these devices. The painting was excited when anybody came near it. Belonging to friends in the country, it was destroyed by a cat. (Cage 1961, 106)
Possibly the cat’s reaction was an early example of behavior in relation to interactive art that did not conform to the artist’s expectation, although it might have pleased Cage.
As electronics developed, the opportunities for making interactive art increased. Edward Ihnatowicz, for example, showed his work SAM in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (Reichardt 1968). SAM looked rather like a flower mounted on a short backbone. It used hydraulics to move its parts in response to sound detected by four microphones in the flowerlike head. SAM was more sophisticated in the way it interacted than most of the earlier work, in that it not only responded to sound but also restricted its response to sound of an acceptable volume—not too quiet and not too loud. Cybernetic Serendipity,7 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968, was one of the defining exhibitions of early cybernetic and computer-based art. Another significant early interactive work in the exhibition was Gordon Pask’s The Colloquy of Mobiles (Pask 1968). This was a work based on Pask’s cybernetic principles in which a set of five mobiles interacted with one another, communicating through light in aiming to reach a stable state of satisfaction. Although it was primarily based on interactions between the mobiles, the public was able to use lights and mirrors to influence the behavior of the work, and so it was a very early example of interactive art.
After he showed SAM, Edward Ihnatowicz went on to build the Senster (figure 11.1), which was a very early, possibly the first, interactive sculpture driven by computer. It was a very large lobsterlike-arm construction that detected sound and movement in response to which it moved, rather in the same way that SAM did but with a much more sophisticated appearance. In fact it was highly reminiscent of a giraffe, turning its head and bending its neck to “investigate” the human observer. In fact, as with SAM, it seems that the algorithms8 used to drive the behavior were relatively simple. It was the complexity of change in the environment and certain rules within the algorithm (such as ignoring very loud noises) that led to this sophisticated appearance. In Ihnatowicz’s work, it is clear that how the sculpture looked was of relatively little importance. What mattered was how it behaved and, in particular, how it responded to the audience.
Edward Ihnatowitz. Senster. (Photograph Edward Ihnatowitz.)
At the same time that Ihnatowicz was developing the Senster, Stroud Cornock and I were using a computer to develop another interactive artwork, called *Datapack. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, we used a machine very like the one employed by Ihnatowicz. We used a Honeywell DDP-516,9 and he used a Philips machine that was very similar and, possibly, a version of the same computer.
By 1966, Roy Ascott had developed a view in which participation and interaction between the audience and the artwork was central:
In California in the 1970s, introduced to the computer conferencing system of Jacques Vallée, Informedia, I saw at once its potential as a medium for art and in 1979 abandoned painting entirely in order to devote myself wholly and exclusively to exploring telematics as a medium for art. (Ascott 1998)
Ascott has become one of the most active figures in the community, as a teacher, speaker, writer, and conference organizer, as well as a practicing artist. Notwithstanding that he “abandoned painting entirely” in the 1970s, he has continued to produce objects from time to time, as can be seen in his 2011 London exhibition.10 But all have addressed the issues of participation and the implications for art of the ideas of computing and communications.
The development of interactive art was a geographically wide phenomenon with significant activity, for example, in Australia. The Sydney collective Optronic Kinetics was committed to responsive artworks, and they made such a work (unnamed) around 1969. Davis Smith, of Optronic Kinetics, said, “It consisted of a dark room in which was placed a cathode ray screen controlled by a radio frequency device sensitive to movement. As one moved about the room a wave pattern changed form on the screen and a sound of varying pitch was emitted from a device called a Theremin” (Jones 2011, 164).
11.4 The Growth of Interactive Art
From the early days of experimental interactive art, it became apparent that the computer could have an important role in facilitating, or managing, interaction. This role is quite different from that of the computer as a means of producing graphic art images. By “managing” is meant that the computer controls the way an artwork performs in relation to its environment, including its human audience. Because the role of the computer was envisaged as critical to the experience, some speculated that such work could transform the artist from a maker of artworks to a catalyst for creativity. The role of the audience was seen as the important new element in the artwork.
Once the personal computer and the individual workstation appeared, the pace of change in interactive art accelerated significantly. Earlier minicomputers had been interactive and people had developed ideas about human-computer interaction before personal computers appeared, but the new availability of computer power brought access to interactivity out of specialist laboratories. Although artists did not necessarily restrict themselves to using personal computers, the availability of such machines certainly caused a significant growth in interest and activity.
The history of these developments in interactive art still has to be told in full, but a number of authors have included partial histories in books that address the broader subject of digital, or information, art. Stephen Wilson (2002) devoted significant parts of his major book Information Arts to reviews of developments in art using artificial life, robotics, gesture, touch, and so on and covered an interesting selection of such art in a later publication (Wilson 2010). Another example is Wolf Lieser’s (2009) book Digital Art, which includes a section devoted to selected artworks, “Interactive Objects and Art in Public Spaces.” There is no space to repeat or extend such histories in this volume, but a few examples (discussed later) present a background picture of the field and illustrate the context in which authors have conducted their work.
Karl Sims is an artist, with expert technical skills, who developed a strong line of work around the notion of evolution in artificial lifelike systems. These were implemented in his case, as for many others, by the use of cellular automata. A cellular automaton is a matrix of simple on-off elements (cells) that have an effect on their near neighbors at each step in a step-by-step process (each step being a generation). All kinds of rules may be invented to determine the effect. For example, a cell might turn on at the next step if it has two neighbors that are on. Artists, such as Sims, produce graphical representations of such evolving processes as time-based artworks, sometimes using random variation in the rules and a selection algorithm that decides with which, among the alternatives, next generation to go.
Sims has made works that turn them into interactive artworks by replacing the selection algorithm by human choice, a process that he called “perceptual selection” (Sims 1992). Sims’s work Galápagos, from 1997, exemplifies this approach. The work consists of twelve screens on stands driven by a network of twelve Silicon Graphics workstations. Pads on the floor are used for participant actions. They are used in two ways. When there is a set of displays on the screens a participant can stand on a pad in front of the one she or he likes best and so make the perceptual selection. Other pads activate the development of the next generation of the system. As Sims put it,
Twelve computers simulate the growth and behaviors of a population of abstract animated forms and display them on twelve screens arranged in an arc. The viewers participate in this exhibit by selecting which organisms they find most aesthetically interesting and standing on step sensors in front of those displays. The selected organisms survive, mate, mutate and reproduce. … Although the aesthetics of the participants determine the results, the participants do not design in the traditional sense. They are rather using selective breeding to explore the hyperspace [of] possible organisms. (Sims 1998, 68)
The interaction is simple, but the computational complexity that it drives is quite high. It is an example of interaction in which relatively simple acts, when taken together and over time, can lead to a wide range of outcomes and to complexities that may seem quite surprising in relation to those simple acts taken individually.
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau have a substantial history of collaborating on interactive art works based on artificial life (Sommerer and Mignonneau 2009). Indeed, as early as 1992 they made a work, Interactive Plant Growing, that used real plants as the interface that participants touched or approached. The voltage difference between the plant and the human participant was interpreted as an electrical signal that was used to determine the behavior of computer-generated images of plants.
A classic example of their work is Life Spacies (figure 11.2), which was created in 1997. Physically, the work consists of a laptop computer on a stand in front a large projection screen. Virtual creatures appear, grow, and move on the screen, thanks to the artists’ use of artificial life concepts. Participants are invited to type text into the laptop, and as they do, the text is used by the computer to generate new virtual creatures that enter the space. For example, the letter T is considered in its numeric, internal, ASCII value, which is 84. That number is then used as a seed to generate a random number,11 which is in turn used to select a modification for the creature from a list of options. Participants can also type text that becomes food for the creatures to feed on.
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Life Spacies. 1997, screenshot, collection of NTT-ICC, Tokyo, Japan. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artists.)
The creature’s lifetime is not predetermined, rather it is influenced by how much it eats. … A creature will starve when it does not eat enough text characters and ultimately die and sink to the ground. …
Written text … is used as genetic code, and our text-to-form editor translates the written texts into three-dimensional autonomous creatures whose bodies, behaviors, interactions and survival are solely based on their genetic code and the users’ interactions. (Sommerer and Mignonneau 2009, 107–108)
Many artists have explored artificial life. Mitchell Whitelaw (2004) talked with many of them and published a theoretical study of the field. In “Twenty Years of Artificial Life Art,” Simon Penny provides a brief survey of those developments (Penny 2011). He cautions us to remember the vast changes in technology when we look at early examples of this kind of art (and implicitly other kinds). As he says, however, “There is still much grist for the mill in the application of these ideas in emerging cultural forms.” In other words, despite the rapid growth in research and art in this area and the changes in technology that have gone with it, artificial life still has significant potential to inspire new work.
An interactive artwork that uses a direct relationship between the input and aspects of the output is Iamascope (figure 11.3). As the designers of this system describe it,
The Iamascope is an interactive kaleidoscope, which uses computer video and graphics technology. In the Iamascope, the performer becomes the object inside the kaleidoscope and sees the kaleidoscopic image on a large screen (170″) in real time. The Iamascope is an example of using computer technology to develop art forms. As such, the Iamascope does not enhance functionality of some device or in other words, “do any thing,” rather, its intent is to provide a rich, aesthetic visual experience for the performer using it and for people watching the performance. (Fels and Mase 1999, 277)
Sidney Fels and Kenji Mase. Iamascope. 2000, in the Millennium Dome Play Zone, London. See color insert. (Photograph courtesy of Linda Candy.)
The idea is that one member of the audience acts as performer. An image-processing system detects certain movements that the person makes (typically, arm waving) and uses that to generate both kaleidoscopic-type image transformations of the movements and music. It is also intended to be interesting to other members of the audience who just watch the action—and in the case of Iamascope, it certainly is!
Some artists have placed more emphasis on the object and the physical, one might say sculptural, qualities of their interactive art works than the interaction process. Jeffrey Shaw, for example, has made many such artworks in which the interaction process is quite simple but the sculptural qualities are quite powerful. A well-known early example of his is The Legible City, 1988–1991. In this work a
bicycle with a small monitor on the handlebars is mounted in front of a big projection screen. When the observer pedals, a projection is activated and he can move through three different simulated representations of cities (Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe). The architectural landscape of streets is formed by letters and texts. … Jeffrey Shaw presents a poetic image of the architecture of different cities, and leaves the discovery of the virtual information structure to the observer on the bicycle. … The illusion is successful because riding, looking and reading compel the observer to dive into the picture. The rider loses himself in total immersion. (Schwarz 1997, 149)
Immersion is one of the qualities of the interactive experience that many artists have pursued, and audience experience is a concern in most of the other contributions.
More recent work naturally builds on the art I have mentioned, but it is also influenced by the many more recent technological developments. A few examples of the technologies that have been employed include robotics, global positioning systems, the web, virtual reality, and many interaction techniques, such as gesture recognition, image processing, and active objects, in which the object can change and is controlled in some way by computers. The range of artwork produced is too extensive to cover here, but the Wilson and Lieser books are examples of descriptions of these recent developments (Wilson 2002; Lieser 2009). The basic principles of interaction and participation, however, stand above the exploitation of interactive technologies, and the current focus is on understanding and exploring the area in terms of participant experience, which is discussed in chapter 9.
11.5 Interactions and Correspondences
It is not difficult to see a relationship between time-based visual art and music. My interest in time came from music in the first place. Adding a concern for music is a step back to the starting point. In some respects, the combination of the two is normal in twenty-first-century Western culture. When we watch a film we accept music as a natural part of the work. More generally, the sound track is recognized as a crucial element in the quality of the film in its total sense. However, at times the music is thought of as an accompaniment to the visual element, whereas it might alternatively be thought of as having equal weight and importance.
In popular music as it evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, the opposite situation has often occurred, in which a visual element was added either in parallel to the music or derived electronically from it but, in either case, again, as an accompaniment. Later, the pop video developed as a new form that extended the music and was often as elaborate and significant as the music that it was intended to promote. Such videos extend, but primarily illustrate, the music that is their source. Perhaps the most interesting integration, however, is when the music and the visual element are equal so that, for example, one can see a visual display as one instrument in a piece in which other instruments, such as violins, happen to produce sound. The composition of such work can begin either with the music or the visual or swap between them. Alternatively, it might begin from some more abstract description or notation that can be mapped into either sound or image, as discussed in chapter 12.
11.6 From Interaction to Influence
In general systems theory the behavior of a system or the interrelationship of one system to another can be seen to be more complex than some of this chapter’s examples (Bertalanffy 1968). An interaction involves an exchange but need not necessarily lead to a significant change in behavior. Interaction cannot be simply understood as if, for example, “what happens to a system in an interaction is determined by the perturbing agent and not by its structural dynamics” (Maturana and Varela 1987, 196). An interactive system is an open system that exchanges information or matter, in both directions, with its environment. One key concern is the relationship between any input and later output. In the simplest such system, any given input is followed, after a certain interval, by a predictable output. One depresses a switch and the light comes on. If we add the notion of an internal state, then a slightly more complex version can be described. The output associated with a given input may be a function of both the associated input and the current internal state or, as it is often described, the system’s mode.
As a simple example of an interactive system with an internal state, consider a remote control device that can operate both a TV and a digital set-top box. It may have two buttons (TV and BOX, say) that, when pressed, produce no observable reaction. Instead, they change the mode so that any subsequent button press is directed to the indicated device. Hence, each of the two modes leads to the device displaying a different set of responses to the same set of user actions. For example, the power button may turn the TV or the box on, depending on the current mode.
Even in this very simple case it is interesting to consider some of the interaction structures in place. The TV and BOX input buttons are not associated with action-response behaviors. Instead, they change the internal state and, hence, the action-response behaviors of later button depressions.
Of course, there is no reason an input might not both generate a direct response and change the internal state. Thus, we can consider various kinds of input to an interactive system. We can identify ones that do the following:
- Generate a given response after a given time
- Change the internal state (and so influence later behavior)
- Both respond to and change the internal state
In addition to responding in these ways, a system can take actions (generate outputs) purely as a result of internal mechanisms. For example, an automatic controller might turn the room lights on and off at certain intervals. Hence we can also consider output that are the following:
- Responses to inputs (relative to the current state)
- Generated autonomously (relative to the current state)
Clearly, these outputs can be different parameters of the same output event, such as the pitch and amplitude of a note. A similar point can be made in relation to inputs, of course.
So the question arises of what we really mean by “interaction.” In some respects, with delayed response (as a result of mode change) and even delayed influence on autonomous output (in the same way), “interaction” does not seem an appropriate word to use. Perhaps the words “influence,” “stimulus,” and “interchange” are more evocative of the meaning discussed here. Perhaps the influence of one system on another could be said to come about as a result of stimulus, interchange, or even cooperation and conversation if we add a layer of meaning to the situation. We may talk about the audience’s “influence” on an art system whose behavior development is affected by the interactions that it has experienced.
As an example, my Shaping Form (and Space) (figure 11.4) series consists of unique abstract interactive artworks that are each generating colors and forms in time from a set of unique rules. They also take data from a camera and continuously calculate the amount of activity seen in front of the work. The computer software then steadily modifies the rules. The artwork and its development over time are influenced by the people who look at it: the audience helps shape the work. Shaping Form is a representation of computed life, moving and changing of its own accord but maturing and developing as a result of the movement of audiences. Each work interacts gently with its environment. The Shaping Space installation is in a darkened room where there are two changing images in space creating a field of color. The screens show a living matrix of colors that sometimes change very slowly and at other times burst into life. The colors use a small, but changing, palette of hues. Images are generated using rules that determine the colors, the patterns, and the timing. These are generative works that are changed by the influence of the environment around them. People can readily detect the immediate responses of the work to movement, but the changes over time are apparent only when there is more prolonged, although not necessarily continuous, contact with it. The shaping of the form is a never-ending process of computed development.
Ernest Edmonds. Shaping Space. 2012, interactive installation. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist. Photograph Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK.)
Thinking in these terms, we can consider the artwork and the audience as interacting systems that influence one another. We can consider the development of computational art systems that are open to influence and that develop over time as a consequence. Equally, we can think of the influence that such systems will have on their audiences. We therefore need to think about this kind of computational generative art in open systems terms from the very core of their design.
______________
This chapter draws on E. A. Edmonds, “Interactive Art,” in Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner, ed. L. Candy and E. A. Edmonds (Oxford: Libri Press, 2011), 18–32.
1. GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), in their manifesto promote, for example, the “active participation of the spectator” (GRAV 1967).
2. Happenings was a form of theater, performed in the street; it is sometimes confused with Fluxus (see Kirby 1965b).
3. Roy Ascott was one of the contributors to Control Magazine’s first issue.
4. Today we would be more likely to use the term “participant” rather than “observer.”
5. CYSP 1 (Cybernetic Spatiodynamic 1) is an environmentally perceptive robotic sculpture (see Samantha Cesarini, “The Certainty of Uncertainty,” http://
6. This was the first interactive art work that I encountered. I saw it in the 1964 Rauschenberg exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
7. Nicolas Schöffer was another exhibitor.
8. An algorithm is a set of instructions performed in a defined sequence to achieve a goal.
9. See http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=551 (accessed 17.4.2011).
10. Roy Ascott: The Syncretic Sense at Space, May–June 2011, http://
11. The random number is technically a pseudorandom number.
References
Ascott, R. 1966. “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision.” Cybernetica 9:247–264.
Ascott, R. 1998. “The Technoetic Dimension of Art.” In Art@Science, edited by C. Sommerer and L. Mignonneau, 279–290. New York: Springer.
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. 1968. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller.
Boden, M. A. 2010. “Aesthetics and Interactive Art.” In Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise, 210–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burnham, J. 1969. “Real Time Systems.” Artforum 7 (September): 49–55.
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