Interactivity In Art

Interactivity In Art

Abstract:

This essay examines the nature of interactivity in the arts through a cybernetic model, to arrive at an understanding of how interactive artworks can maintain and augment the subjectivity of the viewer. The cybernetic discourse foregrounds the relationship between the physical artifact (machine and/or work of art), the participant/spectator, and information/data/content. By examining the shifts in focus from each part of the cybernetic equation, several models for interactivity in art emerge.

In a search for a definitive and user-centered working model of interactivity in the arts, a logical place to look is at the history of cybernetics. Cybernetics, defined by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine as “…the entire field of control or communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal” (Wiener 11) contains a number of pointers to a useful model of interactivity. The origin of the term cybernetics from the Greek, meaning “to steer”, implies a reciprocal relationship between external forces, the machine, and the human to maintain a condition of homeostatic. In a work of interactive art, as in Wiener’s description of a bee-hive, the secret of its organized action lies “in the intercommunication of its members” (156). A second fertile site to mine for understanding the nature of interaction in the arts is the traditions and conventions of the art object itself; at how the art object is thought to project feeling and meaning , to change across time and culture, and to involve the viewer, temporality, and artist in a dynamic interchange within an aesthetic dimension. Toward these ends, I will address two questions:...

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