Is this page loading slowly? If so, you might want to try the mirror to it hosted on another server. The sites interlink so, yes, you will be able to find your way back to your ring, and even back here, if you wish.



"How can art have a dialog with anybody?", you might ask. "It is just art. It is a creation. It has no mind of its own, no point of view to express, so how can it be a participant in a conversation?" If we take the concept of "dialog" with an absolute literalness, what one would be saying would almost be true - there is interactive theater. The persona the actor adopts as he plays his role certainly has a consciousness - a facet of the actor's own consciouness - but perhaps you don't count any sort of improvisational theater as being a form of interactive art? For the purposes of this group, it will be so counted, but I could understand the point of view of somebody who disagreed with that, I think.






Having been on stage, albeit only as an amateur, I think of the interpretation of the character, himself, as being the actor's work of art. Somebody, having viewed that same performance from the other side of the footlights, might think of the actual words and gestures heard and seen as being the substance of what has been created. The character can respond, but his words can not - having been uttered, they hang in the air, unable to change. They are what they are, and so there is no interaction in the art, merely a piece of non-interactive performance art that the audience is there to see created, while maybe offering some suggestions to the creator. "Would painting be one of the interactive arts if would be buyers were invited in to see the paintings being made?", somebody might ask, perhaps knowing that I would insist quite firmly (and with signs of remembering my past annoyance on this point) that it was not. But nobody is ever immersed in a painting. In Improv, in some cases, the audience is itself on stage, and that is a much different experience than being down below, watching quietly in the dark.






That's going to be the only sort of improvisational theater to be discussed on this group - the kind in which the audience member is immersed in the performance, with nowhere to hide - and for the most part, this group won't be about theater. Interactive theater is one of the interactive arts, as I define them, but there are others, which seem to be seen far more often, and I might add, with far less creative risk - and I mean that in a bad way. If one gets an audience member in a foul mood, the sort of person who shows up at a comedy show angry and determined to remain that way - this can be the start of something very bad. One could, I suppose, bypass that problem and still have something that was undebatably interactive by doing a scripted piece with forks in the script - "if such and such is said or happens, follow this passage on this page, and if this other thing is said or happens, follow this alternative version of that part of the script" - while the audience sits below, free to be as surly as it wants, because who will know - but then we are back to our question, are we not? Since the character isn't really making his own decisions, as he responds to the audience, but instead, having his hands tied in this, reacts as an automaton would, he isn't having a dialog with the audience, and yet the piece is? How can that be - and what about the visual art we've been seeing in the pool? How does that have a conversation with the viewer?

I still haven't answered that, have I?






The easiest thing would be to say "it's pretentious art school talk, but it's what people have said, so I have to start there as I explain this, even though I'd really rather not" - and I did start out writing this piece by thinking of doing exactly that, but thought about it a little more, and saw that this really wouldn't be fair. Those who penned those words were trying to explain a new sort of artistic experience, and as with an explanation of a subjective experience new to the one who hasn't had it, one can hardly do this without fumbling around, looking for a metaphor that fits, as the point of view of the listener slowly shifts, redefining what it is, that would be fitting. No, to demand precision and logic in such things is to lose track of the spirit one should be bringing to them in general, and especially to this. One should be ready to be a little playful.






Yes, to some extent, to think like a child and why not? There are strengths that we have in childhood that we are too quick to discard. Who learns more quickly than a child? He doesn't demand an explanation of a toy, he picks it up, plays with it, sees what happens, maybe reading about it in little snatches if the mood strikes him, before going back to play with it some more. Maybe that's why we see small children teaching their grandparent how to send e-mail, rather than the reverse. Not because old people are inherently any slower, but just because they've forgotten how to play - that's how you learn to do these things. That's also why adults should be watching when children get their first chemistry sets or pick up knives for the first time, but backtracking psychologically is not an all or nothing affair. One can loosen up a little without becoming reckless, and loosening up is one thing practically every adult I've ever met could really stand to do, a little more. A lot more, usually.






In a way, interactive installations - the visual pieces we see, and maybe a few sound installations, eventually - are like really big, cool toys for adults to share, and play with. If you handed a toy to your daughter or son, and found that the child just stared at it, you'd be a little disappointed, wouldn't you? You'd be thinking you'd chosen the wrong gift? A toy, to be experienced, has to be played with, not just looked at. Interactive Art is the same way. This video from the Milwaukee Museum of Art might help explain matters. Note the positive review given to a piece by the important reviewer in the center of the frame at 0:50, and try not to take the comments about crises between 1:09 and 1:15 too seriously. I think that the reviewer is seeing things more clearly than the curator.






As the administrator of this group, I've been both delighted and frustrated by the electronic pieces you see in the gallery - frustrated, only in the sense that I've had to work so hard to find them, in part because people had to work so hard to create them. As one goes into some of the galleries looking for specifically electronic pieces, one often finds oneself looking at submissions from 2009 before one even gets to the second page of thumbnails. That doesn't keep me from leaving off invitations, but responses are slow - just to get the entries you see in this groups pool, already, was a few days of work for me. I'd do it, again - I have a special love for those pieces - but sometimes, one just wishes life could be a little easier. As do the artists, I imagine - one can't assemble one of these pieces with a few dollars of paint, a canvas, and a lot of hard work and inspiration. One needs all of that, and the money to buy some hardware as well. I suspect that the economy has taken its toll on this art form, over the last few years, but it's still there and still worth looking at.






I am biased, of course - one of the subjects I've studied in graduate school is Electrical Engineering, and this is part of that area in which Electrical Engineering and Art overlap, but I'm not so biased as to say that Interactive Visual Art is a subclass of Electronic Art, or that such work must be the work of a hardware engineer and never a software engineer. Not at all. Interactive art websites exist, pieces that one climbs on or through, ... just think of all of the possibilities of the word "play" and you'll get the idea.

The group is over here. When you're ready to return to the ring, you'll find code on the main page of the group, and a link back to the homepage for the group (which you're on, at the moment) should you wish to return to your ring using the code that brought you here, in the first place.