SOFTWARE READING RESPONSE

Trouble at the Interface, or the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art
by Erkki Huhtamo

In Erkki Huhtamo’s essay Trouble at the Interface, or the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art, he dives into the genealogy of interactive art, and what lies ahead in the path of it’s constantly evolving future. Huhtamo begins by spotlighting a couple standout interactive art pieces, and describes what common features they share. One noted commonality was that all the pieces were either installed or took place in public. A piece that immediately reminded me of these was Following Piece by Vito Acconci, where he picked random people on the street and essentially stalked them. The game would only stop when the person either noticed they were being followed, or entered a capacity where Acconci could no longer follow them, such as a restaurant. Acconci momentarily stepped completely into the life of a random stranger—each step he took was controlled by someone else’s path. He could just for a moment catch a snippet of where they are rushing off to, a single snapshot in the span of their lives. Acconci describes this work as a way to “get in the middle of things,” which he quite literally did. Performing in public was an essential aspect of this piece

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
by Lev Manovich

In the essay Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies by Lev Manovich, the idea of impossible illusions created through two-dimensional realities is touched upon – it is designed to shock the eye “due to its impossibility in reality.” A piece that directly reflects this concept is Milk Run by James Turrell. Turrell took advantage of human physiology by creating a piece that was dependent on the time it took for the human eye to adjust to the dark. People would enter a room and at first see nothing, and as their eyes adjusted, they would begin to see a bathroom door left slightly jar, that becomes increasingly glowing as your eyes fully adjust. By the time you can fully see the piece, the room looks entirely different then it did when first walked in to. This creates the illusion of the piece appearing out of nowhere, when in reality it is your eye that does the work. This basic human function is necessary to the piece, without the human interactivity, the piece would be entirely different and lose its performance aspect.

Ars Combinatoria: Mystical Systems, Procedural Art, and the Computer
by Janet Zweig

In Janet Zweig’s essay Ars Combinatoria: Mystical Systems, Procedural Art, and the Computer, Zweig discusses a number of modern pieces of art spanning the preceding categories. One piece that stuck out to me was Europas 1 & 2 by John Cage, where he took two hundred years of opera music and put it into a computer system that would give it back to him in mixtures and fragments, based on a chance computer algorithm. More than just the music, the entire performance was actually generated by computer algorithms – “the timing, stage movements, the appearance and removal of scenic flats with cropped images, and lighting (7)”. This elements used to create this piece significantly remind me of Cybernetic Serendipity, one of the first large exhibitions of computer art by Jasia Reichardt in 1968.
Reichardt used algorithms and devices for generating music. Aspects of the exhibits included explanations to the audience of the algorithms in pamphlet form, while others showed musical notation being produced by computers in live time. As opposed to being a performance on stage, there were devices present that made musical effects in live time. Spectators could sing or whistle a tune into a microphone and the equipment would create a tune in response based on the noises it had just received. Essentially, both pieces of work described depend on computer algorithms to create the actual art aspect for them—which I’m not sure is something I particularly prefer over other mediums. Cybernetic Serendipity was different in the sense that the music generated was not completely up to chance, it actually depended largely on the audience’s activity and thus was highly interactive.