Interactivity Reflection

It has been in making this sculpture that I have felt a personal liberation with working in three dimensions. In drawing, what really attracts me is how it allows the impossible to become possible in a fictitious space. The objects and occupants of a drawing are not subject to any physical laws; in fact, there isn't even the precondition that what is drawn has any physicality at all. By in a way escaping this universe human beings are subject to, the contents of a drawing can transport a viewer into a sort of second, fanastic living. WIth the sculptural work I've down, I have grown increasingly comfortable with the physicality of the materials - materials bound by the laws of my world - but I have also missed the sort of second animation that drawing can immediately offer a viewer. I believe that interactive artwork can collapse this distance, especially work that participants manipulate, or is manipulated by the presence of an individual.

Interactive work does this by introducing layers of possibility. A viewer can share in the same impetus to create that the artist surely carries, having a dimension open up before them in the artwork, which is greater than the artwork, which is also a place to be transported to and move around in. Where with other forms of work that are strictly observed and where a relationship between work and observer may be innocuous or tangential to the more important reception of a message, interactive work makes this relationship the central focus. The work 'interactive' presupposes a mutual influence between two things. IN artwork this could be between artist and artwork, artwork with space, artwork with audience, audience with artist, or even audience with itself. All these relationships can be intensified through interactive artwork. So such work has a sort of sociality as its cornerstone. We no longer live in an age where the few masters of the art world bestow their grandeur upon the common man. No, we line in an age of communication and exchange, and so interactive work is inherently characteristic of our times.

With the piece that I created, I feel possibilities open up. No longer am I dictating the experience of the viewer with a static image, a viewer who is no longer a viewer but a participant. I am no longer expected to have a profound artistic understanding, though I am no more ignorant than I would otherwise be creating work in another vein. All I have done is establish a relationship. Just as when a man and a woman enter a relationship - when they have opened the doors to one another, and created a venue of disclosure - there is not yet an expectation that everything just neatly falls into place; it is just the beginning. Static work is too quickly seen as an end  when the eye is done wandering, the relationship concludes: "I've gotten all I can out of this," a viewer thinks. People don't have the attention span that they once did. They rarely see old mediums with new eyes. People assume they understanding a painting for the fact that it's a painting, a photograph that it is a photograph, a pile of I-beams that it is a pile of I-beams. Interactive work provides a near bottomless magical bag of materials in that the subject isn't the material, but the relationship that occurs between materials or people.

My piece offers a direct - and perhaps perfect - relationship with the body. It moves proportionally with the participants movements. The viewer has no opportunity to feel daunted by it, or overwhelmed by it, or frightened by it, or that they are doing all the work in relationship, or that they aren't getting a return on their investment. It is really a mirror, yet as a cloth. That the entire apparatus functions through the head is a particularly profound fact. This is where the brain is housed, where for of the five senses operate from, and where people most sharply experience the 'self'. I'll observe that my work only responds to the body movements, not sight, sound, or anything else, and even then somewhat feebly, but its response is the beginning of life, of relevance. Ironically, that that relevance would be the simple raising and lowering of a cloth is curious, but that cloth and its movements are powered by the participant imbued with a profundity unable to be dismissed. Questions emerge: "What is beyond this curtain surrounding me? Where am I being revealed or concealed? Where is the outside world opening to me?" The movements of the participant are duplicated around him or her, almost as an extension of the body, but now that the body has become something bordering on the theatrical, inextricable from the body of the curtain, the individual becomes intensely self-aware. I see the achievement of these sensations in my piece to be a great success, while the may just be the beginnings. I still need to explore the implications of this relationship, of the additional possibilities that it opens up, the opportunities to communicate participant to piece, participant to self, participant to an outside world that is varyingly concealed and exposed based on his or her movements.