Download the PDF of Kira's Where Human Input Meets Artistic Creation Paper

Abstract:
Interactive Art: Where Human Input Meets Artistic Creation, a written and practical exploration of interactive art, how it emerged, the current state, and the unique aspects to the genre.

The Dadaists, the Fluxists, and artists like Allan Kaprow, John Cage, and Joseph Beuys created some of the earliest interactive artworks. While these artists created outstanding interactive artwork it was slow to be received by the established art network of museums, galleries and patrons of the arts.
It took traditional art outlets a number of years to recognize the value in the often-intangible field of interactive artwork. The difficulty in finding a way to exhibit and archive interactive artwork played a part in the initial refusal of museums and galleries to exhibit this type of work. The first segments of the population to accept interactive art were artists' communities, art schools and science centers.
Interactive art is developing into an art movement gaining speed and critical mass daily as the spirit of acceptance for the trend improves. Recently, the genre has had a boost in popularity due to the lowered cost and improvements made in interactive technology making interactive artwork cheaper and more reliable to produce. Interactive art challenges many conventions of traditional art, the role of the audience, the artist, the environment around the work, and the method of displaying the work. Audience members are transformed into collaborators. The making of interactive art forces an active experience for the artist as well; the artist creates the circumstances and waits for participants to engage the work they created. Interactive art can be displayed on the Internet, in the community or in a traditional art venue like a gallery.
Evolving out of the past and reaching into the future, interactive art will continue to be an influential trend in the art community.


Interactive Art: Where Human Input Meets Artistic Creation

Kira Hammond
Copyright 2003

This project is a synthesis of research and realization in the field of interactive art. There are two branches to the project, resulting in a research paper and in a number of original interactive artworks. The purpose of the project is also twofold: The research paper will explain how the practice of creating interactive art has risen from an alternative method of creating art to an accepted medium in the art community. The second purpose is to showcase some of the unique attributes of interactive art that make the genre an unusual contribution to the art world. The dual track of creating interactive artwork while researching the genre provides an advantage to the researcher and the reader. The research paper component is capable of in-depth examination of the reasons interactive artwork has gained acceptance and what the movement has to offer future generations of art enthusiasts. The practical component will allow readers to become participants giving the public the ability to experience original interactive artwork and draw personal conclusions based on exposure to the genre. Due to the original approach both art historian and layperson will be able to glean useful information regarding the field of interactive art.
Definitions are always difficult by defining art you are limiting the interpretations of what constitutes art. For the sake of clarity and understanding the salient points of the paper art will be defined as "The conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects." The definition of interactive is, "mutually or reciprocally active; being a two-way communication system that involves a user's orders or responses." Combining these two words the definition for interactive art is the conscious use of a skill and creativity to create tangible or intangible art experiences that require human input to reach completion. One cannot negate the feelings expressed by curator and journalist, Itsuo Sakane, "All arts can be called interactive in a deep sense if we consider viewing and interpreting a work of art as a kind of participation." All artwork allows for a viewers interpretation, but interpretion is not like interaction, interpretation is a one-way form of communication. Interactive art allows viewers to remodel the artwork and immediately recieve feedback from the artwork. This give and take system of interaction allows the participant to act and react, forming a real co-authorship relationship with the artist. While all art may engage the viewer interactive art must explicitly enlist the viewer's help, for without the viewer actively engaging the meaning of the art is lost.
A caveat when defining interactive art interactive art must intentionally require the user to participate in an art experience, for instance Web Pages are not inherently an interactive art experience. If the Web Pages were a means of delivering an interactive art experience the piece would then be considered interactive art. An interactive art piece delivered via the web allows viewers to rearrange the content of the work while interactive communications media delivers content. An example: the interactive artist Lucia Grossberger-Morales' Web Pages would not be an interactive artwork. There are interactive elements such as links, animations, videos, and photographs of her work but the website is displaying artwork and peripheral information relating to the artwork in the interactive environment of the Internet not creating a new artwork. Mark Napier's The Shredder (1998) is considered an interactive artwork. The artist uses the World Wide Web as an artistic medium. The Shredder is a web browser that will rearrange any URL entered in the address bar. The World Wide Web is the platform for the artwork, without the inherent interactivity of the Web the artwork could not exist. In addition The Shredder forces the visitor to participate in an art experience when they visit the page if the visitor does not participate the artwork is not complete.
Interactive artists can be considered reactionary in the sense that those who first experimented with the genre were reacting to trends in society and art of the time. Interactive art responded to the work of the Dadaists, the Happenings, the Fluxists and others. In some regards current interactive art still seeks to capture the best aspects of these pivotal art movements. It is important to examine modern art trends in relation to past and future art trends, showing the progression from one methodology to another. Examining the current state of an art trend in relation to the past allows the reader to follow the emergence of interactive art into the mainstream art world and to explore the stages of its emergence. It is just as important to understand current art trends as it is to study the history of art. Looking at the past trends of artistic innovation to artistic acceptance artists can also develop an intuitive mind, learning to see future trends in the art world before such trends manifest as full art movements. Major players from the art movements who also experimented and incidentally may have founded the idea of interactive art include: Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, one time advocate for the Fluxists, and Allan Kaprow, a key figure in the Happenings.
Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire, are the three persons credited with the official founding of Dada in the year 1916. The reason the Dada movement inspired later interactive artists was because the Dadaists departed from the physical aspect of painting and placed an emphasis in ideas as the chief means of artistic expression. Dadaists were also interested in the appropriation of media and modern technology to make a statement. Duchamp's ready-mades are a good example of how Dadaists would approach art. Ready-mades were practical objects that became objects of art once they were signed and given a title. In 1915 Duchamp moved to New York City, where he created a New York Dada collective. During his time in New York Duchamp created The Large Glass, also called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (1915), a mixed media piece constructed of wire, painted foil and clear glass plates. DuChamp's purpose was to create a piece that was not complete without a spectator; the work relied upon a spectator to look into the glass. The Large Glass could be considered one of the first interactive art pieces created. A quote by Octavio Paz describes the experience, "Duchamp's painting is a transparent glass; … it is an incomplete painting that is perpetually completing itself. Because it is an image that reflects the image of whoever contemplates it, we are never able to look at it without seeing ourselves."
John Cage was a fundamental character in the creation of the Fluxist and Happening philosophies yet he denied long term affiliation with either movement. Cage said the point of creating his artwork was to blur the distinction between art and life. Cage sought to use chance, audience participation, and a sense of play in his art to minimize the artist's role in the work. Zen philosophy, the Dadaists, and Duchamp's ready-made artwork influenced Cage. Cage's piece 4'33" (1952) revolutionized the way artists interacted with programmed music. Cage abhorred meticulously crafted music, so instead of composing a piece in advance Cage created an environment where the attention shifted from the stage to the audience. First performed by David Tudor in 1952, the work involved Tudor seated at a piano, closing the keyboard cover for four minutes and thirty-three seconds while the audience listens to itself. Audience and environmental noises that made up the piece included chairs squeaking, coughing, traffic noises from outside, criticisms and mumbling from disgruntled audience members. Tudor had this to say about the piece: "It is.... one of the most intense listening experiences one can have. You really listen. You're hearing everything there is. Audience noises play a part in it. It is cathartic - four minutes and thirty three seconds of meditation, in effect." After this experiment in audience participation Cage went on to work in collaboration with other artists like Robert Rauschenberg and students at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina to create performance art events that would become pre-cursors to the Happenings, and Fluxus art movement.
Happenings were breakthroughs in the art world. The Happening was to be a genuine 'event' involving spectator participation. A key point to the Happening was that the artwork was not confined to the museum or gallery, instead the Happenings were often held in public spaces like parks, lawns, and streets or private residences like artists' lofts. Performers were encouraged not to pre-plan the event but rather to create the conditions for an event to occur and then to watch the art unfold. To be considered a Happening the meaning of the piece needed to evoke symbolic and universal themes.
Allan Kaprow became a key figure in creating Happenings. He became a crusader for artist-spectator involvement seeking to bring participants to the same level as the artist. Cage, Abstract Expressionists' emphasis on the act of painting itself, and Jackson Pollock's action paintings, influenced Kaprow. In the Happening Words (1962), spectators were invited to rearrange words painted on cardboard on the gallery walls. Yard (1961) consisted of a backyard full of rubber auto tires heaped randomly for viewers to climb in and around. Happenings invited participants to interact with the artwork and each other, creating a unique collaborative art experience. One of the exciting aspects of working with interactive art was that the artist could play with the shifting role of art, the art becoming the performance, and the act of creation as the artform rather than a tangible product.
Artists like Rauschenberg and Yves Klein, who made creating artwork into performance, influenced the Fluxus artists. The Fluxists took the art one step further and made the performance the artistic act. The Fluxus art movement began in the late sixties and early seventies. Growing out of the influences of Cage and the Happenings, the Fluxus movement was built upon the principles of conceptual clarity and simplicity of actions. Several Fluxists were interested in creating performance art situations. The artwork depended upon the performance of viewers, who transformed themselves into actors through participation in the art. This inclusion of the audience was a radical departure from the traditional performance art pieces where there was a sharp distinction between performer/artist and audience. Early innovators of the Fluxus movement who embodied the nature of interactivity include Joseph Beuys and Dick Higgins. Beuys sought to create 'Social Sculpture,' in his own words, "This most modern art discipline-Social Sculpture/Social Architecture-…will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or architect of the social organism… " In his piece 7,000 Oaks Beuys bought exactly that many oak saplings and relied upon volunteer participants to plant the trees around the world. Next to each tree a stone was set in the ground. The scale of the project was such that without the direct participation of hundreds of people the artwork could not have been completed. Beuys eventually broke away from the Fluxists due to differences in the meaning of interactive social art. In Higgins, Winter Carol (1959), he simply created a directive:
Any number of people may perform this composition. They do so by agreeing in
advance on duration for the composition, then by going out to listen in the
falling snow.
This piece transforms potential audience members into collaborators. The art was truly interactive in the sense that it could not reach fruition without participants.
There were so many artists experimenting with interactive art principles between 1950 and 2000 that it would be impossible to list them all. Attempting to focus on major art movements that contributed a number of artists working in the field of interactive art is one way of examining the trend of interactivity. It is imperative to include information about the environment surrounding the artists as well.
The first segments of the population to accept interactive art were artists' communities and science centers rather than art institutions. The metropolitan cities of Tokyo and New York were particularly accepting of interactive artists. Interactive artists like Myron Krueger worked and were first appreciated in the circle of science institutions before being formally recognized by art institutions. Interactive art is still most often exhibited in the context of the computer world or the festivals and institutions dedicated to showcasing art, technology and design. Examples of this type of venue include the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria and SIGGRAPH in San Diego, California. In the mass media, interactive art is often featured as an extension of science and technology, rather than a facet of art and culture. Despite the lack of recognition during the infancy of the interactive art trend, those who appreciated contemporary arts were excited to be able to participate in the creation process, the dissolving of the barrier between artist and audience led to a renewed excitement for the artistic process.
However, even in the most open art circles there were social obstacles to acceptance. Because explicit interactivity was a relatively new phenomenon there was resistance by some formal music composers and artists working in traditional mediums. Artists working in traditional mediums may have felt threatened by the movement away from the artist as the central figure in creation since their artforms relied heavily on control during the creation process and carefully orchestrated production, essential elements to creating artistic ownership of the finished work. Interactive artwork depended upon artist-audience collaboration, and a relinquishing of control on the part of the artist. Some artists felt interactive artwork was no longer art at all, since the role of the artist was being obliterated. Other artists expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a polished finished product. Lastly, there was a sentiment that interactive art was moving towards a watering down of artistic sensibility, becoming an entertainment medium where completing the simplest group action was more important than finding the meaning in the artwork.
The inclusion of cutting edge works in museums is difficult. Often slow to change, the institutional nature of museums causes slow acceptance of new forms of art. Institutions depend upon the exhibits to entice patrons to visit and spend money in the museum. If curators are unsure of the popularity of an artform among the masses the museum will not purchase work in that genre. Museums have become highly managed political entities. Boards of directors and curators prefer exhibiting works that are known to draw a crowd rather than take a chance on putting up an exhibit that may be controversial or not well attended because the artist is not as established. Adding an interactive artwork to the permanent collection is even more difficult. Museums are faced with the questions; Will visitors pay to see this work; how will the work be exhibited; if the work is technologically dependent, who will repair the work if it is broken; and how will the work stand the test of time? In 1971 Chris Burden, an interactive performance artist, commented that there were few major collections of artists' videotapes, and there seemed to be reluctance on the part of museums to collect video-based interactive artwork due to the uncertainties regarding the integrity of the videotape medium. The growth and acceptance of technology is intertwined with the growth and acceptance of interactive artwork. The uncertainty that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium impacts interactive art. In the early years of interactive art from 1950 to 1970, few museums had full-time curators who were knowledgeable in the areas of new technology and new media. Artwork that involved unproven technology or unknown techniques that could not be hung on a wall, or packaged and sold were therefore not chosen for institutional collections. Due to the reluctance of purchasing interactive art, many early interactive art pieces displayed in a museum setting were gifts or donations. To examine the adoption of interactive art into an established museum, the acceptance of interactive art into the New York based Whitney Museum's permanent collection will be examined. It should be noted that the Whitney was one of the very first museums to ever have interactive art become part of the permanent collection. The progressive nature of the Whiney allowed for such inclusion, however many museums with a more traditional bent such as the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. do not actively purchase or have interactive artwork in the permanent collection. The first interactive artwork donated to the Whitney is the Xenon projection piece Shanta (1967) created by James Turrell and presented to the Whitney Museum in New York as a gift by Philip Johnson in 1968. Shanta consists of projected xenon light that created a floating rectangle in the space. Visitors were encouraged to reach out to 'touch' it and walk through the projection, changing the space and the artwork. Once museums were able to justify and fund committees who were versed in recognizing and acquiring interactive artwork more of this type of work was purchased. Work the Whitney purchased included Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone (1973) a 16mm, black-and-white, avant-garde silent film. Line Describing a Cone invites participants to step into the path of the projection to play with the light beam. Lloyd Cross and Simone Forti's Striding Crawling (1977), an integral hologram and mixed media piece was also purchased by the Whitney. Striding Crawling involved holographic images of Forti in which she appeared standing, striding, and crawling in a sequence; the viewer's movements activated the holographic sequences. Both Line Describing a Cone and Striding Crawling were purchased with funds from the Film and Video Committee. The Whitney Museum acquired its first work of Internet art in 1995; the Schwartz family donated Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1973) to the museum.
Profit-based galleries were reluctant to exhibit or fund interactive artwork since there was rarely a finished product that could be commodified and then sold to the public. Interactive art was displayed in many community galleries and those not driven by sales. In the late 1970's galleries in New York like the Lehman College Gallery, Gallery 303 and Gavin Brown Gallery displayed interactive artwork. Starting in the 1980's Komai Art Gallery and INAX Gallery in Tokyo, Japan and later The Molue Gallery, in Manitoba, Canada. Interactive artwork was often accepted into galleries familiar with videotape based work or other early forms of technologically dependent artwork. Experience with other forms of art technology gave these galleries confidence in and an understanding of interactive art. When galleries or museums refused to fund or commission interactive art, the artists turned to patrons of the arts to help provide the monetary support.
Early patrons of interactive arts were often friends or family members of the artists. Starting in the late 1970's interactive art slowly began to gain credibility among patrons of the arts. Early patrons of interactive digital artwork include Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Schwartz, who funded and collected digital interactive art from the late seventies to early nineties. Many early patrons that could fund or commission interactive artwork were outside American in countries like Japan where technology was embraced as a new medium for creating art, and interactive art flourished. As the medium began to gain credibility as an artform more people all over the world invested in the work.
Educational institutions and grants funded much of the early work in the field of interactive art. Beginning in the summer of 1948 Cage began teaching at Black Mountain College in Lake Eden, North Carolina. The college was co-founded by John Dewey and John Rice, who strongly believed in a common experimental and in the inherent social responsibility of arts education. Black Mountain College allowed the radical faculty members which included Joseph Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Cage freedom to develop unorthodox curriculum. Through his classes Cage was able to enlist the students for assistance in creating avant-garde multi-media events. Cage taught his students to seek alternatives to creating traditional static objects. Instead he encouraged them to experiment in non-controlled environments, in chance encounters and random occurrences. "The art work is not a thing, not a static object; rather, it is the process of interaction among receiver, performer, and composer. All three are equally important, equally indispensable, but the composer is only an initiator in the last analysis and, after the performance the work exists at one flash, a memory, finally independent of the time it took to reveal it." Cage organized a number of this type of event at Black Mountain College. In one such event, each audience member held a white cup standing in front of their seat while waiting for four boys to randomly serve them coffee. Meanwhile various staged actions occurred. Examples of such actions included Cage reading a Zen Buddhist text, student Rauschenberg playing old records, Tudor pouring water from one bucket to another, dancers running down the isles from an excited dog, Charles Olsen and Mary Caroline Richards reading poetry. The students and faculty in attendance were delighted by the performance. However one composer in the audience, Stefan Wolpe, found the performance offensive and walked out in protest.
Feeling the benefits of the curriculum at Black Mountain College, other collegiate programs began to accept interactive art into the world of university academia. One such university was Rutgers, situated in New Jersey. After 1959 the college's president Lewis Webster Jones felt that students should be exposed to all kinds of experiences and emphasized an atmosphere of free speech for the University. This decision is particularly important considering that the prior president of the University black listed several outspoken faculty members following policies from the Cold War era. Visiting artist Milan Knizak hosted one of the first interactive art experiences in the style of a Happening. Knizak called his piece the Lying Down Ceremony (1968). Held on December 17th, 1968 the artwork involved many participants who agreed to join together following instructions from Knizak, with no idea what the artist had in mind before agreeing to participate. What Knizak had in mind was to blindfold everyone and ask them to lie down on a bare wood floor. A student at Rutgers and a participant in Knizak's piece had this to say:
My reactions at first to Milan Knizak's piece was that it was a Non-Happening. I expected something a bit more constructed, more like a Kaprow Happening with props and things. I expected to find myself creating unusual visual effects as we did in class with newspaper and cloth …Instead I was manipulated. I didn't create anything. I experienced something. My mind did tricks for me. All that while on the cold wooden floor, my mind did mental gymnastics reacting to the situation. I experienced a carnival of emotions from boredom to anger to fright to impatience to confusion to enjoyment to wonder. The best part was that I realized what really happened during the Happening that many people thought didn't happen.
In the summer of 1969 Geoffrey Hendricks, a Rutgers faculty member, created a Fluxus program at the University with the help of an artistic collaborator George Maciunas. This class fits into the realm of interactive art because performance art and audience involvement was an important part of the Fluxus art movement. A Fluxus art project created by this class included a Flux-Mass where everyone participated in a mock Catholic mass in the Douglass College Voorhees Chapel. Participants were invited to join in rituals of the church; members in the congregation were given wafers laced with a laxative that also induced blue urine. Sneezing smoke was poured into the audience. These stunts involuntarily pulled the audience into the work. Persons in authority at Rutgers put pressure on Maciunas after the Flux-Mass, forcing Maciunas to defend the Fluxus artform and in particular his work. A positive effect of the Flux-Mass was that the artist-teachers had found a new way to work with students in an institutional setting by actively eliciting their help as collaborators.
Still other teacher-artists used educational institutions to develop new cutting edge technologies to incorporate into interactive art experiences. Krueger worked for the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During his time at the University Krueger experimented and developed several human-computer interfaces. An example of an art project that utilized his achievements in human computer interfaces was Glowflow (1969). Glowflow was a computer-controlled light and sound environment that responded to participants' movements. Glowflow consisted of a dark room with four transparent tubes attached to the walls. Phosphorescent particles were transmitted though the tubes to distort the visitors' perception of the room's shape. When participants stood on sensors placed throughout the room the glowing phosphorescent particles were triggered and the optical illusion of distorting the room would begin. In addition, the sensors also triggered sounds. The lights and sounds worked together to create an engaging interactive experience. Krueger called his research "Artifical Reality." His research led to the creation of graphically man made interactive environments in which characteristics of the virtual space were composed by the artist, and manipulated by the viewer.
With all of these unique and successful interactive artworks created in the early days of the artform it may seem unusual that the field of interactive art was not more prevalent in society. To illustrate the issues that stopped artists, patrons, museums, and galleries from readily accepting technology based interactive art, the case of Douglass Davis's collaborative Net Art piece, The World's First Collaborative Sentence , will be examined. The World's First Collaborative Sentence was created using an Internet interface; anyone with access to the Internet could log onto a website and add to a page of text, creating a long sentence. The result was one long stream of conscious sentence that kept evolving as more people added to it. This interactive artwork was revolutionary for its time. Here was a piece that virtually anyone could contribute to, that not only crossed the boundaries between author and reader but allowed visitors across the world to interact with one another on a personal level.
Early forays into digital interactive art were costly. No one knew how to use the latest technology to create art; and many techniques using new technologies were pioneering first attempts.
Man, brainpower, and money were of the utmost importance in the early days of digital technology dependent interactive art. Due to this obstacle much of the early digital interactive art was either created in a University setting or funded by patrons willing to venture into unknown territory. The World's First Collaborative Sentence was originally funded by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, for inclusion in 'Inter Actions,' a 1994 gallery exhibition of Davis' work. Curator Susan Hoeltzel was a key figure in collecting and commissioning works for this show. The World's First Collaborative Sentence was created in a university setting where three college professors were involved in bringing the idea from concept to fruition. Two patrons of the arts, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Shwartz, purchased the concept and a signed disk with recordings of The World's First Collaborative Sentence. Barbara Schwartz donated the artwork to the Whitney in honor of Eugene M. Schwartz, her late husband, in 1995. A unique quandary arose out of this piece's addition to the Whitney's collection- What was the best way to display an Internet piece? The Whitney's answer was keep the work housed on the Lehman Gallery server and have a link to the work on the Whitney museum's website. The World's First Collaborative Sentence illustrates how many people were involved in early creation, showing and exhibiting of technology based interactive art. Even today museums and galleries struggle with issues of presentation, storage, and funding for Internet based artwork. Without courageous investors such as the Schwartz family, forward thinking curators like Hoeltzel, and museums like the Whitney it is doubtful that large scale interactive art that relied on Internet technology would have developed past the experimental stages.
Art critics, patrons, and peripheral art community members like museum board of directors, gallery owners, and members of the academic art community shunned early interactive art. Without a clear end product the art was meaningless. Art critics felt it was impossible to critique an art experience with interactive pieces because the experience was never the same twice. Patrons were distressed because there was nothing to hang on a wall or a pedestal in their homes, and thus artwork that could not be displayed was of no interest to many patrons. Museums, galleries and members of academia were slow to acknowledge the significance of interactive art, in part because there were few people in this inner circle who felt qualified to access interactive artwork. Add to this that many interactive artworks were charged with emotion, political sentiments or harsh statements about the bourgeois art community and you come up with a slow integration of interactive art into the art world.
Currently interactive art has a large number of artists producing work in the field and increasing recognition by the art community. Interactive art is developing into an art movement gaining speed and critical mass daily as universities, museums and galleries continue to provide a spirit of acceptance for the trend. The gradual acceptance of interactive art can be studied by looking at the impact and extent of interactive art in historical art venues, such as national museums and state college art programs. Contemporary artists creating diverse kinds of interactive art, from interactive sound art to technologically innovative (and dependent) artworks will be explored.
An example of an artist currently working in the field of non-technology based interactive artworks is artist Lee Mingwei. An example of his work includes Letter-Writing Project (1998). The piece consisted of two rooms with an open mailbox structure attached to one wall in each room. Both rooms were virtually identical. Participants were invited to step up onto a raised section of the floor to sit or kneel at a desk equipped with paper, envelopes, and pens. The rooms were set up with a minimalist aesthetic meant to instill a sense of quiet and meditation upon the participant. People were invited to write letters, especially letters they had wanted to write but had never found the time to do so. Completed letters could be taken or left on the walls of the two rooms. Mingwei would pick up, add postage to, and mail sealed and addressed letters. Unsealed letters were left on the walls so that other participants could read them.
Currently Mark Napier is working exclusively in the field of Internet based artwork. His work speaks of the code behind the Internet and the fragile relationship between this code and the user interface. His Internet browser The Shredder (1998) deconstructs and recontextualizes the Web. Visitors enter in any URL; Napier's browser then uses all of the underlying code for the site and rearranges the elements. Another unique aspect to the work is that the browser will never provide the same image twice, and even if the user enters the same URL multiple times the resulting images will be different. Net art is one of the newest areas of interactive art, and Napier is a key contributor, creating unique and socially conscious Net artworks.
A long time contributor to the field, Lynn Hershman began creating her unique form of interactive art in 1970. Many of Hershman's pieces use cutting edge interactive technology, she is credited with creating one of the first Laser Disc based interactive works, Lorna in (1979). In her piece Room of One's Own (1990) a viewer is asked to put their eye up to a viewing periscope attached to a small box. Inside this box there is a miniature scene involving feminine identity and a couple video monitors. On one video monitor the viewer sees their own eye in the box, thanks to a hidden camera. In addition the viewer's eye movements trigger another video monitor to display clips of a woman scolding the viewer for his/her persistent voyeurism. A Room of One's Own uses interactive technology to comment on media representations of female identity. This piece also reverses the role of the watcher and the watched. While a viewer is peering into the box, other participants are watching, making the viewer both the watcher and the watched.
New technology based interactive art is being developed and explored by Toni Dove. Working in a variety of new and innovative technologies such as computerized clothing, and objects capable of translating movement into digital information, Dove is also one of the pioneers in using virtual reality to create interactive art. Archeology of a Mother Tongue (1993) consisted of video projections thrown onto screens and scrims to create the illusion of video projections hovering in space. There is a soundtrack played throughout the piece. While many participants can be involved at once, one participant controls the action by wearing a power glove (a technology allowing movement data to be translated to computer data), and a video camera. This participant triggers sound and controls the speed and placement of video projected objects by 'touching' the projected objects and moving through the space. Dove seeks to make the interface transparent so the participants can focus on the art experience instead of the technology.
In the realm of interactive sound art Gregory Whitehead has created a number of sound pieces relying on collaborative efforts from participants. The Listening Room, an Australian based group, funded a piece called Pressures of the Unspeakable (1991). Whitehead posed as Resident Director of the International Institute for Screamscape Studies. Using radio broadcasts Whitehead enlisted the help of Australians to record human screams. He established a Scream Room at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a National Scream Line answering machine. Participants were invited to call the answering machine and record their unique scream. The finished work was broadcast over the radio; the artwork combined screams from those who called into the Scream Line in conjunction with the artist's thoughts on the topic of screaming. Whitehead pronounced the project a success saying, "the result had a sense of play that was well outside of my control." He goes onto say that this process of 'letting go' is one of the exciting aspects of creating interactive sound art.
With the sheer number of artists working in the field of interactive art, it is impossible to do the genre justice by only examining a few works. Other interactive artists that warrant attention include Bill Viola, Randall Packer, Sonya Rapoport, and Steve Mann.
Recently, interactive art has had a boost in popularity due to the lowered cost of the interfaces that allow for transparent user interaction. The lowered cost and improvements made in the technology makes interactive art cheaper and more reliable to produce. The growth of new technologies like the World Wide Web, sensors, computer processing power, virtual reality and 3-D simulations add to the array of media at the disposal of an interactive artist. New media gives rise to creative and innovative interactive art pieces. Interactive art that relies on no technology is also on the rise due in part to the ever-growing acceptance of interactive art in the art community. More universities offer degrees and programs in multimedia art than ever before. With the increased number of museums accepting interactive art into their permanent collections there is a place for interactive artworks to be exhibited and enjoyed by the public. There are also a growing number of non-profit and artist collective galleries focusing on showcasing multimedia works. These galleries are more likely to display interactive artworks than the profit-based galleries of the past. Lastly, due to excellent interactive art pieces by past artists there are more patrons and institutions giving grants or purchasing interactive artworks. Funding can only increase and help to improve the base of support for interactive artwork.
Interactive art must walk a fine line between becoming an artform that depends on technology and an art form that uses technology as one tool in a toolbox of mediums. Interactive art celebrates the use of new technologies; artists working in the field absorb new technologies into their repertoire readily. The use of new and cutting edge technology is a unique characteristic of interactive art as a whole. Interactive artists often take technology invented for a practical purpose and re-purpose it for use in an art project. For example, virtual reality was first funded as a means of visualizing 3-D spaces or objects for scientific study. Interactive artists have commandeered these VR environments to simulate fantasy worlds or inner realms of the mind. Interactive art contributes a sense of experimentation and innovation to the art community, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and exploring the place where art and technology merge. Lastly, interactive art challenges the concept that art is a finished product of artistic deliberation. With an interactive piece the artwork is never finished; instead the artwork is constantly evolving growing and changing, as more participants become involved. Interactive art breaks the role of artist. With many interactive artworks there is no longer one definitive artist- everyone who adds to the piece becomes an artist and forms a collaborative relationship with the artwork. This role changing threatens the notion of ownership, making the process of art the final product. This movement away from authorship and towards collaboration means that the artist becomes a spectator and the spectator the artist. The interactive art experience brings the audience from the role of passive spectator to active participant. Participation transforms the audience into a collaborator, an artist in their own right.
This new way of experiencing art brings about new challenges. One challenge of interactive art is to break through the invisible barrier between the viewer and the art. In theatre this concept is referred to as the 4th wall, the space separating the audience from the stage. The participant must forget the ingrained concept of don’t touch the art, and become a proactive user not afraid to add their personal touch to the artwork. While the viewers experience differs from piece to piece, many audience members turned participant feel empowered and exhilarated with the new freedom of crafting an artwork to suit their own interpretation. Yet there is a sense of safety- a buffer zone exists between the artwork and the participant. The interactive art experience is akin to facing an equation with variables, the equation exists and the variables can be manipulated. The artwork exists, in an unfinished state without input, the viewer is asked only to re-arrange certain elements. Interactive art certainly exploits this fact. In a successful work the viewer feels empowered free to make independent choices. They can control the interface but are not held accountable for creating the framework. Beryl Graham makes an interesting observation on the role of the spectator/participant in interactive artwork, stating that interactive art often pits audience members against one another when encountering interactive art, because many pieces ask the audience members to contribute something personal to the piece. Even if the piece allows more than one audience-member to be a participant at once, multiple participants can confuse the interpretation of the piece for one another. "Those pleasures of choice which enable the viewer to choose paths, to go at their own pace, make it annoying or incomprehensible to anyone 'watching over their shoulder', and intensely irritating to have one's shoulder watched over." Without a clear distinction of who adds what to the piece, Graham counters that interactive art may make audience members wish they were the only ones in the room with the work. In this regard the experience of interactive art can provide selfish individualistic pleasures. Another byproduct of a participant audience is the embarrassment factor; audience members become actors themselves, everyone waiting to interact with the piece is also watching the person interacting with the piece 'perform.' Unless the participant is sequestered from the rest of the audience members the participant is subject to voyeurism from fellow audience members. While many interactive pieces incorporate this voyeurism into the work itself this peeping tom aspect often discourages audience members from participating or detracts from the audience members' appreciation for the work as they are self consciously thinking about how they look instead of how the artwork makes them feel. Not surprisingly the younger generations of viewers, used to wearing VR goggles, strapping computers to their body, and interacting with technology on a regular basis are less phased by the voyeuristic qualities of interactive media than older generations who find the technology and attention overwhelming or embarrassing. Another challenge lies in the clarity of vision. If the artist is not careful to define the audience's participatory role the audience may become confused, or frustrated. This could result in visitors bypassing the interactive artwork for one that clearly defines their role, such as a painting where people are familiar with the look and think interaction. Even with all the obstacles ahead of the interactive art trend there are many positive reactions to the work as well. Gauging from majority of viewers' responses to interactive art experiences most people have a positive reaction, finding the new participatory nature refreshing. Being able to contribute to the artwork is a welcome departure from traditional mediums where the audience can only interpret what is placed before them.
Interactive art challenges many conventions of traditional art, the role of the artist, the audience, the environment around the work, and the method of displaying the work. Interactive art pushes the envelope on all of these fronts, proactively challenging the art world to come up with new solutions and new ideas about what is art and how it is best viewed. An illustration of this point is the number of interactive works with an Internet component. With interactive art there is often a possibility for viewing or interacting with the work offsite. In other words, someone in another country can now access and contribute to an interactive artwork housed in a museum. The artists involved in the creation of RTMark pieces often include a way for online participants to comment on, interact with, or otherwise affect a piece of current art, joining in the process as the artwork evolves. Interactive art has also helped to create a number of online museums. Many interactive pieces translate well to an Internet style presentation, in part because the Internet is an interactive medium. There are several advantages to an online museum: the artwork can exist there indefinitely and the online museum is cheap to maintain since there are no physical space constraints. A wider audience can experience the work. If a person has access to a public library or other free means of using the Internet it costs nothing for a visitor to enjoy the work. The technological innovation of interactive artists also helps push traditional arts forwards. For instance, the use of VR environments by interactive artists has encouraged the use of the technology for displaying traditional artworks. Several artists' architectural sites have been re-created using VR so that people can see the work in three dimensions without having to travel to the physical locations. An example is the virtual reality CAVE simulation of ancient Roman architecture developed by Virginia Tech. The use of interactive CD-ROMs or DVDs for displaying artwork has been transposed to traditional art where an interactive disc can be used to provide the historical background of a painting or information about an exhibit at a museum. In this regard interactive art has helped the art community expand its uses of cutting edge technology.
Interactive art comes out of a rich historical tradition of artistic innovation. Interactive art forces a new role on the audience; the audience must become a collaborator in the creation of the art experience, and this is one of the key contributions to the larger art community. Interactive art has enriched the art world by activating the display space, by using old and new technologies in innovative ways. The artistic platform can be a virtual reality room, or radio broadcast, a chance meeting, or a work that can only exist on the Internet. The making of interactive art forces an active experience for the artist; the artist creates the circumstances and waits for participants to engage the work they created. Interactive art has expanded the definition of art: Now the artwork becomes an open-ended expression of the artist and the participant which does not stop evolving until the artwork is no longer displayed to the public. With this excitement there must be a renewed effort to engage the viewer in a meaningful way. To create the work with a clear vision and easy interface so that everyone feels they can participate in the experience. Evolving out of the past and reaching into the future, interactive art will continue to be an influential trend in the art community.


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