What is Interactive?

Recently I have been working with cameras, sensors, real time video, sound, and different kinds of interactive systems. I like these things. I like learning how they work, and I like the moment when something that existed only as an idea finally starts responding in the room. But the more I learn about interaction, the more suspicious I become when the word itself starts to sound like a guarantee of artistic value. A person enters a room. A camera detects the body. The video changes. The person moves again. Another thing happens. Or someone puts on a VR headset, spends a few minutes inside another world, takes it off, and walks away. This is interaction. But sometimes I still want to ask: then what? I do not mean this as a judgment. I am interested in a simpler question. Why does the technology need to be there? Is it doing something that belongs to the idea of the work, or is the technology itself becoming the thing we want the audience to notice?

David Rokeby was already worried about this in the 1990s. What interests me about Rokeby is that he was not criticizing interactive art from the outside. He was building it. After watching thousands of people use his installations, he noticed that the novelty of interaction could become so visible that it covered up what he actually wanted people to notice. In some later works he deliberately made the interaction less obvious. He did not want the audience constantly testing the machine or performing for the image. He wanted room for other things to happen, including confusion, uncertainty, perception, and reflection. I like that uncertainty. We often assume that somebody who moves, touches, clicks, or controls something is active, while somebody who sits and watches is passive. Rancière made me question that assumption. A person can sit still while their mind is doing a huge amount of work. They are remembering, comparing, rejecting, imagining, and making connections. Claire Bishop’s writing on participation also made me question the idea that participation itself is enough to make an artwork successful. Maybe participation is not the value. Maybe it is only one possible form.

Rokeby has another story that I really like. When he was in art school, one professor made the class look out of a window for three hours. At first he thought the exercise was stupid. After fifteen minutes, however, he started to notice things: the flow of traffic, small differences in the blinds across the street, the changing shadow of a tree. Eventually he became completely absorbed in what he was seeing. He later wrote that we often stop really seeing something as soon as we have identified it. This also makes me think about something I have been worrying about more generally. We are living in a culture of very fast consumption. We watch something for a few seconds, react to it, and immediately move on to the next thing. Everything seems to ask for an instant response. Sometimes I wonder whether art can also fall into this rhythm. A work gives the audience a quick surprise, a quick interaction, a quick feeling of “this is cool,” and then the experience is finished.

I sometimes think of this, perhaps a little harshly, as a kind of “canned art.” I do not mean that technologically interactive work is automatically shallow, or that slow work is automatically profound. What I mean is that art should not become another canned product that can be opened, consumed quickly, and thrown away. For me, one important difference between art and fast consumption is that art needs time. Sometimes the audience needs time to sit there, listen, look, and not immediately know what to do. Sometimes the work itself also needs time to become meaningful. It may not fully happen in the gallery, the concert hall, or the installation. It may continue later, when the audience is walking home, or the next day, or even years later when an image or a sound suddenly comes back. This is why I am becoming less interested in measuring engagement by how many things the audience physically does. A person can touch ten sensors and still leave with almost nothing. Another person can sit quietly in front of a drawing for several minutes and keep thinking about it long after leaving. To me, the second experience is not necessarily less “interactive.” It may simply be an interaction that takes more time to become visible.

I felt this very strongly at MMCA Seoul. One of the works I remember most clearly was Ahn Kyuchul’s Individual, Freedom, State ownership. It is just a pencil drawing. Three heads. Three words: individual, freedom, state ownership. Nothing moves. Nothing recognizes me. I cannot change it. But I left Korea and kept thinking about it. I kept thinking about who an individual belongs to, what freedom actually means, and what happens between a person and a larger political or social structure. The drawing did not give me an answer. I am not sure I want one. What mattered to me was that something continued after I had stopped looking at it. The work remained fixed. I did not.

A few rooms away, I had almost the opposite experience with Lee Jungwoo’s Written Film, Written History. This work uses generative AI in relation to missing material from the 1946 film Hurrah for Freedom. Here I did not feel that technology was an extra layer placed on top of an idea. The technology was part of the problem. If historical footage is gone and AI generates something in its place, what are we looking at? A recovery? A reconstruction? A new fiction that has learned how to look like history? These two works look completely different to me. One is almost technically empty. The other depends on generative AI. Yet they made me arrive at almost the same thought. The amount of technology is not the question. The reason for the technology is.

I still think artists should learn as much technology as we can. I want to keep learning programming, electronics, sensors, AI, real time audio and video. Technical build up gives us more choices. It lets us imagine things we could not make before. Rokeby also reminds us that an interface is never neutral. It shapes how we perceive and move through an experience. At the same time, I think it is useful to put all of it aside sometimes and ask what is left. If the goal is simply to show that I can build the most complicated system, I do not think I need to be an artist. If we really want to compete over programming, hardware, or technical sophistication, most of us would probably be better off studying computer science or engineering. There are people who spend their whole education becoming much better at those things than I am. I am not interested in beating an engineer at engineering. I am interested in why I need the machine in the first place.

This question also brought me back to Haydn. In the final movement of Op. 33, No. 2, “The Joke,” the music keeps making the listener think that it has ended. Then it returns. The joke depends on expectation. If the listener does not anticipate an ending, there is nothing to interrupt. More than two hundred years later, the mechanism still works. No camera has to read my body. Nothing changes in the score. The music stays where it is, and something moves in me. I do not want to conclude that fixed art is better, or that interactive art is shallow. That would only replace one simple hierarchy with another. I just want interaction to become ordinary enough that we can choose not to use it. Rokeby once wrote that “interaction itself is banal.” He imagined a time when it could simply become another tool in the artistic palette, used when appropriate. I like that idea. Maybe art needs something that our current culture does not always give us very easily: time.

Bibliography

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