PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGY 2010 / TIMARA

Due to my past couple months spent constantly traveling, I’ve found myself in a growing amount of public spaces which have been installed with some form of interactive, new-media based art.  Whether it is a commission in an airport, public park, or the more obvious museum, the amount of hidden projections with motion based interactivity that I have come in contact with has grown considerably (more than I ever thought, in fact).  Some of these have been advertisements (such as JFK’s Chase ad which features screens in a busy hallway with images being rearranged as people walk past them) while others funded by some kind of public arts grant.  It has been even more interesting to note people’s changing reactions to these enhanced spaces.  Once the magic of these interactive screens begins to dissolve, as all of people’s personal appliances and surfaces become motion-sensor and touchscreen based, what will keep people interested in works like these?

When speaking with media-design students working within this exponentially growing landscape, the answer that most teachers give them is to search for the public’s “handle.”  Everyone “handles” which grab their attention and would cause someone otherwise going about their day moving through a crowded walkway to stop and glance at something out of the ordinary, something interactive that has at once caught their attention.  In dealing with my future work in this class I hope to gain some sort of grasp of what an Oberlin students “handle” could be.  I think when installing my first project in the waterfountain I got an initial sense that messing with people’s urgent consuming habits, that is, the universal need to drink water, is an easy enough handle.  How to enhance that experience or change it for people beyond drawing some of their attention to it is still up to me and other interactive media-based artists.  I just hope to move beyond novelty to create something that can do more than divert attention and rather engross that person in their interaction with certain extra-realities.

-Nick