You Were In My Dream (2010) installed at Blackbox, Melbourne as part of Experimenta Utopia Now.
End of an era. Last Digital Theory & Aesthetics assessment, last assessment for the semester and the last essay I’ll do as an undergraduate. It’s a shame the word limit was so small, I could’ve ranted for pages. Maybe not worthy rant, but extensive nonetheless.
Taking the interactive works of Osmose (1995) and You Were In My Dream (2010), I compared them to each other and attempted to express how they provided the viewer with immersion and ultimately freedom – something of a Holy Grail for interactive art. Of course, both fall short of absolute freedom. No computer program has ever come close. However, both use wildly different approaches to allow the viewer to interact with them, and it’s interesting to look at them in the context of what the user has been allowed to do.
Without any further ado, here’s my essay and a small wave goodbye to my second last semester.
As I’ve often a tendency to do, I tried to be overly clever with my (very) short essay on interaction this week. Basing my paper on Robert Morris’ Plywood Show (1964), I had to express in just 300 words why I thought his work was interactive – and if it wasn’t, make it so.
The image above clearly shows that Morris’ work is often interactive, even if it’s not based in the digital interaction that we’ve come to know today – and focus on in our course. My attitude hasn’t changed since studying this subject, as I argued in my paper.
Just a brief post, this one. Something like a ‘statement of intention’. For this subject, we need to select a work that we consider fits with the topic we’ve been asked to research. For myself, this is interactivity. I spend a lot of my time looking at, thinking about and working on what most people consider to be interactive artwork today: pieces based on interaction with a computer (regardless of the interface).
Instead of selecting one of these, I have decided to look at an older work: one of my favourite minimalist installations, Robert Morris’ Plywood Show (1964) (above).
Following on from what we did in Screen Culture last session, Digital Theory & Aesthetics takes a more focused look at some of the theory involved with creative practice in the digital arts.
Being one of those ‘course outline walkthrough’ classes, we did little more than that, with the exception of watching a couple of examples of technology-based artworks…
No Comments »
