Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Project 3: Interactivity
ANALYSIS

Interaction Analysis                 

Interaction within sculpture can manifest in many forms, such as performance pieces, constructing environments for an audience to engage with, providing a script for a participant to follow, or other artworks which include the audience as part of the work. All of these scenarios create artworks which are incomplete without community interaction.   Artwork can provoke and influence us mentally, but not be fully interactive. For a sculpture to be fully interactive, the artwork is not fully complete until the community physically interacts with it or influences the piece itself.

Krzysztof Wodiczko is an interactive artist who works with projections to provoke, inspire and heal both the audience who looks upon it and the participants involved in his art.  To create his work, he forms a relationship with people who have gone through tragic events so that he can, through his art, tell their story. This artist uses the participants’ faces, hands, voices, and sometimes full bodies, which he projects onto large architectural forms, to help them express themselves to an audience.  One example of the artist’s projection works is Tijuana projection, where he projected the faces of women who suffered abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence on the Omnimax Theater at the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The angle that Wodiczko chose to project focused on the expressive features of the womens’ faces (nose, eyes, mouth) to make their message more powerful when projected onto the building. Another of Wodiczko’s projections is the Central Library Projectio,  where he recorded voices and hands of the participants telling stories of those who had lost loved ones to violence, and stories of prisoners who had done such acts, as a form  of community healing. In this projection, Wodiczko uses the architecture and the hands of the participants as a form of expression when they are telling their story. Both of these projection projects could not be completed or presented without the engagement or interaction of the public.

Vito Acconci’s artwork is also influenced by public interaction. His famous Following Piece, in 1969, is one of the best examples of interactivity between the artist and another person. Unlike Wodiczko, who attempted to form a relationship with his participants, Acconci, for this artwork, chose his subjects randomly. In Following Piece, he walked the streets of New York and selected someone off the street. He then followed that person until he/she went into a private space. He repeated this activity multiple times, where he might follow someone for minutes to hours. Acconci described doing this artwork as being completely pulled along by someone else's life and giving them full control of where he went.  In this interactive piece the artwork was the person and the interaction between the artist and his subject. Without the randomly chosen person involved, there would be no artwork. Another interactive piece that Acconci created was Project for Pier 1, where he stood on a pier at night and confessed to anyone who came near him. Without the interaction between the artist and the subject, this artwork could not have been completed.

These two artists use the public as a medium within their art. Without some form of relationship between the artist and their subjects the artwork could not materialize. The people whom they chose, either willingly or at random, are as much a part of the artwork as the product or the artist themselves.