Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Project 3: Interactivity
ANALYSIS

Analysis

Interactive art takes the viewer and integrates them into the visual and experiential art experience.  Interactive art can in fact fall into many different forms of visual or auditory art but we study it in sculpture because sculpture breaks the fourth wall and enters the three dimensional realm of the audience. What would be considered performance art, auditory art, and visual art can all be integrated into interactive art.   Interactive art is responsive to the viewer in relation to the value of it’s product.

Performance artists like Vito Acconci use their audience to make conceptually valuable art. The artist in this sense uses the audience as a vessel for some particular action or result.  The interaction is in turn the artful notion of the piece.  This is usually well documented with video, writing or photography.  This performance art can be based on the situation or the exhibited action.  Where Marina Abramovich may scream in a room for extended periods of time the viewer wonders about what the artists intention is. Their presence in the room interacts with the artist as well as the acoustics and furthermore the reaction of the other viewers.  Where Acconci for instance may go out into the world and follow people around he is studying the interaction of the situation.  The audience in that sense does not even know they are part of a piece of art, in this way interactive art can be seen as social experiments presented by an artist to make people think about some other largely conceptual idea based upon human condition.

Also the art produced from interaction can come musically or audibly at all.  Having the audience act out tasks or interact with something that makes sound.  Like when David Byrne constructed an organ linked to different noisemakers throughout a hollow building.  The acoustics of this place changed upon where the audience stood as well as what the audience played.  In this way the piece completely depended on the audience making an always changing composition unique to each variation of the given viewer.  Adversely, it can be the absence of sound such as with John Cage who acted like he was going to put on a piano concerto and ultimately did nothing but check his watch for the duration of the song title which was 4’33.  In this way the audience interacted with confusion as well as maintaining silence or maybe even causing whispers of sound in their movements or the subtle sounds of talking to one another.  

Finally the artist can ask the audience to partake in the art making.  Sets of instructions or audible commands are ways the desired audience can make the aesthetic piece. Sol Lewitt did this  in some mural pieces which had the audience become the artist and make their specific mark on the canvas. Yoko Ono also did this with her cut piece which had her audience cut pieces from her clothing while filming it. The process of instructing your audience to make actions which you present as art immerses your audience in the content of the finished work.  The interactivity of the artists vision and the audiences interpretation of this is the conceptual and aesthetic value of the finished piece.