Project 2: Kinetics and Interactivity

Interactive art involves the viewer directly into the piece of art.
For my interactive/kinetic sculpture I chose to create a site installation.
Seeing as we go to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I thought it would be fascinating to put a sea monster like creature in the pond where everybody walks each day.

To make project more interactive, I decided to put it up in three stages, and thus made the creature out of three pieces of plywood: the head, the hump, and the tail.
I wanted the piece to give the illusion of being bigger than it actually was, and to make people feel that it was submerged in the water.

I felt that seeing the creature wasn’t enough, so I put up signs, which has the silhouette of the piece on it, and some signs even said “Have you seen me?”
Here, I encountered the difficulty of putting up an installation in public space: people kept on taking down my signs.

I should have put the signs up sooner to peak people’s interest more before they were taken down.

The creature would of course interact with the tide, and be showing more when there was low tide, so it would be able to interact with the environment.
I also created a Facebook fan page to add awareness to this new addition to the pond. This way, people could have a more direct interaction with the sculpture.
I was surprised with how the results turned out. Within the first two days, someone suggested naming the sea monster.

Someone even uploaded pictures and wrote a blog entry about it, which canm be seen ehre:

http://smcmlol.blogspot.com/2010/03/panic-sea-monster-attack-imminent.html

The name I liked best was St. Messie, sort of a play off of St. Mary's and the Lochness monster.

Quotes from passersby:

"What are those fucking pieces of plywood in my fucking pond?"

"It's art!"

"Look- there's a lochness monster!"

"That is badass"

"When will the rest of it come?