Art 308 Sculpture Studio Portfolio

Molly Burtenshaw

Project 2- Kinetics and Interactiviy
ANALYSIS

Interactive art is a term that could possibly be applied to any artwork, because an art that doesn't engage the audience, at least their mental processes, is not an artwork worth producing or sharing. However, works from artists such as Christo and Jeanne Claude and Vito Acconci demand that the audience must be present for the artwork to have any purpose, and this is what defines their artwork as interactivity.

Christo and Jeanne Claude create works that literally cannot exist without the interaction of other people. They need a multitude of volunteers to build the project, as well as involving government and property owners in order to get permission to build the works. The discussion and production they promote, as well as people's reactions to the projects supersede the actual objects in importance in terms of the aims of the artwork. In Acconci's work, often the interaction is the entire artwork and there is no object left behind, outside of a video perhaps in some instances. There is no physical "work", but is rather just an event that can be talked about.

Often, these kinds of art projects are hard to define as art because they delve so much into the realm of normal human interactions or creative psychology experiments. It is hard to constitute having dinner with people as art, but it is the intentions behind these ordinary actions that gives them their definition as art. Interactive art has a level involved of making an audience aware of its own actions and conscious of their reactions to them. It is not attempting to analyze human involvement but to observe and inspire it, so it doesn't quite reach the level of psychology. The audience is required in interactive artwork, and it is often more their participation than the ideas of the artist that make the works meaningful –whether they just require physical action from an audience, such as in kinetic art, or physical presence, as in the case of most performance art.