Interactive Art: Touching the "Body in the Mind"

Abstract

Interactivity is a concept familiar from the computer sciences since the 1960s, and one which has, since the late 1980s, gained greater currency, integrating itself through the computer into the larger culture. Art-making is one of those areas where we hear about such integration in the form of interactive video. A brief look at precursors, instances of artists earlier on using performances and events and objects to involve or engage viewers, often transforming them into performers, draws the current situation and the dynamics and practices of interactivity in the world of contemporary art into relief with the work of six artists to be discussed in particular. With the futurists and the dadaists early in the century, and in the late fifties and sixties with happenings, Fluxus, actionism, and proto-pop, artists' performances and events were engaged in breaking down the barriers between art and life, wearing away the walls of aestheticism built up with modernist movements such as cubism, purism, expressionism, later abstract expressionism. Epater le bourgeois was the early motto capturing the essence of a futurist event on the streets or in a theater in Milan or Turin or a dada evening provoking the audience in a Zurich cafe. The audience was pushed, even taunted into responding to a performance or a series of tableaux, a poetry reading, a manifesto declaimed, aimed at shocking or insulting; success for the artists was measured by the reaction of the audience - shouts, egg throwing, riots, the more the better. The provocation became an expectation for the audience, then a cliche, as the strategies wore out (see Goldberg) .

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