Strategies of interactive art

Abstract

An interactive artwork takes on the shape of an event. An artist does not make a final, completed piece of art, instead produces an area of activity for the receivers, whose interactive actions bring to life an artwork-event. Regardless of what shape the final product of an artist's activity takes on, an interactive artwork finds its final formation only as a result of participative behavior of the viewers. The latter ones in that way become participants, performers, executors, or (co)creators of an artwork-event.What I consider the basic area of research in interactive art are the strategies organizing fields of activity for the receivers-participants. They can be understood as scores that project the interactive behavior of the receivers.The typology I put forward in this essay distinguish eight strategies of interactive art: strategy of instrument, game, archives, labyrinth, rhizome, system, network, and spectacle. The analysis of individual strategies reveals that all the common elements that occur there and characterizing an interactive experience en globe are organized differently each time. These elements are interface, interactions, data (database), data organization (hypertext, cybertext), software/hardware system, relations among participants, and performance/spectacle. In every strategy, a different factor takes a position superior to others and plays the basic role in the process of organizing interactive activities of the receivers. This means that it is not the occurrence within the frames of individual strategies of elements that are different each time, but their organization and hierarchy different each time that play a decisive role in providing strategies with their specific character.Discussing all strategies I shall distinguish their basic characteristic features but also pay attention to its range and variety of its forms observed so far. The latter aim I shall realize by pointing out to various actual examples of artistic usage of particular strategies.

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