Field Report 2 Act/React: WorkTogether

Control, control, control, control. The exhibit currently inhabiting the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) features interactive works from some of today's most prominent and imaginary media artists. These artists have reached new places in the inclusion of the audience into art piece installations within the museum and gallery experience. This particular sort of audience/art convergence was not possible before the technological advancements and eventual economic availability of video equipment. Lev Manovich, media theorist, points to the idea that people have always been participating in works of art. With books and movies the person engaged with the material is relied upon to fill in the gaps of the storyline. Video games function in a similar way to the sort of works on display at MAM. They both require the participant to step up and into the work, to make choices and create changes. Roger Ebert felt video game works were inferior to classical film work because the artist hands over some authorial control to the participant. Is this so? What are the limits that surround some of these pieces residing in the Act/React exhibit? How they are formed and what is the way/potential for people to change them?
These sorts of works now showing are examples of how people can interact through technology. It has already been shown in many different ways that people can come together to create and change works. For example a drawing can be posted as a base for others to add to, changing the images and meaning. Sculptures can be movable objects for a person or people to manipulate and rearrange. The Act/React installations allow the viewers to change the representation and works in a variance of ways that are particular to each piece. These projects all rely on strong complex technology to function. It seems to beg a question as to how much an artist has to do with the project or how much the technician rigging the technology has to do with the piece. Assuming the artist happens to understand these technological issues and has the ability to assemble them, they themselves would be solely responsible for creating the world that the audience enters into. (If not, the process would be one of collabortion with the technician) The artist would set the parameters for the world and what can go on in it.
Camille Utterback and Daniel Rozin both use specialized computer programs , cameras, and a projector in order to create their works. Utterback, with her untitled works 5 and 6, invites the visitors physical actions to be captured and turned into lines or splotches on a screen where a work is already in progress. Depending on where a person would stand or move, a computer generates a line or shape that represents them on the screen. It is essentially an abstraction of the participant working in conjunction with a preset computer program. The marks that others before them created are in constant flux as new viewers engage with the pieces. The marks that are made on the screen are done by the viewer, but it is only due to the computers programming that this piece is possible. Therefore even though the viewer is participating in this event, it is the artist and her use of technology that has made every movement on the screen possible. She has decided how the world of the piece will be mapped and how each participant will have the potential to the visually represented. In this way Roger Ebert's statement is right and wrong. The artist is giving the illusion of handing over control to the audience when, in reality, they are a sort of god presiding over their work; just as they would over a traditional film.
Rozin's work functions in a similar way to that of Utterback. As mentioned, they both use the same devices to create and make their works possible. Rozin takes a less abstract approach to representing the participating audience. As the viewer enters the piece Snow Mirror, pixels (the smallest digital particles) cling to the human forms transforming them into fuzzy snowy outlines. The room in which the exhibit is installed is pitch black which throws one' s perception of spatial relations as if you were engulfed in a snowstorm. When looking at your image and the image of the another in the work, it is hard to tell how close or far apart you actually are from that other person in the relation to the space both inside and outside the piece . Again, though each person will have a different experience in the snowstorm, it is only because Rozin has created its world and laid out the parameters and restrictions.
All in all the experience of the museum was a pleasant one (though one that, as it was commented to me, would have perhaps been enhanced by the use of certain hallucinogenic substances, which would have made for quite the collaborative interactive process. Artist, human, computer, and nature...or chemical) It was very fun/entertaining to watch people react to the pieces and to do so yourself. The artist as ultimate creator still seems to reign, but the new processes in art engage people in new ways to spark interest. To quote George Fifield in saying “at its best” the art in these exhibits will inspire people to re-examine themselves, the way they interact with each other and the world at large.