An interesting start to the semester!

Already 4 weeks in and I have learnt more words in Max 7 than I did in year 7 French Class. Even though there was a lot to cover, Max 7, when used correctly, gives us the opportunity to physically put our ideas into action. The start of the interactive was a good chance for us to understand and learn a thing or two about the world of interactive media. Personally I have had little to none knowledge of interactive art.

During the first two weeks of the subject we were sent off to research on a particular interactive artist. Considering that I had no idea on who to choose, I quickly dived into Google and searched on the top ten interactive artists. This is what I have found:

I had a brief look at most of them and they were all interesting in their respective ways. Most of these artists were able to send some kind of statement to their audience through their works which ranged from politics to human behaviour. One artist that really intrigued me was Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who I eventually chose to study and present his works to the class for the first assignment. Observing his incredible instalments which included “Pan Anthem”  and “Tape Recorder” really caught my attentions and drew me towards the world of interactive art. His instalments were very simple but sent out a strong message to his audience.  And this inspired me to create my own art in this manner as I feel as though this is reflective of my own personality and artistic tastes. Another source of inspiration was Yoko Ono’s work called “A Box of Smile” which was discussed in class. Like many of Lozano-Hemmer’s work Ono’s idea was so simple but was able to effectively interact with her audience. As the user opens the box and sees their own reflection, they can not help but smile. The idea is very witty and fun, and it would be nice, for myself, to be able to send a positive message to my audience as they experience my piece of interactive art.

After researching into Lozano-Hemmer’s work as well as other interactive artists, I began to have a better understanding of what interactive is designed to do. How I interpret the purpose behind interactive art is the ability to communicate a message by having the audience engaging with the work in order to bring it to life. The interaction of the audience and their response is the art piece itself. I think that interactive art is a powerful way of sending a message because the audience is able to experience a feeling by being apart of the art. It allows for the artist to send a message that is packaged in away for an individual to understand and gain perspective on a particular matter.

Once the class had a better understanding of interactive art, we were able to develop ideas for 3 different interactive pieces. Once we had developed a few ideas we had to integrate them into Max 7 in order to bring the ideas to life.  My first idea was a word generator that produced a series of random words that derived from different categories of words. The audience would then construct a sentence using the random words provided by the generator, which is then written in a dedicated space. No one person will construct the same sentence and it will be interesting to see the variety of sentences constructed by each unique individual. The second study was based off controversial issues relating to politics and humanities. The study was designed to record the initial reaction of the user, which was immediately played after in a loop once they have seen the controversial image for a few seconds. This study was designed to observe the impact between people and controversial imagery. Considering that everyone has a different set of morals and beliefs, not everyone will react a certain way. What may be controversial to a lot of people can be normal to one person. The third study was more superficial in terms of its purpose in comparison to the first two studies. This study was a distorted live self portrait video of the user, which can be manipulated by the loudness of the user. This study was more concerned with aesthetics than being thought provoking. It was just a fun idea and a good learning exercise in understanding the language used in Max 7.

Overall it was a good start to the semester. I look forward to learning more interesting set ups used in Max 7 so I could produce different type of interactive art. Right now I am limited to basic distortion of live feeds and recording sounds.