STUDY 1, 2 & 3 Reflection:

Looking back at the progress thus far, I felt like I am a little more competent compared to the first day of class. I never expected there to be this much programming involved in order for us to design our own conceptual and interactive art pieces. However, in many ways, Max 7 is an interactive piece in its own right. For every action, or a combination of, there is a reaction. This is a fundamental part of interactive art, which requires the audience to participate in the art piece in order for the ‘art’ to be appreciated.

In the beginning, I already had a perceived perception of what interactive art was to me. However, through the creative process of taking inspiration from other artists and designing new interactive projects on Max, I felt that I was very limited in my ability to conceive interactive ideas. It was really helpful to have the opportunity to work as groups and individually in order to enhance the creative experience and have the confidence to formulate new ideas and apply them to Max.

The first few studies were real simple tasks. These were design to familiarise myself with the software. My first study was more conceptual as I did not have the knowledge to translate my idea of a sentence generator into Max. This slowly regressed into more simple ideas such as visual distortions by loudness of sounds or generating reactions through controversial visuals. This simple approach is not also good training wheels for Max but it also goes to show that a simple can be just as effective as a complex idea. As long as the execution of the interactive art is well thought out and concise.

Through other peers and our teacher, I have seen a variety of interesting concepts. This is a valuable experience to witness and participate in. There are so many ways to design interactive art, you would thing that having only five senses would be very limiting to interactive art. Creativity in interactive does play with these senses but also goes beyond that and can serve as a tool to commentate or reflect on human behavior such as politics, emotions and so much more.

I have a big fascination for human psyche, and when it comes to conceptualising a piece of interactive art I am most concerned by the way I want to make the audience feel. I am not too worried about making some kind of big statement but more so provoking some kind of emotion by the tools I use. I think there is a lot of beauty in the way we can be so similar yet so different at the same time.

When I think of interactive art I think of big installments which people can be fully immersed into the art. However given that I am confined to Max, I feel as though the ideas I have in my head are more suited to a big room rather than something on a laptop. However, I just need more time an practice to construct my ideas that are more optimized for Max in order to execute the idea effectively as if it were have the same impact in an installment. So in terms of how successful I feel thus far, I would have to say I have been more unsuccessful in my interactive works. However it will take some time for me to be able to be satisfied with my work.

In terms of what I hope to improve on for the future, I would like to execute really simple but impactful ideas. When I saw Yoko Ono’s Box of Smiles concept in class, I was really impressed by how something so simple was so effective. This is the kind of interactive art I wish to translate through Max. An idea that is less tactile would also be nice as well. Quite possibly something more audio visual next time? There’s so many possibilities but I have to improve my Max skills first before I start thinking of bizarre concepts.

The few ways that I have been trying to improve Max, besides always asking Camille for help, was looking at tutorials on YouTube. There are plenty of valuable information out there on the platform and there are also a lot of people using Max creatively as well. It is just another great source of information that I can take inspiration from and learn unique or fundamental functions in Max. Max also has a really good user interface for assistance on particular functions as well and how they would work in a certain scenario.

Another small thing, but big at the same time, that I can improve on is the small little refinements I can do my projects. This makes the work look a lot more presentable and make the interactive experience so much better for the audience. This is simply just a poor habit of being lazy and something that can be improved on for the next project to come.

Major Study Reflection:

A blend of all the studies I have learnt so far I wanted to create that was fun, but more so frustrating. Inspired by puzzle games, I know how frustrating it can get when your stuck half way or, even worse, at the start, and so felt like making something that was not mentally challenging but mentally draining. The puzzle that I took inspiration rom was the one with a 3×3 grid filled with 8 squares with one empty slot. This slot enabled you to move the squares around to solve the puzzle by completing the picture.

In my interactive art piece, the user must control 9 individual panels which have 9 unique combination of keys that correspond to up, down, left and right. The pieces are also scrambled in different areas of the map and the player must rearrange the pieces so that form the live feed of themselves.

The challenging part to making this project was organizing the work as there were so many controls to put in the program. Sometimes it was easy to get lost in the patch if you’re not keeping on top of the order that you have chosen for the controls.

Study 5 Reflection:

In study 5, as a group, we had to refine the interactive piece. We felt like there was nothing wrong with the way the patch was laid out and it worked the way it was intended to. So we went for the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach. So instead of the unnecessary meddling of the patch design itself we refined the patch by making it look more presentable. This process required us to rearrange the most important key function for the audience to interact with and hide the unnecessary parts that weren’t involved in the interaction. We utilised the presentation mode to enable the necessary adjustments to the aesthetic of interactive piece.

Since we did not accomplish the goal of making people angry in the first iteration of the project, we decided to make people happy instead. The newly presented patch has only the live feed, a fun and interesting caption to entice your curiosity and the outlandish angry meter. This approach makes the interactive piece a lot more pleasing to the eyes which results in a more effective interactions between the work and the audience.

Study 4 Reflection:

In study 4, as a group, we had to design a concept piece that was interactive in a non-tactile way. Furthermore, the interactive piece had to make you feel a particular way; more specifically – a type of emotion. So, as a group, we brain stormed the idea of making the audience feel angry. In our attempt at provoking our audience to feel angry, we designed a project that involved a live recording and a sound meter. The project required no touching of the keyboard, hence the ‘non-tactile-ness’ of the brief. As a person watches him/herself on the live feed, if they were to dare make a loud enough noise, their face will be masked with a really pixelated angry red face.

I was away during the time the group first started the project, but from what the group has told me, the reaction was the opposite of angry. I would assume that we got the opposite reaction because having a red cute angry face popping on and off your face in a live feed would be fun and funny for the audience. The audience would want to shout more to have the angry face appear more frequently because it would be fun to do so.