Commentary : An Old Tradition in Art Is Revived in the Digital World

For Modern art, interactivity is almost as old as the 20th Century. The idea that the audience should be an active, self-aware participant in creating meaning for a work of art, rather than a passive observer who is acted upon, is central to the Dadaist spirit of Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp’s 1913 bicycle wheel mounted atop a kitchen stool was meant to be idly spun, while his 1916 ball of twine with an unidentified object hidden inside was meant to be shaken. Both sculptures, banishing audience passivity, put you in the position of curious dreamer, nudging the audience toward Duchamp’s conception of what an artist is.

Interest in interactive art has come and gone several times since Duchamp. Lately the tradition seems to be on the upswing, as attested by the recent work of 13 sculptors and installation artists in the current Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition, “Action Station: Exploring Open Systems.” The show includes a variety of objects the visitor can rearrange, try on, manipulate or talk back to.

Current interest in interactivity is most likely being fueled by the electronic revolution, whose digital and video-oriented products are exploding everywhere in the commercial world. And one reason for the explosion is that an inescapable sense of intimacy seems fundamental to interactivity.

I’m not talking about dating on the Internet--although the widespread popularity of that pastime, together with the outsized hysteria over pornography in cyberspace, are certainly related phenomena. I’m talking about something integral to the very idea of interactivity.

Exciting evidence of the intimate power of interactive technology may currently be experienced in a second exhibition of six installations by seven artists called “Digital Mediations,” at Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery. Most of the participating artists are American, such as San Francisco’s Lynn Hershmann, whose pioneering efforts with interactive technology date to the early 1980s. The intimacy of their electronic art is enhanced by the salient fact that, in general, only one viewer at a time can experience the works in “Digital Mediations.”

Austrian artist Christa Sommerer and France’s Laurent Mignonneau have collaborated on a visually beautiful essay on life and death in virtual reality, with the spectator at the switch. Australian Bill Seaman has made an interactive poem of images and language, which the audience manipulates via a computer station.

Sara Roberts’ “Elective Affinities” is a complex narrative about four silent passengers traveling by car along a country road. As you approach the independent image of each passenger, you suddenly hear his or her thoughts, which concern the others in the car.

Finally, Jim Campbell’s “untitled (for Heisenberg)” is composed of a bed of salt, on which is projected the moving, black-and-white image of a reclining nude couple. Motion sensors hidden in the wall respond to the viewer’s movements in the room, changing the picture of the couple. Move closer to the bed and the picture zooms in, making it harder to see the caressing figures; the farther away you move the more you see, but from a frustrating distance. The famous “Uncertainty Principle” of physicist Werner Heisenberg, which says that the presence of a spectator inevitably changes what is being seen, is underscored as a ground zero for interactive art.

In all these works, the relationship between the work of art and the audience is emphatically one-on-one. A single viewer manipulates the computer to co-write an electronic poem with Seaman, a single viewer wields the flashlight that confers life and death in the virtual world described by Sommerer and Mignonneau. The motion sensors in Campbell’s ode to Heisenberg respond to the one person closest to them, regardless of how many people are in the room, while multiple visitors to Roberts’ automotive narrative reduce the passengers’ privately whispered thoughts to an indecipherable cacophony. Roberts’ and Campbell’s installations are most powerful when you’re alone.

Jennifer Steinkamp’s “Lap” is perhaps the most rudimentary example of interactivity in the show, which may explain why it feels the least intimate. A playful video-projection by the typically engaging, L.A.-based artist, “Lap” employs pulsing, brilliantly colored, abstract shapes projected on darkened walls that frame the gallery. As you walk by, your body simply intercepts portions of the light, dramatically changing the patterns.

Interactivity is seductive because it privileges an individual spectator. You get singled out. An interactive work of art seems to say that it was made for you . The intimate exchange between artist and viewer, with the work of art as go-between, yields a casual sense of reciprocity that is unusually satisfying.

The installations by Campbell and Roberts are of special note in this regard, because both make intimacy the subject of their work. Campbell pictures intimacy through the imagery of erotic coupling, Roberts by letting you into the very private thoughts of her four protagonists.

Of course, the viewer’s range of interactive options is not open-ended. Limited by the contours of the computer program, which the artist has created, it is finally like any material an artist uses: Interactivity can only be as good as the artist is. (“Garbage in/garbage out,” the dictum of the computer programmer in the commercial world, also applies to interactive art.) Still, at a time in modern society when feelings of helplessness and ineffectuality are the norm, “Digital Mediations” shows how the prospect for mutual exchange offered by interactivity might be an indispensable counterweight.

* Williamson Gallery, Art Center College, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 396-2244, through Oct. 1. Closed Mondays.