VALERIE LAMONTAGNE:
How do architecture and fiction cohabit in the medium of interactive art and Web projects?
DOUGLAS COOPER:
Interactive art is inherently obscene in its structural demands. It requires a kind of rigor no sane novelist would willingly submit to. On the other hand, those of us who regard sanity as the realm of the provincial, happily submit to all manner of restraining devices.
Indigestion, a piece I made with Diller + Scofidio, required me to write the same narrative in numerous iterations. It is a laser-disc installation which involves a video projection upon a table top: the hands of two dining partners, and the food and plates between them. A menu at the side of the table/screen allows the viewer to assign various attributes to the diners: they can be educated, uneducated; masculine, effeminate; male, female. When the attributes are chosen, the hands and the food morph to reflect the new speakers and the dialogue changes appropriately.
Indigestion deals with the false promise of interactivity.
The audience has the illusion of narrative power - they seem be able to control the direction of the story, by making meaningful choices - and yet each narrative proves ultimately unyielding, subject only to the will of the author. And this is generally the case: a complex interacting narrative is invariably scripted, and the audience's sense of contributing to the narrative process is illusory. At best, they're choosing which path they wish to take through a preconceived structure.
I had to deal with every possible combination of various interlocutors, and it was a serious headache. We had been warned in advance that "creating interactive art is like cleaning your loft with a toothbrush" but we only fully realized the truth of this when we'd spent some weeks trying to make all the narrative bits mesh.
Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor
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