ACT/REACT

Interactive art, to me, is art that you can personally dictate. Dictatorship in that your presence and ideas shape the way the art appears to the senses.  The installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum's Act/React show that I found most representative of this definition was the "Snow Mirror" by Daniel Rozin. The snow mirror was set up in a dark black-covered room that you walked into and stood in front of a screen cloth, which had a camera behind it, and behind you was a projector. The projector projected your recorded image onto the cloth in front of you. Also projected was the appearance of snow falling down onto your reflected body. Your movement conducted the way the snow fell, and the snow created the outlines of your body image. This is a clear example of George Fifield's explanation of new interactive art. He says that "around the turn of the millennium, video cameras and sophisticated programming in a new generation of installations eliminated the mechanical interface and replaced it with one we are all intimately familiar with-our bodies." This is true to this exhibit in the sense that we didn't have to touch or do anything, except merely exist in the space with our physical self in order to interact with the art. I think this is a very personal exhibit because every single person who walks in there is going to have a different reflection, since we are all unique, so therefore you personally dictate the way the art looks. Every time you move, the snow melts and scatters, so also depending and how, where, and how fast you move, changes the way the snow separates. My favorite thing to do while looking at my image and the snow, was to hold my hand still so they had a sharp outlines, and then slowly wiggle my fingers, so that it looked as though my hand was dissipating into the snow. By doing this, I found a way to do something original to interact my body in shaping the fall of the snow.  "Snow Mirror" reminded me of another piece of interactive artwork not in the exhibit, but in the main part of the museum. There is a painting of a girl in a room and via a video camera, your movements in the gallery are reflected in the art as you moving about the room in the actual painting. Then, even more involved, based on your gestures and movements, you can get the girl in the painting to react, such as smiling or waving at you, or getting upset and walking out of the picture.  Although the girl's reactions to your gestures are based on calculated movements of human emotion that are the same across the board in all humans, your unique movement and reflection are different for everyone in the painting. This makes your individual action different from everyone else's, just like everyone's reflection and movements in "Snow Mirror."

Although all the art in the exhibit was interactive, I felt that some were more interactive than others. Liz Phillips' installation, "Echo Evolution" was interactive, but the experience of her artwork is basically the same for everyone. Her art consisted of multiple speakers along a wall and on a table in a dim room, and a series of spiraling and straight blown-glass tube lights hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the table. The sound and the lights would turn on when you walked past certain sensors around the room that activated the different lights and sounds. Although what you saw and heard changed upon where you were walking, or how fast you were moving, the same lights and sounds always came on for people that walked in the same area, therefore you didn't have as much control over the art.  In this case, Phillips has more control over what you see and hear than you do as an active participant. You are simply walking through her maze to figure what turns on according to where you are in the exhibit. This is sort of like watching and controlling  a DVD. You can pick the order in which you watch it, (for example...the movie, next the documentary about it, and then the other trailers) but your still watching and hearing the same things, you just choose in which order to experience those things. I thought this specific installation was interesting, but I didn't find myself too engaged in it, since my presence didn't have as great of and effect on the work as in "Snow Mirror." I found this artwork to be less fulfilling to my description of interactive art because I don't have a dictatorship about what's going on; it's already scripted for me, I am just going through the motions.