[-empyre-] empyre: engagement was all

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

Probably not a wise idea to suggest that interactivity as an artistic paradigm was over, and Simon is right to wonder about that statement. So let me rephrase,
under two points of view. First, I would have to explain in much greater detail than possible here my dissatisfaction or boredom with interactive/programmed
environments in the performing arts, and my main reference point is performance, and to a lesser degree new media arts/installation art, where of course the
"paradigm" for two decades at least has gained prominence. I can't say my own own practice, or the attempts to experiment with interactive systems in dance,
goes back quite as far as some of the media art works created by members here on this list; I think I began to become aware of interactional design (with
computational software, capture systems, sensors, feedback systems, etc) around 1993 or 1994, so this is about two decades, and in the mid-2000s I was
still relatively convinced that there was no way around it if one were to work with software driven closed or generative systems on stage or in performance
constellations (mostly the kind of dark rooms so nicely described by Sue):

>>
In the  context of the beautiful setting of Bundanon, it sometimes seemed at  odds to be in a darkened studio, immersed in projected image, learning  to negotiate a highly mediated environment where motion was tracked, voice captured, action augmented, space constrained.
The presence of technology was very apparent in the particular  environment we created in the studio, which at first glance seemed in  total contrast to the 'natural' environment outside and loaded with constraints on 'the performers' 'freedom'  to move....
>>

Even as I was involved in the dance-tech movement, and thus in a series of performance-technologies-experiments and various learning stages and cross-fertilizations (all the work that emerged was hybrid and often
depended largely on collaborations between performers/choreographers and composers, sound artists, software artists and hackers, engineers, designers, architects, film makers, etc.), what I tried to say yesterday
is simply that programmable environments, during my recent work with dancers, musicians and visual artists, became aesthetically limiting to me, and the loaded constraints, also mentioned above by Sue, began to
overshadow to some extent the "attentiveness" we learnt in reacting to, or playing with, a "changing environment" - and here i am thinking not yet of the wider implications of the cultural and political world of
data transmissions and digital infrastructures, but of the reactive environments we tested in the studio or on stage, or in the emerging constellations of "participatory media installations" that invoked the audience
as players and asked them to learn the system and act in it.  A discussion of how so-called participatory installations tend to be overdetermined, loaded and often predictable and sometimes infantilizing or annoying, and only occasionally intriguing, challenging and poetic, is another matter; installations themselves have come to be an ever insistent art form that deserves careful and historically acute interpretation.
In dance, or music, or the visual arts/media contexts, as I tried to suggest, I've come to appreciate interactive system design less and less, especially since I'm not sure, to follow Simon's point, how we would evaluate
artistic success in a work's ability "to facilitate the critical self-consciousness required to become aware of this condition" of entanglement.   Is this point meant to state that interactive art raises critical consciousness about, or reminds
us of - unnecessarily, one would think? - the fact that we live in highly mediated environment?   In this case one would have to discuss some works or current propositions, say, in dance or in music or the visual arts, to look into the
framework for change that I wondered about when I asked Garth Paine about "'The Sustainability of Future Bodies'  and whether you can innovate with the body..