The Interactive Show
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring pioneering works of computer art, interactivity, and cyberspace. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (November 1992).
Exhibit at the Thread Waxing Space, New York
The viewer completes the artwork — was this ever much more than a rhetorical proposition? For the artists in "The Interactive Show," to the contrary, this is no longer a rhetorical but rather a functional proposition. Their medium is not a material per se but rather a connection or a conjunction, a medium in the etymological sense of the word, something that happens between a work and a viewer.
How many times have you gone to an art gallery and wished you could take a few whacks at something with a hammer? Matthew Schlanger's Lumpy Banger, 1991, invites you to pound a few nails into a block of wood that is wired for sound and embedded with a video monitor. Schlanger provides the hammer and nails, though he hopes that "some very creative people might even create and bring with them their own nails, thereby extending the interactive process beyond the walls of the gallery." He also hopes that you will be considerate enough not to try to pound a nail directly into the video monitor, but what's to stop you? The great thing about the work is that the choice is yours.
Some of the artists in the show, which was curated by Carol Parkinson and Neil Zusman, use interactive works to explore the subjectivity of participants' responses. For instance, Yoshi Wada's What's the Matter With Your Ear? allows you to conduct a mechanical orchestra by pushing various buttons that activate such "instruments" as a coffee grinder, a windshield wiper, a chintzy drum kit, and a suspended steel barrel hit by hammers. The idea is that there is nothing intrinsically pleasurable in any given sound; rather, its affective value depends upon the conjunction of sound-producing mechanism, listener, and context. It was fun to play Wada's piece once or twice, for example, but the people who work in the gallery said it wasn't so easy to listen to day after day.
Denise Mortillaro's Ahmandia's Telematic Embrace has something of a didactic function, like an interactive display at a science museum. Ahmandia is Mortillaro's online moniker (i.e. the name she uses when she communicates via computer), and her piece is a software program called a Hypercard stack that introduces the user to the wonderful world of telematic communication. In one stack, for instance, you learn how to leave electronic mail for the artist; in another, you learn the etiquette of "smileys," electronic shorthand such as :-) (look at it sideways).
But didactic interactive work always has the potential to slip over into the Pavlovian, as in the case of Brent Scott's Plexus. In this work, a graphic of a woman's sleeping face is presented on a large screen. When you touch your finger to a small interface, it shows up on the screen as a red dot and the woman wakes up. By moving your finger around, you cause certain states in the woman: boredom, excitement, etc. The point, however, is to learn how to make her orgasm. The machine thus not only responds to your touch but trains you to push the right buttons (unless maybe you're sadistic or frigid or technophobic and you don't want to make Plexus climax). Is sex the great paradigm of an interactive future where you will be able to talk to your car, immerse yourself in virtual reality, or in other ways have intercourse with your smart machines? When Scott says that "the machine becomes a reasonable surrogate for human contact. It is less threatening than one-on-one encounters," it sounds less like great sex than electronic diddling. But hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
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