Ryszard W. Kluszczynski

Strategies of interactive art

An interactive artwork takes on the shape of an event. An artist does not make a final, completed piece of art, instead produces an area of activity for the receivers, whose interactive actions bring to life an artwork-event. Regardless of what shape the final product of an artists activity takes on, an interactive artwork finds its final formation only as a result of participative behavior of the viewers. The latter ones in that way become participants, performers, executors, or (co)creators of an artwork-event. What I consider the basic area of research in interactive art are the strategies organizing fields of activity for the receivers-participants. They can be understood as scores that project the interactive behavior of the receivers. The typology I put forward in this essay distinguish eight strategies of interactive art: strategy of instrument, game, archives, labyrinth, rhizome, system, network, and spectacle. The analysis of individual strategies reveals that all the common elements that occur there and characterizing an interactive experience en globe are organized differently each time. These elements are interface, interactions, data (database), data organization (hypertext, cybertext), software/hardware system, relations among participants, and performance/spectacle. In every strategy, a different factor takes a position superior to others and plays the basic role in the process of organizing interactive activities of the receivers. This means that it is not the occurrence within the frames of individual strategies of elements that are different each time, but their organization and hierarchy different each time that play a decisive role in providing strategies with their specific character. Discussing all strategies I shall distinguish their basic characteristic features but also pay attention to its range and variety of its forms observed so far. The latter aim I shall realize by pointing out to various actual examples of artistic usage of particular strategies.

Arts, Media, Cultures: Histories of Hybridisation

Nowadays we are faced with an enormous development of digital, information and communication technologies. Together with numerous phenomena, which are the products of activities that belong to the biotechnosphere, these technologies build a complex corpus called cyberculture. In this context art has an important, critical role to play. In particular (multi)media art can serve as an experimental laboratory, not only for new technologies but, especially, for studies of the new social relation(ship)s created or fuelled by those technologies. Media and multimedia information and communication technologies generate new promises, problems, and threats; and artists undertake efforts to examine this emerging area that has been repeatedly considered as a ‘post-biological syndrome’. In other words, artists do not only use media technologies, but also scrutinise and challenge them. In this sense the new (multi)media art could be deemed a successor of the avant-garde movement.

Re-Writing the History of Media Art: From Personal Cinema to Artistic Collaboration

ABSTRACT The author reinterprets the artistic phenomena that composed historical avant-garde art. His method of interpretation is an intertextual strategy that approaches the historical artifacts through recent phenomena. The first case study is of structural film; its most important attributes appear to be artistic strategies questioning the structural/material integrity, durability and permanence of the film work. The second case study is of the avant-garde strategy of collective work, reinterpreted through the open-source work and interactive art of today. The author identifies three steps in the development of the 20th-century concept of joint creative work: avant-garde general strategies of artistic collaboration; avant-garde film works oriented toward creative collectivism; and collaborative artistic practices that manifest themselves in non-hierarchical strategies of contemporary interactive art.

Art of virtual bodies

Abstract There is a very interesting movement in multimedia art nowadays, with such artists like Simon Penny, Jane Prophet, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Stelarc, and many others, working on artificial creatures, artificial life and intelligence. Virtual performances, and first of all, communication with those virtual beings seems to be one of the most fascinating aspects of experimental multimedia art today. In my paper I examine some art works as well as their theoretical context and some artistic attitudes concerning that subject.