Interactivity in the Digital Art

Interactivity in Digital Art

If we spoke of interactivity in the art and we want to look for the origins, can be result contradictory. Duchamp usually said that any piece of art to be read needs a process of creativity to be decoded, for this reason we could say that any art piece it’s interactive.

We continued investigating in the interactivity of the media them we were with find Bertold Brecht and his developed around the radio ("to change this apparatus of the distribution to comunicación"(1), a use differentiated from the television with the same intention to dissolve to the dichotomy receiving-producer, trusting the potentials emancipates of not hierarchies systems of communication. Another initial point we could find in fluxus when they began to use happening and performance to question the relation that the audience have with the art, speaking about the object and the lost of this. Also they dealed with the subject of the communication and for it, they theorized about the new mass media that appeared like the television. In them, this machine of images lost its customary invisibility, calling the attention on its physical presence and materiality as concrete device. Simultaneous negation, therefore, of the visibility of the image and the invisibility of the apparatus. The multiple delays of the spectator and their unquestionable desire of disappearance no longer here are satiated by the succession of visual moments and vertiginous ruptures chained to a continuity of sequences and fast transitions.
A point to emphasize on the interactivity is the make to give an opportunity to the implication/participation hearing in the art piece. The process of the piece has a part of participation of the audience not being the author of the piece the person in charge that deciphers and disturbs the complete route of the piece.

One of the big problems than we found, is the location of these pieces; normally arranged in galleries, museums, institutions, ect... where the tradition of "look but do not touch" is very latent over the audience, where these act shyly or simply don’t act by fear not to commit something that it’s not allow.

But I find asking myself, Does exist this really interactivity? For example an affluent fact known that is the button "To close the door" in many elevators is placebo without utility, ready in the place to only give to the individuals the impression that they participate in some way, contributing to the rapidity of the day of the elevator when we pushed that button, the door is closed exactly at the same time that when we pushed the button that indicates the floor without "worrying" the process by the fact to also push the button of "closing the door". This extreme case of false participation is an appropriate metaphor of the participation of the individuals in our "postmodern" political process... Of course, the postmodern answer to this would be that the radical antagonism only emerges, as the society even is perceived like totality, as Adorno said that contradiction is difference under the identity aspect. So that the idea is that with the postmodern era, the backward movement of the identity of the society involves simultaneously the backward movement of antagonism, dividing in two parts the social body what we received in exchange for this is one person of the indifference like the neutral means in which the multitude (of life styles, etc.) it coexists. Then, What it’s the point for the artist does not mediating to the audience in its work? Is not perhaps an interactive piece a masked closed route? Does really exist the interactivity? For me I would only talk about the interactivity when the act of the art it’s a way of visibility or make become aware about a subject. Other good example will be talk about the hackactivism when they proposed some flood net to get something for the better status of a community, to me it’s a real act of interactivity.


And after all the massive part of the artistic projects more assets in the field of the critical reflection on the use of mass media of masses been has based on the belief in that it is possible to solve many of the present problems of the society through different a public communication. For that reason we find its insistence in the attempt to produce means, surroundings of opinion interchange and language, giving then a production of new forms of critical community through them.