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.Interactivity: OTIS, Muds, MOOs, and MoreIt would be difficult to trace the early roots of interactive art because all art is actually interactive on some level.A Shakespearean actor makes an aside to the audience and it is, after all, the audience's response which drives theactors.In computer terminology, the distinction between multimedia and interactivity has become somewhatcloudy.To me, the concept finds its origins with artists such as DuChamp, who made works that were meant tobe touched and handled or Julian Beck, whose Living Theater produced works that were meant to triggerindividual responses from the audience.Sound and light pieces, where an observer's movements trigger sensingdevices that then drive light, sound, or movement, began to evolve in the 1960s.Environmental playgrounds existthroughout the world today.Unique to the online culture are muds, MOOs, MUSHes, and interactivecommunities such as MUSE that can, and should, be viewed as an art form in and of themselves.(For a morecomplete discussion of muds see Chapter 11, "Online Entertainment.")Multiuser interactive environments, Adventure, and MultiUser Dungeon, being perhaps the oldest and mostfamous text-based object-oriented games, create an internal virtual landscape and provide characters, objects, andsituations that fill a temporal landscape of action, inaction, chance occurrence, and skill.In the Renaissance, anartist would have to capture the whole gist of possibilities within one static painting.Volumes have been writtenanalyzing the various postures of the Saints in "The Last Supper," for example.The programmer still must createthe characters and the scenery with care, balance, and insight.An entire culture then blossoms around the gamewhere users exchange strategies.To a certain extent, the game is now beyond the hand of the author.Not long ago in New York City, and in Chicago as well, there were art installations that were mini golf coursesdesigned by artists and meant to be played upon.At the vastly exciting Jonathan Borofsky installation at theWhitney Museum in the mid-eighties, among the enormous body of static and kinetic works was a hand-paintedPing-Pong table complete with paddles and ball, and the museum guard's responsibility in this case was toretrieve or replace the occasional overshot or overworn ball.As more systems have allowed direct access toindividual public directories, the individual home page has become a personalized interconnective tool.Handselected favorite sites as well as local gossip/news combine with the author's thoughts, comments, and views tobecome a type of interactive environment to play within.Often they combine pictures and sounds.MUSE (Multi User Simulated Environment) extends the multiuser role-playing game to where an entirecommunity exists in real-time.Citizens may enter rooms, embark upon paths, manipulate objects, and createrealms for others to explore.The participant doesn't merely play through a pre-programmed set of rules andlocations.Objects in space become a medium for creativity, and it's possible for user-citizens to orchestratescenarios as well.http://docs.rinet.ru/ITricks/tig22.htm (10 of 22) [4/18/1999 12:46:03 AM] Tricks of the Internet Gurus tig22.htmFrom a commercial point of view, interactivity will be the primary means by which the consumer is pulled in,analyzed, fitted, given a chance to test drive the product around the block, and billed.All of the challenges thatgo into making a MUD or a MOO are contained in this growing field.Interactive artists have been dealing withmany of the same issues as well, though usually from a conceptual or aesthetic perspective.How, for example, doI create sounds that when triggered by a person's movement, allow the person to know what particular movementat what moment triggered the sound? At the same time, how do you handle the overload of many people in aspace causing the sensors to be constantly triggered? And if you successfully trim the sensitivity way down, howdo you handle the times when one person or no one is on the site? The artist must not only conceive of thepossibilities but he or she must also create a fluid, purposeful transition between these different states.Finally, it'snot just the look and feel of the work, but an idea is also being conveyed.Creative WritingLet's not forget the time-honored art of writing.The Internet forces each of us to be verbal.We "meet" peopleonline on a daily basis who we may never actually physically meet.Most of us don't have full fledged videoconferencing, and therefore we're forced to express ourselves through the written word.Paradoxically, as thetechnology has so rapidly grown, we have returned to the pre-twentieth century skill of letter writing.I havefound that I am much more likely to e-mail a letter to a complete stranger than I am to phone someone I don'tknow.I'll more readily post my comments to an online discussion group than I would break into an actual groupin "real" life.How many of us would hold a sign up in a busy train station reading, "Can someone help me withadding memory to my PC," and yet the relative anonymity of the Net allows us to admit our weaknesses to theworld at large and ask for help.The Internet as an Art MediumArtists find it hard to resist any new medium.Even the most traditional painter can become interested and evenquite enthused over a new kind of paint as was the case when acrylics were introduced.Artists have beeninvolved with the capabilities and technologies of computers ever since this medium became accessible.Many ofthe oldest SIGs on the earliest online systems are art interest groups.Sound artists use MIDI.Video artists edit oncomputers.Special effects on stage are computer controlled.The communications media have also beenextensively exploited.An interesting precursor to the interactive era was video artist Nam Jun Paik's New Years'Eve piece in the 1980's.24 locations around the earth separated by an hour's time zone difference andcommunicated real-time via interactive uplinked video.Internet based art has been initiated, or rather instigated,by people whose fields are not generally art.John Romkey's "Internet Toaster," driven by its two Internet basedcommands "push" and "pop" (which are assembler program instructions) has spawned a genre of Internetic art.Awork that which went online in June 1994, "The File Room"(http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu/FileRoom/documents/homepage.html) uses the Web to connect to and examinecensored works of art in files created and stored by contributors in several countries throughout the world.In the fall of 1994, The Electronic Cafe finds its U.S.home at New York's Kitchen (kitchen@panix.com), avenerable performance art and multimedia exhibition space that has survived since the early 1970's.The NewYork strong site, as it is called, joins several other cities around the world to create a setting where artists aroundthe world can create and share interactive multidisciplined works.A dancer in California, for example, mayperform in real-time with a musician in Austria.Cyber-culture blossoms here as local patrons of the cafe haveaccess to the teleconferencing systems as well.Countless virtual pubs and cyber-collectives exist throughout theworld where users meet to discuss and collaborate.Internetic InstallationsThe issue of how to design, create, and install "internetic art" is a challenge.Even the most basic idea ofhttp://docs.rinet.ru/ITricks/tig22
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