I’m sitting in on one of Elin‘s classes at Mass Art and they’re showing some interesting new media work. Antenna Design‘s “Cherry Blossom” is a charming installation where passers by trigger flowers that grow on a screen. More people causes more flowers, no people and the screen shows softly falling snow.
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Another artist doing similar installations to be played with is Scott Snibbe. I love the look of his Compliant, where a projector simply projects a blank white square – but the user can push the edges of the square inwards. |
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scott
Isn’t that really pretty simple basic interface stuff, pushing a square? I understand that it’s, well, sort of cool, but does that qualify as art? Does the fact that it’s a projected square, rather than, say, a play-dough square, make it art? The flower thing seems cool.
Jill
Well, if play-dough was a New Medium and we were still kind of anxious about the edges of this new kind of a thing and still spending whole conferences in defining what it was (imagine three keynotes on What Is Play-Dough) perhaps it would be art?
scott
I guess it just bothers me that we jump up and down whenever we see the computer do something that play-dough can do but put a bunch of words that we need to pay more than momentary attention to in the middle of the play-dough and suddenly it seems too complex to even bother reading.
Jill
I’ll play play-dough with you any day, Scott…
real icon
Doesn’t it also have something to do with expectations? I *expect* a play-dough square (or rather, cube, ball, piece, whatever) to be soft and mouldable. I do not anticipate that a square of light projected onto a wall reacts in almost the same manner. Events associated with a square of light: dia show, Power Point presentation, language classes (our Swedish teacher used an overhead projector quite frequently). Mostly situations involving a rather silent audience and a single person standing in front of it, giving a lecture.
vika
At first, I repeatedly read the title of the work as “Complaint”, which struck me as a decent one for it as well.