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Cham, Karen
(2006).
URL: http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2006/abstracts/cham.ht...
Abstract
Any discussion of aesthetics & interactivity must first transgress the divide in modern western art history between art & technology. Despite the fact that technical principles have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion & the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalized in art historical dialogues. The mechanically reproduced artifact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity & originality anchored in production techniques.
For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the 1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still neglected in art theory. Not only can video artifacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity essential to establishing an aesthetic value.
Digital artifacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artifact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and original than a mechanically reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artifact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ themselves.
These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In Media Studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artifacts clearly demonstrates that whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context. In such a way it is easily possible to demonstrate various aesthetics of photography, film, television and video.
In the same vein, interactive media artifacts abound in our day to day lives. This paper will argue that for academic dialogues to embrace the aesthetics of interactive art in a constructive and meaningful way the intellectual prejudice against reproduction & access must be abandoned. For example, how can one seriously analyse the aesthetic of Edward Ihnatowicz 'Senster' (1970) without the context of contemporary science fiction when it’s a fifteen foot high hydraulic robot with a triple proboscis of sensors for a 'head'?
Only in this way can the use of wholly appropriate theories from Media & Cultural studies ensure the technical skill of commercial producers, the narrative dexterity of on-line gamers and the visual eloquence of the television audience are accounted for in both interactive art production & theoretical discourses on new aesthetics.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
