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Authors: |
Lyons, Keiran | |
Title: |
Audiences and Users and assigning assumptions. | |
Keywords: |
Interaction. Installation. Audience. New Audiences. | |
| click here to download the full paper | ||
Abstract: |
The paper deals with questions that
arose during the presentation of Assigning Handlers to a Shadow at Consciousness
Reframedin 1998. This was an installation dealing with the uncertainties that emerge in
group decision making. I will however be turning away from the dilemmas of decision making
bodies, in this paper, to focus on the situation of audiences within the frame of digital
interactive art. The discussion addresses the creators of off-screen installation based projects rather than screen-based ones. The users of screen based interactive works are generally familiar with the routines and protocols of the medium and they do not experience the exposures that affect audiences in installation space. The effect of this exposure reveals a problem in the reception of interactive art. I will be asking if audiences can behave meaningfully, within the physical space and temporal dimension of interactivity, and I will argue that increasingly they do not. This is a crucial question for the artists who design interactive works. It is also compelling for the audiences who enter a compact with the artist through their own engagement with the work. I will orientate my discussion towards this audience and the difficulties that as an audience it encounters. The words that are used to redefine them e.g - 'the user', 'the viewer', 'the [v]user' - are strangely disengaged terms that describe inadequately the commitment of audiences who cross the threshold into interactive work. They offer more in their engagement than these terms would allow. Defining this problem lies at the heart of this paper. I will be asking what strategies can be devised to prevent interactivity from diminishing into the disengaged simplicities of sampling culture. After all it was this original dissatisfaction that contributed to the enthusiasm for interactive processes in the first place. It might simply be a generation thing and an argument made that an emerging audience will bring the necessary sensibilities to create better avenues of meaning to interactive work. Perhaps this will be so. For the moment, however the problem would seem to be embedded in the original assumptions made by artists about audiences and therefore these assumptions need looking at again. |
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| Lyons, Kieran |
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