Interactive Art

A closer look

Look for a readable invitation to act, a perceptible response and a relationship between the participant, the material and the surrounding space.

The response is part of the artwork

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room, created in 2006, provides a concrete example. His project description explains that a sensor records a participant’s heartbeat and makes a bulb flash to that rhythm. Earlier participants’ recordings move through the installation’s array of lights. The viewer contributes to the work’s changing state; the bulbs alone do not explain the piece.

An interactive work can involve physical materials, movement, sound or digital systems. Technology is a possible means, not the definition. A moving animation that ignores the viewer’s actions may be dynamic without being interactive. Likewise, a picture of someone touching a screen cannot prove that an actual response exists. Describe the action, the change and how a participant recognizes the connection.

Design the invitation and the consequence

For a small original study, choose one action and one visible consequence: turning a handle changes a shadow, moving a colored sheet changes an overlap, or stepping closer changes a projected pattern. Make the relationship easy to discover before adding more options. Test whether a new participant can understand what changed without an explanation from the maker.

Compose the space around the encounter. Leave room for bodies and movement, make the active area distinct and consider a way to participate from different heights or positions. The retained poster and collage are static illustrations of interaction ideas, not functioning installations or photographs of Pulse Room. Use them to sketch a proposal, then show the proposed before-and-after states. A successful image can explain an idea, but a working prototype is needed to test its behavior.