Abstract

Active participation of the recipient is one of the basic themes in 20th-century artistic production. In the 1950s and 60s, op art and kinetic art, on the basis of analogue media, already revealed the artists’ intention to involve the audience in the completion of the artwork. Interactive pieces of the 1990s bring new media to the fore and pose new challenges to the viewer. The dwindling distance between artist and viewer, adumbrated, for example, by the work of Sommerer and Mignonneau, “The Interactive Plants Growing” from 1992, can be observed today in numerous works that demand a high degree of engagement on the side of the viewer, e.g. “Messa di Voce” (Levin/Lieberman, 2003) or “Flick_KA” (Weibel/ Gommel, 2007).

• Dominika Szope (DE)is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Siegen, DE. After studying art and media studies, her recent work focus has been on Web 2.0 social software applications and on the role of users and their capacity to act.

Full text (PDF) p. 288-289