Abstract

Due to its processuality and multi-modality, interactive new media art presents a challenge for the humanities. Not only is it a hybrid of visual and performative arts, it even exceeds both fields of research through its foundation of aesthetic experience on action as opposed to contemplation. Interactive art is, on the one hand, a technical system designed by an artist (or any entity that can be considered author of the system). This system has a (more or less) permanent existence as material or coded interaction offer, independent from its actual realization by the visitor. This characteristic determines two basic parameters of interactive art: It is usually presented in the context of an exhibition (not as a scheduled performance), and it can age, i. e. become a historic “work of art”.

• Katja Kwastek (DE) is art historian and worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. from 2006 to 2009. Before, she was Assistant Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (Munich, DE) and Visiting Scholar at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, US). She has curated exhibition projects, lectured and published widely, including the catalogue “Ohne Schnur. Art and Wireless Communication” (2004). Currently she finishes a book on the aesthetics of interaction in digital art.

Full text (PDF) p. 293-294