Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Responsive Environments, Protagonism, The Gift, Sustenance, Productive Principle.

This positioning paper is in two parts. The first part examines the notion of ‘the gift’ as applied to artistic works in The ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork, edited by Anna Dezeuze (2010) and to disrupt this notion with the countervailing concept of sustenance. This analysis critiques sociologist Marcel Mauss’ research into the First Peoples of Canada, specifically in terms of the development of his theory of ‘potlatch’ based predominantly on the Kwakwakw’wakw People and their destruction of property as a show of strength. The paper seeks to disrupt this concept, summarised as ‘the ‘gift’ as obligation’, with the Coast Salish Peoples’ practices of offering sustenance to their fellow tribes through the sharing of food wealth. This can, it is asserted, provide resources for the author’s present research on responsive environments. The second part explores the principle of sustenance. The paper argues that, from this perspective the artist’s role is to create resources that can be productively extended, challenged or repurposed by a process of ‘protagonism’. This is because those resources, supported by digital technologies, sustain opportunities both in and out beyond responsive environments. This position, it is asserted, supports an intensification and diversification of Claire Bishop’s participation motivations of ‘activation’, ‘authorship’ and ‘community’.

• Russell Richards is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Southampton Solent University, UK. He has written on digital aesthetics and interactivity: ‘An Aesthetic or  Anaesthetic?  Developing a Digital Aesthetics of Production’, Journal of Media Practice 5 (3) (2005) and Users, Interactivity and Generation New Media and Society 8 (4) (2006). He is a
  member of KikiT VisuoSonic who have performed/presented across the world including Interactive Futures, Victoria, British Columbia (2007), Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, UK (2008), ISEA, Singapore, (2008) and at the London Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2010). In the latter case, interactive visuals in real-time to create ‘Digital Tapestries’ projected along side 500-year-old tapestries in gallery 94 of the V&A. Richards is researching a PhD in Responsive Environments at Southampton Solent University. His research is focusing on how such environments can position users as protagonists.

Full text (PDF) p.  718-721