Researching for this project I’ve found a huge amount of documentation in physical books and also in digital format like e-books, journals and other kinds of scholarly articles. When I started to research about the topic of interactivity I was really happy to discover that most of the writings about the subject fall into the fields of digital art, coding and technology; and these are areas in which I’ve been interested in during this course. Finding different books about the subject has driven me to really interesting contemporary artworks, practitioners and theories; inspiring me to develop my project and my knowledge in the field.
The book “A Touch of Code: Interactive Installations and Experiences” was a great introduction to find a good amount of artists in the field of interactive installations, some of them in the range of sound art too. Observing these artworks in pictures allowed me to find new ideas for my project and also to make further research about these artists and techniques, allowing me to direct my research further in this subject.
One of the artists that kept my attention for being featured in the majority of books within this field is the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. This Mexican-Canadian artist is one of the most influent contemporary electronic artists when talking about digital interactive installations, having exhibited his artworks all around the world. In these works he encourage the audience to participate in the installation with the use of sensors, positional sound and projections. But not only his actual artistic work is influential, he is also relevant for his theories in the field, giving revolutionary and controversial statements in conferences and interviews about technology, art and society. I would like to quote the following sentence, as it relates to the Technology and Nature issues of my project:
“I think it’s complete nonsense to pretend we could back to being outside of technology. We need to intensify our use of technology, because technology is part of ourselves”.
- Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Langey 2018)
Technology as part of our nature is one of the topics that I would like to research more in depth in the future, and this has brought me into finding more interesting theories and theorists.
But I didn’t just found contemporary work in my research, the previous more traditional and analog work of artists like Roy Ascott or Liz Phillips pioneered the way into these fields. These artists contributed to interactive sound installations and computer art during the end of the 20th century; in his book Sound Art Revisited, Adam Licht analyses Liz Phillips 1970’s works, stating that:
“Phillips also used sound as a perceptual tool, but in a more interactive way, to spotlight people’s movement within a space. A sculptor with no musical background, in the 1970s and 1980s she made many installations using radio frequency capacitance fields”.
Roy Ascott’s work was also innovative and revolutionary for his discoveries in computer art and in the field of cybernetics; in his book Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness we can find a collection of his best articles, speaking about art, early coding and interactive issues in the 20th century.
My most recent research has driven me to find interesting and intricate theories about the relation of technology and nature. Biophilic design and more in particular “Biophilia” is one of the aspects that keeps my interest at this point. In his essay The Human Relation With Nature and Technological Nature, Peter H. Kahn wrote that the the term was coined in 1984 by E.O. Wilson to refer to the mental, genetically based human need and propensity to affiliate with “life and lifelike processes”. Other related theories like Techno-Nature and the Anthropocene are also interesting in this aspect, these are concepts that rely in the relationship between humans, technology and the ecosystem and I will develop these theories more in detail during the rest of this project.
This was just a summary of the research side of my project, there is much more information that would need to be disclosed from all these books and articles, but we will leave it here for the blog work. These ideas are going to be explained and further explored in my Research Project and Portfolio during the rest of the course.
References:
Ascott, R. (2003). Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. United Kingdom: University of California Press.
Feireiss, L.(ed.)(2011) A Touch of Code: Interactive Installations and Experiences. Germany: Prestel Publishing.
Kahn, P. H., Severson, R. L., & Ruckert, J. H. (2009). The Human Relation With Nature and Technological Nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(1), 37–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20695991 Accessed: 13-10-2024
Langley, H. (2018) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explores human identity in our hyper-connected world. Available at: https://www.documentjournal.com/2018/12/rafael-lozano-hemmer-explores-human-identity-in-our-hyper-connected-world/
Licht, A. (2019) Sound Art Revisited. New York, NY: Bloomsbury