On audience attitude in participative and interactive forms (original) (raw)
Related papers
Audience as medium: Internet art, audience contribution and agency
2008
The relationship between artists, artworks and audiences has been changing rapidly at the latest since Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1923). Theorists and artists alike, Roy Ascot and Frank Popper among them have written about the ways that artists relinquish authorship and delegate artistic production. This the-sis builds on these concepts and argues that the audience can be regarded as a medium used by artists. This thesis focuses on participatory Internet-artworks. Glyphiti and Communimage are analyses for the way their appearances are mainly to be attributed to the work of participators. The artworks’ dependence on audiences to complete the concepts they embody is related to video installations of the sixties and seventies. Midnight Madness and the installation and website of noplace are analyzed as recent examples of works that incorporate user-generated content. Using audiences as part of an artwork provides an artistically appealing form of randomness. Using the audience as a medium can provide an intended distortion to the appearance of works. User-generated content and audience participation give back a sense of originality and authenticity to artworks. Although interactivity is generally felt as giving audiences more agency the opposite is of-ten true. In the case of the works analyzed here the artists provide the framework of possibilities for participants to work with.
Article: Spectator, Participant or Dupe?: (Re-)imagining the Audience through New Media and its Arts
In this paper I discuss two competing sets of claims about new media art practice. The first set celebrates and champions the new aesthetic possibilities afforded by digital technologies and argues that these enable new and ‘liberatory’ modes of spectatorship based on play, performance and participation. The second suggests that far from emancipating the spectator, new media art devalues genuine social interaction through an illusory participation in trivialised interactions. I conclude by suggesting that, given the increasing sociocultural significance of new media technologies, a dialectical synthesis of these positions is both desirable and possible.
Recovering the Activist Force of Interactive Art
Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Digital Arts - Crossing Digital Boundaries, ARTECH 2012, 2012
This article analyzes the effects of the reduction of physical distance between artwork and spectator/participant during aesthetic experiences. It claims that immersion and transparency, so commonly found in interactive artworks, extend a design strategy found in everyday gadgets and appliances. However, despite their power to engage the spectator in a sensual experience, they seem to lack critical thought, considered here as a key aspect of art experiences. Regarding this situation, the text proposes three pathways for a critical interactive art practice.
Spectator, Participant or Dupe?:(Re-) imagining the Audience through New Media and its Arts
arch.kmutt.ac.th
In this paper I discuss two competing sets of claims about new media art practice. The firstset celebrates and champions the new aesthetic possibilities afforded by digital technologies and argues that these enable new and 'liberatory' modes of spectatorship based on play, performance and participation. The second suggests that far from emancipating the spectator, new media art devalues genuine social interaction through an illusory participation in trivialised interactions. I conclude by suggesting that, given the increasing socio-cultural significanceof new media technologies, a dialectical synthesis of these positions is both desirable and possible.
Goffman in the Gallery: Interactive Art and Visitor Shyness
Symbolic Interaction, 2013
In an effort to facilitate public engagement, contemporary art galleries and museums house interactive exhibits incorporating digital media. Despite removing traditional barriers of cultural capital, however, these exhibitions now presume a level of technological and performative competence, which can feel equally intimidating to visitors. Reporting on an UK-based ethnographic study and using dramaturgical theory, we show how interactive exhibitions can evoke situational shyness in visitors, through the combination of a demand for active, performative engagement and the deliberate restriction of instructional and explanatory information. In this ambiguous setting, visitors search for a social script to guide their action, the absence or opaqueness of which creates self-conscious inhibition. Actors adapt to this resourcefully by looking toward others to provide a replacement script; these may be companion visitors, strangers, or imaginary audiences. Some visitors, meanwhile, demonstrate resistance by refusing to engage with the interactive art agenda altogether, preferring to assume a role of detached spectatorship.
Reception of Art in the Public Space -The Most Common Reasons for Non-acceptance and Their Causes 1
In the study we analyse the goals, reception and social impact of art in the public space. A potentially wide group of recipients has the opportunity to reciprocate the art located directly in an environment that usually serves the pragmatic needs of ordinary people. If the work catches the public's attention, many individuals usually distribute a reproduction of the work in the form of a photograph on the Internet via social networks. However, the mass availability of art presented in this way can also lead to the expression of negative reactions of its perceiver. The aim of the study is to name; and to some extent categorise the reasons for not accepting visual artistic expressions in public space. In principle, they can be categorised into: pragmatic (i.e. practical), subjective (i.e. reasons for non-acceptance based on the recipient's individual previous experiences) and reasons for non-acceptance given by the varying degree of sensitivity of the perceiver. We draw on specific extreme cases of non-acceptance of an artistic expression, the consequence of which was that it had to be removed from the public space or replaced by another work. The categorisation can serve as recommendations for practice, as based on the identification of shortcomings, artists can avoid them in their further work for public space, as well as the creators of this space themselves. This is also one of the paths to the durability, or rather to the temporary stability and wider reach of the presented artistic production.
In an effort to facilitate public engagement, contemporary art galleries and museums house interactive exhibits incorporating digital media. Despite removing traditional barriers of cultural capital, however, these exhibitions now presume a level of technological and performative competence, which can feel equally intimidating to visitors. Reporting on an UK-based ethnographic study and using dramaturgical theory, we show how interactive exhibitions can evoke situational shyness in visitors, through the combination of a demand for active, performative engagement and the deliberate restriction of instructional and explanatory information. In this ambiguous setting, visitors search for a social script to guide their action, the absence or opaqueness of which creates self-conscious inhibition. Actors adapt to this resourcefully by looking toward others to provide a replacement script; these may be companion visitors, strangers, or imaginary audiences. Some visitors, meanwhile, demonstrate resistance by refusing to engage with the interactive art agenda altogether, preferring to assume a role of detached spectatorship. Keywords: Goffman, interactive art, shyness, interaction, scripts
Reception of Art in the Public Space-The Most Common Reasons for Non-acceptance and Their Causes
2021
In the study we analyse the goals, reception and social impact of art in the public space. A potentially wide group of recipients has the opportunity to reciprocate the art located directly in an environment that usually serves the pragmatic needs of ordinary people. If the work catches the public's attention, many individuals usually distribute a reproduction of the work in the form of a photograph on the Internet via social networks. However, the mass availability of art presented in this way can also lead to the expression of negative reactions of its perceiver. The aim of the study is to name; and to some extent categorise the reasons for not accepting visual artistic expressions in public space. In principle, they can be categorised into: pragmatic (i.e. practical), subjective (i.e. reasons for non-acceptance based on the recipient's individual previous experiences) and reasons for non-acceptance given by the varying degree of sensitivity of the perceiver. We draw on sp...
Participation has become a major issue for the arts. At a structural level, funders’ requirements for greater public engagement have been informed by a long tradition of macro-sociological studies of arts consumption (Bourdieu 1984). On an artistic/cultural level, the recent emergence of ‘participatory art’ as a genre (Bishop 2012) marks the ongoing development of a politicised thematic focus on questions of authorship, cultural authority and social relations in artistic movements (Bourriaud 2002; Corris 2006). However, beyond studies of participation in art as a symbolic/political activity, the range of practices involved in its production and consumption have rarely been described as an interrelated set of situated social processes. Bringing together scholars working on a variety of fields (partner dance, choreography, visual art, music, TV production), this panel offers a range of empirical studies of various forms of participation in aesthetic activities and contexts, and proposes new opportunities for the study of artistic and aesthetic activities from an EM/CA perspective.