Act/React

Brian Knepp’s Healing Pool is a work consisting of a large floor-bound screen used by two overhead projectors and cameras. The work projects orange and black gray-matter shapes on the floor which slowly grow and conjoin with each other throughout the lifetime of the work. Until the entire board is filled, the work will continuously grow. The cameras, mounted aside the overhead projectors, scan, in real-time, your location by monitoring your shadows. The shapes projected by the work will be erased as you pass over them.

Daniel Rozin’s Peg Mirror is a work consisting of wooden dowels connected to servo motors arranged in a circle. The center of the work consists of a camera. Because of the shape of each dowel (cut on a vertical diagonal), shadows are cast past the pegs depending on what way they turn. The camera in the center finds the highest point of contrast to whatever it views, and recreates, in a frightening realistic manner, the light and dark areas of the space directly in front of it.

Many works in modern art museums are the product of classical training. Painters express ideas through the representation of the real world through techniques involving color, shape, perspective, shadow, etc. Musicians express ideas through carefully constructed phrases and motifs through characteristics such as rhythm, melody, timbre, etc. Most works of art are for perception, stimulus. They are solid and concrete - unchanging between viewings. Healing Pool has a

Films are usually in their finished form (or very close to it) when an audience views it. The Mona Lisa was the same a decade ago - and will be the same a decade from now, aside from restoration. Duchamp stated that a work is not complete until its exhibition, where the ideas of the viewer change something about the reception of the work itself to that viewer. This is true for the great bulk of art. But, both Knepp and Rozin’s works break something about our involvement in the artistic process. They DO change over time. Although they operate on a set of unchanging principles, they have a method of reflecting the changes of the environment in which they are installed - they have a method of reflecting the changes in the person interacting with them.

The people I’ve noticed experiencing this work, including myself, try their hardest to test the boundaries of the piece’s inherent interactivity. Because the viewer directly controls the immediate outcome and state of the work, there is little hesitation to immerse yourself within the space of the work. No one rubs their hand against the canvas of a painting hanging on a museum wall - maybe its because the traditional way to receive a painting is through a visual medium alone; maybe its because there is a sort of faux pas in being that intimate with such a relic. No one simply viewed these works. They interact with these works like a game. George Fifield stated in his article: “Since we are always ‘filling in’ the information an artist presents, we interact wiht all art. While we can thus be said to ‘interact’ with the visual arts, music, books, and movies, we do so in a mental or psychological way. Truly interactive art, however, is based on percept that distinguish it from ‘passive’ or linear art - whether visual, cinematic, literary, or musical. Visitors to a work of interactive art choose the path they take through it...”

During my time in the Act/React exhibit, I noticed, on three separate occasions, that people would try to eliminate everything from the board in Healing Pool. “I’ve noticed that my shadow erases part of the work - what would happen if I erase it all - Will it grow back? Will the flow of the piece change”? The same thing happened with Peg Mirror - people would stand before the work at varying distances and varying speeds of movement to see if they could move faster than the peg mirror could change.