Art That Puts You in the Picture, Like It or Not - nytimes

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April 27, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Art That Puts You in the Picture, Like It or Not
By SARAH BOXER

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 26 - Interactive art is irritating. Let's count the
ways at the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival, which opened over the weekend at
the Art Interactive gallery, the Stata Center (the new Frank Gehry-designed
building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus), the Genzyme
building and other places in and around Boston and Cambridge.

Problem No. 1: potty-mouthed machines. "PS," by Gretchen Skogerson and Garth
Zeglin at the Stata Center, is an oval mirror with a sign that bids you
"lean in close." You do. A voice says, "I like to masturbate in public."
Ack. Did anyone else hear that? Another voice pipes up, "Psst." You lean
into the mirror again, trying not to look at your reflection. A voice says,
"I have memories of places I've never been to." So what? Luckily, the room's
noise drowns out some of the dirty little secrets.

Problem No. 2: too much ritual, too little time. "1-Bit Love," by Noah
Vawter, is a musical altar, a totem covered in foil and exuding a synthetic
rhythm (a one-bit wave form). The pillar has red velvet knobs. People are
supposed to lay hands on it and turn the knobs to modulate the sound. No one
wants to be the first to paw the idol. And once you do, it's not clear what
effect you are having.

Then there is "Janken" (Japanese for "hand game"), a game of rock, paper,
scissors created by William Tremblay and Rob Gonsalves. Your opponent is a
skeletal hand wiggling on a screen. You compete by sticking your own hand in
front of a light sensor in the rock position (a fist), paper position (flat
out) or scissors position (two fingers ready to snip).

It's creepy and awesome. But there are two hitches: the skeleton will, with
no apology, choose its hand position after you've chosen yours (isn't that
cheating?); and you've got to orient your own hand exactly or the sensor
won't read it correctly.

Which brings us to problem No. 3: ungraciousness. Machines make no bones
about their own flaws, but are unbending about yours.

This is closely related to problem No. 4: moral superiority. Consider
"Applause," by Jeff Lieberman, Josh Lifton, David Merrill and Hayes Raffle.
You stoop to enter a curtained booth. (Already you're in the weak position.)
There's a movie screen divided into three parts, and in front of each is a
microphone. Clap vigorously into one of the microphones and the movie screen
in front of it comes to life, playing its movie. Stop clapping and the
action grinds to a halt.

Now, wouldn't it be great if you could get all three screens going at once?
You can! Just run from mike to mike, clapping in front of all three. Now
they're all going! Uh-oh. It's Hitler giving a speech. And there you are
clapping like crazy, you idiot.

Is every piece of interactive art designed to make you feel like a fascist,
a dupe, a cult member or someone cornered by a pervert at a party? No, of
course not.

At the Art Interactive gallery in Cambridge is Scott Snibbe's "Shadow Play,"
a four-part installation of video projections linked to camera sensors. One
part is a screen with a white rectangle that bends and moves when your
shadow pushes it. A second screen shows a silhouette of a piano mover
pulling a piano. Make your shadow cover the piano mover and he dissolves
into a swarm of bugs (a tribute to Luis Bunuel's film "Un Chien Andalou").

The best part is a screen divided into 16 squares. Walk in front of it and
you'll see your shadow occupying a square, until it gets bumped from the
lineup. People parade in front of the screen, doing their silly walks, conga
lines and cartwheels. Hooray! Here's a machine that is not your enemy or
your superior.

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art
(prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a
mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima's "Trains," at
the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is
a model train set guided by cellphone.

Two trains run through a landscape of movie scenes lovingly crafted with
tiny train-set figurines and props, including a nudist beach from "And God
Created Woman," a riot from "The Bad Lieutenant" and a nightclub from "Sid
and Nancy." It's the best part of the piece, and the least interactive. The
passengers on the train are characters from these and other movies, and
their dialogue is from the movies, too.

You "get on" the train (that is, you get to manipulate the passengers) by
using a cellphone to call a Game Boy attached to one of the cars. Once on,
you can push the star or pound sign (or shout "switch") to switch tracks,
push 4 (or shout "discharge") to discharge passengers, and push zero (or
shout "help!") for help.

Trouble is, you have to time the switch just right or it won't work. You can
peek at the passengers on the screen of the Game Boy only by chasing the
train around the table. And to hear the conversations, you listen in on the
phone, but if you can't hear you must read the dialogue projected on a
nearby screen while you're jogging by and frantically pushing buttons on the
phone. A good-natured assistant fiddles with the switches and offers
sympathy.

Outside the DeCordova Museum, you'll see a parked 1936 Chrysler Air-Flow
Sedan spray-painted silver. It is Nam June Paik's sculpture "Requiem for the
20th Century." From a good distance away you can hear Mozart's Requiem
blasting from under the hood. All the windows on one side are video screens
showing a visual history of the 20th century (or rather, a history of Mr.
Paik's work since the 1960's): faces of presidents morphing into masks,
soccer balls becoming maps, motorcycles and office phones, spinning CD's,
cities.

What a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No
interaction. No instruction. No insults. "Parking is the most serious
problem confronting 20th-century man," Mr. Paik once said in an interview
about the silver Chrysler. Now we've got more serious problems on our hands.

–
Lee Wells
Brooklyn, NY 11222

http://www.leewells.org
917 723 2524