the image is still on screen.
the questions repeat.
the line is open.
what do you want to say?

cabletwo.net

what happens when you not design not to watch, but to live through? how do you structure something that must be unstructured to live? what happens when you set objects up in order to let them play out?

more importantly, what happens when you stop waiting and decide to make your art now?

rewatching the false scent now, i feel like i’m not witnessing the event, but the trace it left behind. i piece together evidence by reliving sense memory like a witness recounting a crime. where did i last see her?

it becomes an inbetween state resulting from the afterimage of unrepeatable participation. the experience of rewatching becomes the haunting. it takes on a different form, you still experience the rupture but with increased distance.

as the scale of the audience increases, interactivity tends to flatten. you can’t interact with 10,000 people the same way you can with 10. reactive media becomes the same as when it is recorded, the artifact becomes the ghost of the process. going from participatory to observational.

even when we aren’t directly participating, we experience it by proxy. the very liveness of an unfolding event, its unpredictability and temporality, affects us. to witness something live is to be changed by it, because the outcome is not fixed. it carries risk.

to interact with the work is to touch it, leave a mark, distort it forever. a form of violence. the pressure to act creates the conditions for ecstasy that results from the breaking of states. it is playful, impulsive, transformative. it’s not embodying a narrative but the process shaped by the now.

the results were varied. they found her on a bus headed out of town. she was at the miskatonic university CVS. she’s pitching with the phillies right now. the suspect is based on the last time greg washed a cup. she was armed and dangerous. she was alone, and afraid. her name was chrys anthemum.

i tried to take a more planned approach with the false scent. I scripted a series of interrogative questions, interpolating pieces from pinter’s the birthday party. images flashing like a cop’s light. backgrounds and google street view in juxtaposition like some parallax view ass montage

what happens in reactive media is that a viewer sees not just the work, but themselves in the work, what we might call the projection of the self. it's not physical. there is still a boundary, a distancing between media and art. the urge comes from wanting to smash that thing apart.

in the way that both music and film are mediums of time controlled by their respective units (frames, sequences, notes), maybe the overall concept can be applied to reactive media. it’s shaped by juxtaposition of interactions. we are compelled to enact the collision that occurs through montage

one thing i noticed is that when streams are made to react to the input of a live audience, it creates a stillness that results in a pressure, urging participants to shape the experience impulsively. you experience time removed from context. looping until enacted on by an external source.

i started trying more often, playing with open-ended, prompts that could be interpreted differently by audiences. the more vague the better. going from voicemail prompts with drawn backgrounds, to just leaving calls open during all streams.

i didn’t know what was happening until twenty minutes before showtime. the idea became to create something generative to build on itself, stating that this was the media landscape of the 21st century.

what is your media landscape?