Interactivity in Installations

Installations focused around surveillance, especially live ones, reliant on interactivity with its audience like Dieter Froese's, are interesting in the way the embody the art/audience relationship. All art, by necessity, has to be viewed for it to have an effect, and viewed by a wide audience in order to achieve the status that allows it to be discussed and analyzed. (The only exception to this being other works that are viscerally aware of the necessity of this relationship, and choose to attempt to break it down in some way.) '

Rush says, on page 131, after discussing Froese's piece Not A Model For Big Brother's Spy Cycle, that from around this time "video installations took an active role in energizing the viewer to respond to the object viewed." It's a role that video can play more effectively than any medium of art previously, because of the numerous ways it can be used to achieve liveness and be in a constant state of change and flux. The question is whether this liveness -- parallel, in a number of discussions, to realism -- is something all video art should be striving to capture, simply by virtue of it being unmatched in other media.

Reading this brought to mind this post that I was linked to by a friend. The post itself is situated as a joke, obviously, but when thinking critically about performance art and large-scale installations like this, it becomes dramatically more interesting. The matching of the piece and the clothing is complete coincidence, and likely only to happen once in the entire course of the installation, but other museum-goers, many of whom probably recognize it as additional to the piece, see it as art.