Christian Cieri - "The Fantasy Beyond Control" and "Art as a Performance Act"

Lynn Herchann’s “The Fantasy Beyond Control” spoke of interactive media, specifically on interactive systems where observers completely controlled their experience. For me, this raised a very important question on what exactly an interactive media was. In the instance of Lorna, observers could control what occurred with their experience, and ultimately became creators of this media. However, are they really observers anymore? They’ve created something new, as it’s different for every person. When I read interactive systems, I immediately thought of video games as being an interactive system I use each day. But this thinking was flawed; while the experience of the same video game is different for multiple people, and they control what occurs, the game has a set ending, or endings, that define the entire experience. Thus, video game players are still observers. But here, the interactive system users are becoming creators in that their experience, though it can be replicated by someone else, is totally unscripted, and can end in unexpected ways.

Klemm’s article “Art as a Performance Act” was rather thought provoking as well, as it touched along the same lines of Herchann’s, but in a different manner. Klemm’s main focus on how physical objects become more when interacted with is interesting to think about because it’s such a true fact that we always take for granted. An object is just an object until we interact with it; then it has definition and a purpose. For example, a chair is something we all sit in, and we know that, but when not actively sitting in a chair, it is just an object taking up space in a room. When we finally do sit on it, it has become something for us to use, and while it is still an object, we are interacting with it and giving it a purpose.

After reading these two artciles, one artist that stuck out in my mind was Andy Warhol, for his Brillo Boxes. A recreation of Brillo Boxes and nothing more, Andy Warhol took an everyday object, recreated it, and called it art. Empty boxes are these “objects” that have no meaning, but now that people have stopped to mentally interact with them, and think about them, they are art.

The Brillo Boxes can be found here:

http://www.warhol.org/education/resourceslessons/Aesthetics--Arthur-Danto/