Act/REact Exhibit

Scott Snibbe’s Deep Walls (2003)
Camilla Utterback, Untitled 5 & 6 (2003)

Deep Walls is an interactive display that, at first glance, is 16 loops arranged in a grid, constantly playing. Once the viewer steps into a certain area, they find that one of the boxes in the grid is a video of themselves, doing whatever they are doing. Once they step out of the area, they find themselves as a constant loop on one of the 16 boxes.

While I was at the museum, I observed a couple for a while and their reaction to this. They were hesitant to even step in the frame at first, slowly testing out the grounds, not really fully understanding what was happening. When they realized how the apparatus worked, they started experimenting. One of them would walk into the frame and fall over once they hit the “edge” of the frame, as if it were a solid wall. They had a mock fist fight in one frame. And, my personal favorite, the guy grabs the girl and kisses her and, after about five seconds, the girl pushes him away and walks out of the frame.

What this array of loops soon became is an anonymous diary of this couples time in this museum, up for everyone who passed by it to see. This interactive piece differed greatly from Camille Utterback’s Untitled pieces. The Untitled pieces were like huge canves in which the viewer interacted with in many complex ways, creating a kind of “wake” that eventually made an image. After the viewer leaves, however, there is not much evidence of the viewer being there, as the pattern on the “canvas” is much too complex to understand. The artist, Utterback’s pieces, is more important and more evident than the viewer.

With Deep Walls, though, the viewer becomes more important than the original artist. Since the concept is a very simple concept, easy for anyone to understand quickly, the artist is forgotten quickly, as the people up on the screen are more important than the person who set up the display. The phenomenon I’m trying to get at is that the viewer’s become the artists. That is exactly what happened with the couple I was observing. They were attracted to this piece because the piece was not simply just reacting to them – they were creating the piece. More than just being fun, because everything the viewer does is recorded and looped forever, the viewer puts his or her own stamp on the piece.

Utterback’s Untitled pieces lack this recording aspect to them. They instead just react to the viewer. The viewer, however, is able to experiment much more with the media because of its extreme complexity. As I was playing with one of these pieces, I started noticing the subtleties of how certain movements I made destroyed certain aspects of the piece and how it, at the same time, created others. It gives the viewer the sense that they are “painting”, which is Camille’s intention behind these interactive pieces. I’m not sure how it gives this impression, but something about the background of the piece (or, I should say, the slow healing process) gives it a sense of brush strokes and paint. This piece, instead of being a diary, is more like a poem. A very complex poem that not even the poet understands (the poet being the viewer).

In connecting the arguments I gave to guest John McKinnon’s lecture on Monday, October 13th, he talked about a lot of the same aspects. He compared Utterback’s Untilted pieces to a painting that the viewer creates, and showed us an interview of Utterback in which she explained how she had to make the piece simple enough so that the user could easily understand that they were interacting with the media, and yet complex and subtle enough to interest the viewer for a long time. This is exactly what happened to me as I was interacting with the piece. I began trying to figure out how to manipulate the piece in certain ways and to see how it really functioned.

John McKinnon also talked about the Deep Walls piece, showing another video with a Scott Snibe voice over. Snibe described the viewer’s reaction to the piece, talking about how they were usually hesitant at first, not at first understanding how they interacted with the piece, until they discovered themselves in one of the boxes. Once they realized more about the piece, that it loops after the viewer steps out, the viewer becomes more comfortable with it and with the anonymity of the silhouettes. This is exactly what I observed with the couple at the museum.

In both these pieces, to different degrees, the viewer becomes the artist. This differs greatly from virtually every other form of media, in which there is a sharp distinction between the viewer and the artist. With these pieces, this line becomes more blurred. I think that is the purpose behind interactive artwork: to inspire. By making the viewer become a part of the work, and by making them, to some extent, the artists, these pieces inspire the viewer to create their own art.