Interaction and Play
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“I prefer the form of seduction for it stems from a mysterious duality/confrontational relationship, an enticing, intense, and covert attraction between the living and the non-living. It is not a form of response, but a challenge, a duel, imbued with an intriguing sense of distance and constant antagonism on which the rules of theme are also based.” – Jean Baudrillard
Reflecting upon the frantic commotion surrounding the new media, one can easily gain the impression of a world turned upside down. Naturally, there are technologies available today that in the course of evolution have attained a certain degree of complexity and perfection offering mindboggling possibilities not only for the entertainment industry but for the artist as well. However, when we consider the perilously desolate state of computer art, it is difficult to understand why in our so-called post-modern era-inured as we are to the euphoria of technological advances-so much rhetorical and institutional endeavor is being invested in persuading artists to take up technologies that neither they nor their recipients really comprehend. Traditional modernists might, of course, take a more balanced view and contend that a different artistic concept is needed. They may also view that the arts simply have to yield to state-ofthe-art technology and its inherent forms of perception in order to remain contemporary, or offer viable alternatives to the prevailing forms of application. But occasionally it is difficult to avoid the impression that instead of the artist creating the art, it is the art and the artists that now have to be manufactured for a technology, which has not arrived but has made deep inroads into our daily existence. If we exclude musicians and composers, artists have been very reticent in availing themselves of the computer, in the area of computer graphics, it was the technicians, programmers, and scientists who first submitted computer images as art. Quite the contrary was true in photography, cinema, or video, where artists soon seized upon this technology and began developing it in the initial phases without the generous support from the state and patrons of the arts.
