October 26, 2006
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
e and eyeToy
Noah Wardrip-Fruin's contribution to the Tate’s e and eye project has just gone live: “e and eyeToy.” Where else can you get Myron Krueger, Camille Utterback, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, EyeToy: Play and much more all bundled into one short essay?
"The Tate's "material gestures" hang cuts across time, but I find my mind settles, first, on the moment of abstract expressionism in the U.S. This work brings the artist's gesture into a particular relationship with artworks shown in museums.
This might be contrasted with the nearby moment of the Happening - the attempt to incorporate the live gesture, including the audience gesture, into artwork that was self-consciously unshowable. The blurring of art and everyday life, as a book title of the Happening's most famous proponent would have it later.
Now we enter a moment in which, through interaction, we see the gesture of the audience being incorporated into showable art. This work moves beyond video art, which included the audience as an image of itself. Now the audience, while perhaps also visible as an image within the work, becomes data - one of the fundamental components of digital media. In work such as that selected by Camille Utterback for the "New Materiality" installment of "e and eye" the audience's gesture is seen to drive the work, to fundamentally produce what we see. The audience's gesture can drive the work by providing data because the artist has begun to work with a particular material: digital computation." Continue reading e and eyeToy by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. [via]
Posted by jo at October 26, 2006 03:42 PM
