I finally made it out to Mass MoCA, and I have to say, my favorite piece, far and away, was, of course, text-based. Jenny Holzer’s “Projections” fea­tures two enor­mous pro­jec­tors set at either end of a blacked-out ware­house space, pointed at each other, and throw­ing text across every sur­face in the room. I was so hyp­no­tized by the visual effect that I for­got to read any of the actual words. I ini­tially scoffed at the museum’s descrip­tion of this as an “inter­ac­tive” instal­la­tion, since the piece itself doesn’t do any­thing dif­fer­ently as a result of your pres­ence, but as I strolled around the room, I observed how my view­point changed, affect­ing the per­spec­tive in which the text was shown to me, which in turn defined its leg­i­bil­ity. Standing here, I can read the words on that wall, but not the other. The piece becomes inter­ac­tive as soon as the viewer-participant real­izes that s/he must phys­i­cally move around the space in order to take it all in. And when you’re tired of mov­ing, there are sev­eral giant, 15-foot diam­e­ter bean­bags set on the floor, so you can stum­ble over to one and sit or lie down com­fort­ably to take in the text. One moment in par­tic­u­lar stands out for me: the excite­ment, mixed with some fear, of watch­ing a 20-foot long cap­i­tal “R” approach men­ac­ingly before “spear­ing” me with its edges and blind­ing me with the projector’s light.

You can watch a live video stream of the instal­la­tion, but it doesn’t do jus­tice to the phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of mov­ing around and through the letters.

Also at the museum was a pro­jected, rotat­ing, writhing, computer-generated tree by Jennifer Steinkamp -- which I expected to be inter­ac­tive, and was dis­ap­pointed when I dis­cov­ered it would go on writhing with or with­out me -- and also a most strik­ing, yet sub­tle instal­la­tion by Mary Temple -- appar­ently sun­light cast­ing shad­ows of tree branches on a gallery wall, until you real­ize that you are stand­ing in a win­dow­less room.