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.

Project: Pick a poten­tial the­sis issue you want to explore and respond to it.

Theory: I’m very inter­ested in how the vir­tual and the phys­i­cal realms trig­ger affect each other and effect changes or events in each other via ongo­ing feed­back mech­a­nisms. It bog­gles my mind to think about how many (phys­i­cal) actions we take in the real world as a result of (vir­tual) infor­ma­tion fed to us through net­works, where data exist as light and are lit­er­ally weight­less. How do flashes of light become man­i­fested in the phys­i­cal, expe­ri­en­tial world?

My the­ory is that the user is the point of inter­sec­tion (and inter­ac­tion) between the phys­i­cal and vir­tual realms, between objects and infor­ma­tion. The Earth enacts grav­ity and other phys­i­cal effects. Computing sys­tems enact data trans­fer and pro­cess­ing. But only sen­tient beings can find mean­ing in both, because they can under­stand what grav­ity means and under­stand what data trans­fer is by extrap­o­lat­ing out­wards, tak­ing what they grasp about these physical/virtual sys­tems and apply­ing them to hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nar­ios. I can imag­ine what would hap­pen if I threw a glass vase up in the air: It would fall back down, hit the ground, and prob­a­bly break into pieces. I’ve never thrown a vase before, but I can model and pre­dict that out­come with near-certainty because I have inferred the rules that gov­ern the system.

So, as a user/sentient being, my job is to intepret inputs, deduce the rules of the sys­tem (that would pro­duce those inputs), decide on a course of action, and then phys­i­cally man­i­fest that action. In the case of a dig­i­tal sys­tem, my phys­i­cal out­put (throw­ing a vase, press­ing a key, click­ing the mouse) is input for the vir­tual sys­tem, which responds accord­ing to its own rules, and on and on the feed­back loop goes.

I don’t think this project was extremely suc­cess­ful at address­ing those ideas, but it’s inter­est­ing nonethe­less. Try it out, and see if you can (1) deduce its rules and then (2) use them toward your own ends. Post a com­ment below with your findings.

Credits: Word list cour­tesy of mieliestronk.com.

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