Interactive Art Piece Research Articles

Body Utilization, Body Grief

This interactive poster involves a shawl that participants are encouraged to put on to explore how the body is lost to different systems, especially public-facing, capitalist, work systems. It is easy to lose oneself to the larger institution and those who are served. In this poster, viewers will be encouraged to engage with the piece and even take it and wear it for a period of time to reflect on the loss of self to the piece. This interactive art piece is tied to an ongoing exploratory study to look at library worker’s bodies at work, which can be built upon to study issues like trauma in the library workplace.
 The study asks participants to complete a draw and write prompt (Hartel, 2014; Hartel et al., 2018), which allows for explanation of the self beyond just the written or verbal. As the study focuses on the body both in drawing and words, the drawings will be added to this shawl to fully share the experiences and feelings that have been expressed. In having a tactile research output through the art of the shawl, readers and participants will be able to directly reckon with the drawings and the feeling of putting on the identities people assume while working at the library.

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Portrait of A City: A Review of Matt Roberts’ <i>Transfers</i>

Transfers by Matt Roberts, Assistant Professor of Art and Program Director of Digital Arts at Stetson University, an interactive car ride of abstract visualization and John Cage-like musical performance, creates individualized portraits of a city. Sitting in the back seat facing an LCD screen with speakers, the rider/reader, controls the direction of the driver and thus the sights and sounds of the art presentation. Matt Roberts sits next to a laptop and a tangle of wires connecting a camera under the rear-view mirror, taking in the scene in front of the car, the microphones on the truck outside, and a GPS unit to the laptop and its software program. As the driver, Roberts, relegates the position of creator to the passengers in the seats, he emphasizes how moving through the urban environment directly creates the experience which is delivered to the riders as a video on CD after their ride. The project calls upon the viewer to direct the driver; “where do I go now?” The directions run through a program that modifies the experience of the passenger. The urban landscape, designed to accommodate automobiles, undergoes a detournment , it becomes like art and life--constantly shifting. Each time the art is created it is unique; the project almost thrives on the unexpected. Getting lost becomes the destination. In a very modernist way, the process is more important than the end result. However, it calls into question the satisfaction of an interactive art piece and the necessity of the material object. Combining high technology with the ubiquity of automobile travel, Matt Roberts’ mobile project moves the audience literally through its own city reinterpreted, reformatted, and reconfigured. The paper will include a video of the visual experience that I saw and heard in Orlando, Florida and several images showing the setup, visualizations, and the artist.