Infraestructuras Peatonales

One interesting feature of interactive art is how it opens up a second category of

audience - that of the user. A user is most often, although not always, also a member of the audience of a work (those who perceive the display of the piece), but a user

interacts with the work in prescribed ways to alter its display. It could be claimed that this category already existed in the role of musicians performing a composer’s work, at

least in terms of the individual expression a skilled musician adds when performing a piece. Interactive art makes much lower demands in terms of its users’ skills and this category is thus far more inclusive and accessible. More importantly, few musical works are composed with the musicians’ aesthetic enjoyment of their role in the performance in mind, whereas interactive works are often created such that the change in display is immediately (and, hopefully, engagingly) apparent to the user(s) for their appreciation. This new, or at the very least greatly expanded, category of audience might engage more directly with a work42 _{and in such works any emotional responses the work elicits}

can reasonably be expected to be stronger and more immediate for them than those of the passive, non-user audience, as not only can the users become at least part, and potentially the primary, focus of the work, often they experience actually being part of the work themselves. One example of this is Panda Eyes by the Jason Bruge Studio, in

which one hundred plastic panda-shaped collection-boxes from the World Wide Fund for Nature are arranged ten-by-ten and fitted with motion sensors and motorised, rotating bases. When a single user approaches, all of the pandas spin round and face him or her; when multiple users approach, the pandas split their attentions between them, and when a user moves around the piece the bears rotate to follow them.

Whether the work is viewed from the perspective of a user or passive audience-member there is a sense that the bears are standing in silent judgement at people’s failure to prevent the destruction of habitats and endangerment or extinction of species.

42 _{Equally, a work could be designed such that users are distanced from the output and the audience}

given a more privileged relation to it; in this case those audience members who perceive the isolation of the users from the output are likely to be afforded a greater opportunity for engagement than those who do not.

However, for a user looking at row upon row of pandas, whose mute, glassy-eyed and condemnatory stares follow them inescapably wherever they move, this feeling is much more powerful, their apparent accusations seem more personally directed and the user feels a stronger sense of unavoidable accountability.

Panda Eyes also serves as a good illustration of how interactive works, and the different

experiences audiences and users have of them, can be appreciated in different ways; for audience members it seems reasonable to assume that their appreciation of the work-as-whole will be more satisfying than the instantiation of it they witnessed (“wherever anybody went they could not avoid the gaze of so many small and silent protesting pandas” vs “when the chap walked around the case some of the models turned in his direction”), but it is harder to conclude that the same holds for users - they will have the same appreciation of the work-as-whole, but their experiences of (or, indeed, as part of) an instantiation of it will be quite different - “when I tried to walk around them they kept turning and following me, and even when other people came close enough to attract the attentions of some of them the pandas closest to me were always staring right at me”. The directness of this relationship between work and user is a key difference between interactive and non-interactive works that can affect the strength of emotional responses a work elicits43 _{and, since the actions of the user play a}

role in determining the display of the work, this opens up the possibility that some works

43 _{One can further imagine a work which gives rise to different reactions from its users and its audience,}

and if the experiences of user and audience-member were each not apparent to the other aesthetic appreciation of it might even be three-fold: appreciation from the perspectives of user and audience- member and, after experiencing both perspectives, appreciation of the work as a whole.

may be able generate emotional responses that are unique to interactive media. One area that immediately lends itself to a discussion of the active role a user plays when engaging with an interactive work is that of videogames, where users (in this context, players) interact with a fictional world, fictionally take actions within that world and make certain things fictionally the case, and - importantly - often have the ability to go back and try things again a different way.