What Exactly Is Interactive Art
It is quite remarkable how creative people can get. It is impossible to gauge humankind's capacity to imagine. Every new element introduced in mankind's history, science, art, or culture fuels that spark of creativity that can potentially grow into a raging flame of ingenuity.
The rapid development of technology is no exception and provides a ripe source of unknown potential that man can exploit to test the limits of his imagination. With clever manipulation, he can use gadgets and electronics so that a viewer is not restricted to passive observation but can actually interact with an art piece.
Interactive art is a contemporary, installation-based art that involves a viewer in a way that allows the piece to accomplish its purpose. In other words, the viewer needs to do something, other than watching, so the art piece does something surprising.
Interactive art installations usually rely on computers and complex sensors. These sensors determine nearby factors such as temperature, pressure, motion, proximity, and even meteorological phenomena. The creator programs these factors into the computer so that the actions of each participant based on those factors elicit a response from the art piece.
For example, a person may view an art piece three feet away. This allows him to see, say, a pattern of shining blue diamonds. However, a person who is 6 feet away sees a different picture. Instead of diamonds, he sees oval opals! In another example, if a viewer touches a deceptively simple looking sphere, the piece suddenly unfurls into a pattern. If he moves his finger to different parts of the sphere, the patterns change. As technology continues to grow, interactive art is growing and evolving along with it and thus has become a new art form.
