On ACT/REACT or Why I don't Chew Gum (Normally)

Milwaukee Art Museum's ACT/REACT exhibit offers a glimpse of the art that may be on a quickly approaching horizon, interactive installations. These pieces all engage with technology and question the roles of the artist and observer, as per John McKinnon's point. Where Marcel Duchamp's work, and many of the pieces by other artists in the Sensory Overload exhibit, deal with these questions by creating art that was ordered and assembled in a shop, or asks the observer to bring their own experiences of life and art museums to a piece. Like those pieces, the ACT/REACT exhibit demands the same of visitors, only in a more physical manner; Camille Utterback's Untitled series and Janet Cardiff's To Touch especially engage these specific questions.

Utterback's work uses a computer program and sensor matrix to project a "painting" based on the broad and subtle movements of an observer. The images are abstract and shifting, allowing an observer to engage with the visual contributions of the previous one. This is entertaining and novel, especially in an art gallery. Where interactive art is common place within the popular culture in the form of the video game, Art Museums have been slow on the uptake. ACT/REACT replaces a Wii-mote with cameras and sensor matrixes, creating complicated computer programs that interpret an observer's image or movements. These installations creatively engage a viewer for a short-time, but unlike a story-based video-game or many of the pieces in Sensory Overload, they fail to engage the viewer for a lengthy period of time. Unlike video games, Utterback's work is to let the observer actually create an image; however, the actual work of art is the computing program and installation, the projection is a sort of by-product of the craftsmanship to engage an audience. Though more complicated than the programs of Snow Mirror or Healing #1, Utterback's work is similar to the paintings of Jacques Louis David, impressive in the technical realm, but not very interesting. Also like David's work, Utterback's work is most profound within the context of art history as a step to an interactive art that is ultimately more engaging and satisfying.

The one exception to this is Cardiff's To Touch. This piece connects two artistic elements through the observer's touch: a weathered wooden table and audio. The table, alone in a room, stands alone as sculpture, the observer reaches across normal boundaries of acceptability when viewing sculpture and touches it. That act then transforms the piece by introducing the audio element. Intimate voices, swelling music and other soundbites become tied to portions of the table through the visitor. The pocked and cracked surface of the table pairs a specific feel (a sense very often neglected by the fine arts) with these sounds; it feels as if the visitor is brushing these sounds out of the textured wood. Had this piece been just the table, it would have engaged the observer with many of the same questions of appropriation and technology that Duchamp did. The audio alone as an installation would have questioned the need for an image and quotidian nature of hearing. And an audio collage that is based on movements of an observer would have been uninterestingly similar to David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (most of the ACT/REACT exhibit seem to be banal, visual variations of Rokeby's work, Utterback's the most so). But, when these elements are paired through the physical act, the Visitor creates connections between sensory experience of touching, the visual impact of the table, and the shifting soundscapes they are eliciting. The subtlety and complexity of To Touch engage art history and the arguments of McKinnon in a much more meaningful way than the rest of the exhibit.

The other pieces, like Healing #1, Deep Walls, and Echo Evolution, engage the visitor and the questions of art and interactivity in relation to art in much less interesting or memorable ways. The greatest strength of these and the other pieces in the show is novelty. Viewers' certainly enjoy themselves when walking through, past and over the various exhibits, but the experience is quickly lost as s/he moves onto the next piece of technological wizardry. Like a paint by numbers kit that is in the style of Van Gogh or the tasted pleasure of chewing gum, there is little lasting effect of ACT/REACT, aside from To Touch.