Interact or Die! was published for the biannual DEAF (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) of 2007. Edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, the book consists of interviews and essays, bringing together biologists, artists, architects, philosophers and sociologists talking about all the aspects of interactivity, both in art and the life sciences.

From the editorial introduction: "Interaction is a defining characteristic of every living being. Bodies and objects build connections, form networks, and then, through interaction, achieve organization, structure, memory and heredity. Interaction is often seen as a process of action and reaction between two already existing bodies and objects, but this is too limited a view. Interaction causes bodies and objects to change and variation to arise. Interaction is not a deformation of existing forms, but rather an addition of information, an informing, a formation of forms. Interact or Die! is about the way in which random behavior in networks creates strong but flexible structures and forms, without there being a central designing coordinator or code that pushes the process into a definite direction or form. It explores how interaction both forms and selects the effective, functioning parts of networks and leaves the noneffective parts to die. Interactivity is on the one hand a method of bringing something into being - a form, a structure, an organization, a body, an institute, a work of art - and on the other hand a way of dealing with it."

The Exercise of Interactive Art
Excerpts from an essay by Arjen Mulder published inInteract or Die!

Interactive art is art that becomes so only once the viewer changes something about it. As far as I can determine, it was invented by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) with O dentro e o fora ("The Inside Is the Outside"). This piece consists of a Möbius strip - a strip of paper that is twisted and then glued together at the ends, creating a loop the inside of which flows into its outside and back again. You are asked to cut lengthwise along the strip with a pair of scissors as long you can. The effect is astonishing. As you continue cutting, the ring gets smaller and smaller, the outer loop dangling from it gets bigger and bigger. And an insight announces itself: life is like that. You just keep plodding around in a little circle, from inside to outside and back in again, dragging all the choices you have made in an ever-lengthening ribbon of time behind you. And all you can do is keep working, until one day you can do nothing but cut the Möbius strip in two and die. The exercise is easy to duplicate at home, for example with newspaper. The paper Möbius strip has no artistic value in itself. As an object, interactive art is nothing. But as an action, it is everything. Then, slowly but inevitably, you become aware of what the object wants to teach you, not so much through critically reflecting on it, but mostly through experiencing it.

Interactive art is not a genre of installation art that needs a lot of digital technology. It can be done with or without computers. What’s good about it is in the interactivity: how does it get the audience to interact, what does the interactivity change in both the installation and the viewer, and what do people watching somebody else interacting with the piece get out of it? The actively interacting visitor experiences the aesthetic, presentational knowledge embedded in the piece, the onlookers get the ethical, discursive knowledge embedded in the interactional situation. Interactive art allows both for direct experience and reflection from a distance. It can be done with one person and one object, or with more people and one object, or with one person and a lot of objects, or with a lot of people with a lot of objects (as public art). The interactivity can be created with candies, with robots, with maps, with buildings, with light, with sound, with whatever useless or functional, senseless or meaningful, cheap or expensive stuff one can find.

We humans are full of experiences and feelings that do not, or not completely, allow themselves to be converted into language. In order to understand them we have art. The meaning of any work of art is the change the viewer undergoes as a result of looking at and thinking about it. Meaning is something that comes to life for a while in the interaction between the art and the viewer. This is why traditional art is also called interactive: isn't something taking place between the work and the viewer? This is incorrect, however, because even if people read overly personal things into it or make very different connections than previous generations, the work remains the same in material and energetic terms. Living meaning - what Lygia Clark called vivências, lived experience - is found on the viewer's part, and only there. In interactive art, the process of meaning-making is taken literally.

Interactive art is not made up of final products that have the ability to influence their viewers, as good paintings or statues do; it seeks to continue the process of mutual change between the creator and the work by which paintings and statues come into being - but this time not with the artist but with the viewer. Interactive art refuses to uphold the forced division between an art world in which real artists are productive on the one hand and an outside world where regular people consume art on the other. Interactive art aims to make art and life coincide again, to restore the complete life, the "empty-full", as Lygia Clark called it. Its interactivity liberates us from the hundred years of solitude of twentiethcentury art. Since interaction means changing each other, and only that which interacts with us is alive for us, we are changing everything around us as much as we are being changed by it - nature and technology, loved ones and strangers, room and city, bed and world. Interactive art is the art of the age of globalization. Everything and everyone is continually involved in exchange, and this perpetual process keeps the world turning. Interactive art addresses this situation itself, tries to grasp it at the moment it is taking place, as consciously lived experience instead of in the language of yesterday or the day after tomorrow.

Arjen Mulder
V2 Publishing / NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2007, co-edited with Joke Brouwer, Contributors: Sean B. Carroll, Eva Jablonka, Arjen Mulder, Brian Massumi, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Detlef Mertins, Lars Spuybroek, Michael Hensel, Noortje Marres, Alberto Tascano and Gilbert Simondon.

Arjen Mulder (NL) is a biologist and media theorist and has published several books of essays on the relationship between technical media, physical experiences and art. His books include Book for the Electronic Arts (2000) and Understanding Media Theory: Language, Image, Sound, Behavior (2004). With Joke Brouwer, he has edited works including transUrbanism (2002), Information is Alive (2003), Feelings Are Always Local (2004), aRt&D: Artistic Research and Development (with Anne Nigten, 2005), (2007), and Dick Raaijmakers’ Monography (2008).