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Museum and Entertainment

Peter Higgins: Interactive Art Jury Member

You are mainly working in the field of museums. Interactive settings are more and more important for museums. What is the challenge in developing interactive applications for museums?

Higgins: With the potential uncontrolled array of information in a museum, the desire of an ever discerning visitor is to search out spectacular experiential media that will help unpack the complexities of obscure concepts or dreary data.

The need for 'interactivity', that has been the mantra of museum administrators for many years has rarely questioned the validity or relevance of the ubiquitous electro mechanical and touch screen interfaces, that deliver binary slabs of yes/no responses.

With the essential objective to engage the visitor through discovery learning we believe that the cognitive process should be investigated in a more imaginative and memorable way. This involves the development of specialist and appropriate interfaces and the issue of the real time /space/person/object experience. In particular it is vital to understand the implication of this collective real time dynamic that disassociates the process from the domestic or personalised situation.

What could be an ideal interface for interactive environments in a public space?

Higgins: Ideally the interface mechanism should have some sort of intellectual narrative link with the subject matter. The mouse or the touch screen have no emotional link with the data and consequently do not capture the imagination or engagement of the participant.

For a visitor centre dedicated to the City in Manchester, we have devised an installation that uses the symbolic physical movement in time and space to create a walkable timeline that through camera tracking responds by delivering large scale images of evolving communities. The timeline may be recalibrated to describe an entirely different immigrants’ stories

You are focussing on a 'walk in web' and 'passive interactivity'. Can you explain what you mean by that?

The 'walk in web' project in Birmingham has been developed as a response to a brief requiring a gallery dedicated to the future of science and technology. The solution has used the web format by incorporating dynamic text and movie clips to create the architecture of the space in order to deliver apparently streaming and topically authored information. Hotspots embedded within the primary large format 3m x 2m screens may be downloaded onto foreground LCD screens. Selected tangible objects enhance and complement the process of engagement. The vitality and immediacy of this medium implicitly demonstrates the complexities of the ever changing world of science and technology.

The web paradigm used here has intentionally challenged the traditional notion of the museum website merely being used as a soft brochureware introductory pre show. Here the visitor may extend their real time, real space inspired experience of the 'walk in web' to their own domain where they may continue to investigate their own personalised extended hierarchy of material on the actual website. In consequence, fundamental principles of the traditional museum are challenged, namely that the complex learning process that must be factored at many levels should be reserved for the post museum visit whilst the primary function remains that of excitement and inspiration.

Passive Interactivity is a concept that we developed originally to accommodate large visitor numbers but have now adopted as an intentional participatory dynamic that supports the collaborative public experience. The concept of delivery of data for a large group of people activated by an avatar/navigator is one such example. To achieve this, the audience and avatar need to be collectively aware of the context and intellectual objective of an interpretive installation. The ultimate delivery of the material needs to be sufficiently coherent, and at an appropriate scale to extend the experience for larger groups. The added value of large format delivery mechanisms as used at the Futures Gallery is that the emitted light creates the ambience and atmosphere of the space, the information becomes the architecture.

It is the third time that you are member in the Interactive Art Jury of Prix Ars Electronica. If you look at the entries: What have been the main trends these last years? And what will be waiting for us in the next years?

Higgins: From the privileged position of Interactive Art jury member for the last two years I have undertaken the daunting task of sifting through recent work in an attempt to identify popular typologies. For participating artists such an exercise could be perceived as demotivating if they find that their particular efforts are perceived as lacking in ingenuity by forming part of a definable trend.

In respect of this I have always been intrigued how exemplary work may set a trend and in particular how trendmakers are manufactured as commodity which may ultimately result in the devaluation of the idea , if their intellectual 'stock' value disintegrates.

Living in London we watch open mouthed as the universal obsession with stardom and fame crosses over into the world of art. Impressionable media acolytes, gallery mafia and high priest museum directors define for us what is art. Contenders for acclaim must deliver idiosyncratic work that is usually provocative, challenging but most of all untouchable. The work should be accessed only in a passive emotional and personal way.

On the other hand, whilst operating in their slipstream, interactive artists extend their objectives to include and engage the participant at not only an emotional but also at the cognitive level and sometimes through simple curiosity to complete the process of the artistic construct. Whilst these gestures of generosity and empowerment enable the collaborative process, they fall far short of the mainstream need to protect and defend the artist and their art from any form of external interference.

When reminded by Neil Leach that 'speculative digital work can provoke us to think of the possibilities of the future by challenging the giveness of the past', I believe that there may be the need for the mainstream darlings to overcome their resistance of the interactive art world especially as the sophistication of the conceptual is progressively more effectively and easily supported by the technical. Beware if they are short of a trend they will hunt you down, reappropriate, and spit you out.




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