Interactivity: OTIS, Muds, MOOs, and More

It would be difficult to trace the early roots of interactive art because all art is actually interactive on some level. A Shakespearean actor makes an aside to the audience and it is, after all, the audience's response which drives the actors. In computer terminology, the distinction between multimedia and interactivity has become somewhat cloudy. To me, the concept finds its origins with artists such as DuChamp, who made works that were meant to be touched and handled or Julian Beck, whose Living Theater produced works that were meant to trigger individual responses from the audience. Sound and light pieces, where an observer's movements trigger sensing devices that then drive light, sound, or movement, began to evolve in the 1960s. Environmental playgrounds exist throughout the world today. Unique to the online culture are muds, MOOs, MUSHes, and interactive communities such as MUSE that can, and should, be viewed as an art form in and of themselves. (For a more complete discussion of muds see Chapter 11, "Online Entertainment.")

Multiuser interactive environments, Adventure, and MultiUser Dungeon, being perhaps the oldest and most famous text-based object-oriented games, create an internal virtual landscape and provide characters, objects, and situations that fill a temporal landscape of action, inaction, chance occurrence, and skill. In the Renaissance, an artist would have to capture the whole gist of possibilities within one static painting. Volumes have been written analyzing the various postures of the Saints in "The Last Supper," for example. The programmer still must create the characters and the scenery with care, balance, and insight. An entire culture then blossoms around the game where users exchange strategies. To a certain extent, the game is now beyond the hand of the author.

Not long ago in New York City, and in Chicago as well, there were art installations that were mini golf courses designed by artists and meant to be played upon. At the vastly exciting Jonathan Borofsky installation at the Whitney Museum in the mid-eighties, among the enormous body of static and kinetic works was a hand-painted Ping-Pong table complete with paddles and ball, and the museum guard's responsibility in this case was to retrieve or replace the occasional overshot or overworn ball. As more systems have allowed direct access to individual public directories, the individual home page has become a personalized interconnective tool. Hand selected favorite sites as well as local gossip/news combine with the author's thoughts, comments, and views to become a type of interactive environment to play within. Often they combine pictures and sounds.

MUSE (Multi User Simulated Environment) extends the multiuser role-playing game to where an entire community exists in real-time. Citizens may enter rooms, embark upon paths, manipulate objects, and create realms for others to explore. The participant doesn't merely play through a pre-programmed set of rules and locations. Objects in space become a medium for creativity, and it's possible for user-citizens to orchestrate scenarios as well.

From a commercial point of view, interactivity will be the primary means by which the consumer is pulled in, analyzed, fitted, given a chance to test drive the product around the block, and billed. All of the challenges that go into making a MUD or a MOO are contained in this growing field. Interactive artists have been dealing with many of the same issues as well, though usually from a conceptual or aesthetic perspective. How, for example, do I create sounds that when triggered by a person's movement, allow the person to know what particular movement at what moment triggered the sound? At the same time, how do you handle the overload of many people in a space causing the sensors to be constantly triggered? And if you successfully trim the sensitivity way down, how do you handle the times when one person or no one is on the site? The artist must not only conceive of the possibilities but he or she must also create a fluid, purposeful transition between these different states. Finally, it's not just the look and feel of the work, but an idea is also being conveyed.