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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 26.1 (2004) 94-99



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Interactive Narrative Art

Chris Thompson

[Figures]

Engaging Characters, a group show at Art Interactive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 26-October 5, 2003.

Through the constellation of in teractive works it assembles, Art Interactive's current exhibition of Engaging Characters demonstrates that any media is new media to the extent that it poses fresh challenges to that oldest of media that is made up of gray matter, neural networks, flesh and skin. Curator Kathy Brew uses as the show's organizational theme the creation and development of character in works ranging from digital video and animation to photography and robotics, mobilizing traditional as well as radical approaches to charater and narrative. In the catalogue for the exhibition she explains, "When experiencing traditional media the position of the viewer is often physically passive or still. With a responsive interface, however, the viewer's body becomes activated and the experience is more intuitively and viscerally felt."

This strategy brings the Engaging Characters snapshot of the dynamic and shifting field of interactive art into an accessible cohesion. It also works as an ingenious hook for the spectator who is able to inhabit the invented worlds of these works through the process of being seduced, captivated, or indeed in some cases repulsed by the characters and character-effects which occupy them. Their diversity of styles and tools in response to the show's tight thematic focus encourages viewers to conceive of character as a fluid category and to consider the characters on view not as solid entities around which plots are constructed, but as fields of possibility generating fertile and provocative narratives that include them.

In this respect, far from entertaining the notion that the age of digital media spells the end of traditional, novelistic forms of narrative, Engaging Characters instead joins narrativity and interactivity in ways that disturb received notions of these concepts. Brew's curatorial framework successfully induces our participation in this process, encouraging our input as active agents in the construction and, in some cases, the deconstruc-tion of the works themselves.

While in the languages of contemporary art and performance "interactivity" [End Page 94] often appears alongside discussions of cutting-edge technologies, this show is grounded in a view of interactivity that entails a more fundamental sort of engagement. It allows for the commingling of a work and its viewer/participant, a mutuality and a reciprocal influence or action upon one another. It suggests that far more interesting than definitions of interactivity are the ways in which it can be enacted: the nature of the interaction that an "interactive" work makes possible for the viewer/participant who engages with it; the varieties of experience that this enables; the reflections that it generates; and the new forms of practice that unfold as a result.

From its introductory screen, Julia Heyward's interactive surround-sound DVD projection Miracles in Reverse envelops us in a complex autobiographical fiction, a tripartite spiritual tale of incomplete redemption and deferred judgment. In a spectacle that dovetails perfectly with its Protestant mix of humor and pathos, the first screen presents a menu in which three life-sized ghostly figures—an alien, a housewife, and Jesus Christ (the latter two played by the artist, the first by the son of a friend)—revolve in place and await the mouse click that will commit us to one of three possible journeys. When we choose Christ and begin our voyage, the work's theological overtones give us the sense that there will be a way to ensure we're on the right track, that we'll see a sign or hear a voice that will point the direction either to salvation or damnation. This assumption is soon overcome by the dawning feeling that we are venturing through a world of infinitely proliferating detours, hitchhiking a ride along with a departed soul on its travels through purgatory.

The work's title, Miracles in Reverse, suggests that there is an architecture of the divine moment, a cosmic flowchart that can...

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