Vortrag: "Interaction Revisited"

Abstract:

Interaction and interface design have not only had their roots in human computer interaction engineering but have also seen parallel developments in performance art, media art and specifically in the interactive arts. With products of interactive technologies increasingly spreading into our private and professional lives, it is interesting to see where early notions of interactivity came from and how artists and designers over the past 40 or more years have already looked at the merits of interaction in their artistic and conceptual work.

As human-computer interaction is becoming more and more embedded into daily products and services, we also observe that creativity, once mostly reserved for artists, has now reached the masses. Or as Peter Weibel states: “Artists, in the age of Youtube.com, Flickr.com, MySpace.com, and Second Life, lose their monopoly on creativity. Using contemporary media everyone can be artistically creative.”

In this lecture artistic and social notions of interactivity will be addressed and the general question on how art and science can merge in the area of interface culture will be discussed. Projects by the authors from their new artist monography - Gerfried Stocker, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau (Eds.) Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau - Interactive Art Research, 2009. Springer Verlag Vienna/New York - as well as their students will be introduced to illustrate these points.

Prof. Dr. Christa Sommerer
Head of Interface Cultures Department
Institute for Media
University of Art and Design, Linz, Austria