(From the essay ‘The Construction of Experience: Turning Spectators into Visitors’ by Luc Courchesne in ‘New Screen Media’ by Rieser and Zapp; 2002)

In his article, Luc Courchesne predicts a great expansion of interactive media art. He argues that the medium will be ‘built around three basic features: interactivity and the connectivity coming from the twentieth-century computer and networking technologies; the moving image, inherited from cinema and television; and the immersivity created by the panorama artists of the early ninetieth century’ (ibid; pp. 257)

In the next part of his essay, the author describes his practice and particular artworks. He started as a video artist, using video to craft linear transformations and to examine how it could be experienced in space. He noticed the usefulness of the medium as a real-time experience.

In one of his first projects, ‘Encyclopaedia Chiaroscuro’ (1987), the artist created a hypervideo, combined of numerous nodes, that could be manipulated in real-time. The visitors of the artwork, noticing that their movement relates to the projection, ‘engaged in a sort of dance with the installation’(ibid; pp. 258). However, the Courchesne noticed that the majority of the viewers felt frustrated, since their experienced was not fully controlled. Therefore, the artwork ‘begun to be understood as a kind of scratch video apparatus meant to be brutalised’ (ibid; 258).  According to the artist, it is important to include familiarity into interactive pieces so users feel comfortable with how to think and behave in relation to it.

The next question the author asks is: ‘what metaphor could help integrate technology and content so that visitors would be drawn to engage immediately with the work.’ (ibid; 259)

In his next project, Courchesne intends to use familiarity in the interface to engage the viewers.  He decides to use people’s faces and gestures, as he sees them as ‘mostly easily to recognised and the one for which we have, in any culture, the widest and most subtle range of interpretations’ (ibid; pp. 259). In his ‘Portrait One’ (1990), Courchesne creates a character, using a female face, that engages the viewer into conversation and encounters increasingly private and intimate discussions. The artists noticed a huge engagement of the viewer to the fictional character, and noticed that in this engagement, the framework: the medium and interactivity, became invisible, the viewer was fully immersed into the experience.

What especially interests me in this artwork is that the artist used the medium and interactivity to build the experience, not to play with technology.  I attempt to integrate this concept in my own artworks, and use the power of interactivity as a tool of my storytelling, rather then create an ‘interactive pleasure’.

Another aspect of this piece that really draws my attention is the concept of building a relationship between the viewer and the fictional character. The artist, through the body language, gestures and conversation topics, crossed all the boundaries of public, social, personal and intimate space to build a close relationship. Similarly in my project, ‘Who Are You?’ (2011), I made my viewer to walk towards the projection screen, and to trigger a character performance relevant for a particular space to build the relationship between the viewer and the character. Interestingly, both of us used gestures, body language and conversations, and divided the narrative into particular proxemic spaces. Moreover, both of us concentrate on using the interactive media as an invisible framework to tell stories.

The next of the artist was to strength the illusion’ of growing relationship between the character and the visitor. In his ‘Family Portrait’ (1993), he added ‘levels of intimacy’ (ibid; pp. 261). The visitor has a choice to go further and to cross the boundary of the proxemic spaces, to make an intimate relationship. In the final stage, the character ends up with confessing something very personal. The visitor, similarly like in my ‘Who Are You?, discovers something new, maybe even shocking, about the character.

Courchesne argues that in his projects he enriched the experience of an encounter between visitors and virtual characters. The installation became a conversational space.  He also argues that the only narrative that emerges from interactive video installations is a narrative generated by the visitors, in their experience. ‘(…) immersive images free the viewer’s body and multiplies the possible points of view: choosing what to look at amounts to picking a subject and making something of it. Any immersive medium is thus by nature interactive and transforms spectators into visitors’ (ibid pp. 266).

The artist concludes that the combination of immersion, movement and interactivity should be the fundament of the next mass medium and the cultural expression of a society moving into twenty-first century and looking at it’s own identity. I strongly agree with the author, in my opinion, interactivity reveals the best how we perceive the world today.