Potentiality of the interactive

My life is officially over for the next 15 weeks - it's the first week back at uni, and looking at my two subjects, Introducing Audio Production and New Media Aesthetics, it's going to be nose to the grindstone (but in the best possible way) from now till the end of semester.

Tonight was the first class of New Media Aesthetics (hereon NMA) - wow! Does this look interesting! This class is what's made me set up this blog - it's based on a lot of discussion about new media and new media art in particular, with a lot of cross-media artforms cropping up by the look of things. The first assignment, as posted on the UTS website, involved either setting up a blog or at least partaking in online discussion with other class members, and while this has been altered to leading a discussion in class, I felt it might be a useful way to record key elements from each week's discussion and any thoughts I have on the topics as immediate reactions to the readings or just as the discussion festers in my brain later in the week.

Tonight was dedicated mainly to introducing the subject and running through some initial concepts. Key ideas tackled were:

• What is aesthetics?
• Technology and art - the risk of techno-centred aesthetics
• The potentiality of interactive work
• Culture of collaboration in new media - place of the "author" in collaborative work
• Conflict within the term "new media art"
• Relational aesthetics

Of these, I think the one that most immediately grabbed my attention and got me thinking was the issue of the potentiality of the interactive. The discussion centred around the experience and response of the artwork's audience - with a linear form of art (e.g. painting, film, sculpture) the piece is viewed and a response generated. If the piece is viewed again at another time, a different response may be elicited - but this will be because of different circumstances for the viewer, not because of any difference in the artwork itself - it could be that the viewer is older, has experienced more, is in a different mood, experiences the artwork in a different setting or some other external element is also impacting on their experience of the work. With interactive work, the potential to generate different reactions within the same viewer lies within the work itself - every time a user is offered a choice of routes to take through the work, they make decisions which present the artwork in different ways - which may be as simple as using a different soundtrack to the same visuals or leading the viewer off to a completely different section of the work. They could come back to that point even seconds later, make a different choice and have the work affect them in a completely different way. The key thing here is that the interactive work contains key elements of generating this new reaction within itself (as well as being affected by external circumstances) - the linear work relies 100% on external circumstances for subsequent viewings to generate a different reaction - and generally these subsequent experiences of the artwork will need to be separated by a longer period of time than that required by the interactive work, which theoretically at least only requirement of time is that it will pass while people are viewing it one way, but if they went straight back after viewing one version and re-viewed it choosing a different option, they would experience it differently and so most likely feel a different emotional response to the work than first time round.

About to start in on one of the reference readings for this week - Timothy Murray's "Digital incompossibility: Cruising the aesthetic haze of the new media" in Ctheory.

For this week, Audio Production (hereafter AP) is focusing on listening to a range of experimental and radiophonic work. Tried to catch 2SER's Audiodaze this evening, but got home too late to hear more than about 7 minutes of... whatever it was they were playing... very frustrating - I was just getting into it! 2RRR seems to have something on at the moment, but I can't get reception, so listening to 2SER's psy-trance show while waiting for their Cathode Immersions programme to come on in about an hour. Might have to invest in a teeny-tiny radio walkman if I'm going to catch this stuff...