Re: Surrealist compliment generator - a hoax?

Kevin Goldsmith (unitcirc@netcom.com)
Tue, 9 May 1995 12:12:10 -0700 (PDT)

Interactive media (of all kinds) tends to blur the line between the
creator and the "consumer." At least good interactive media does this.
Who wants to be led through an interactive experience? Is it still an
interactive experience? VR art does this to an even greater extent. As
artists, we want to somewhat control the experience of the viewer. We want
them to see our creation in the way that we think it should be seen.
This can be for a lot of reasons: a message, a plot, etc... However,
that is a bad attitude to have when dealing with VR, IMHO. With a VR
environment people can resent the limitations put upon them.

This comes back to the surrealism tools vs environment discussion. At
first, I was getting worried what kind of art would be produced if the
viewer was given a black hole and the means to create their own surreal
experience. What is the role of the artist in such a piece. I've been
reading the posts about this and I'm looking for a middle ground. I want
to find a place between completely user-generated experiences (with the
artist providing the tools) and completely packaged experiences (with the
user having little control over the environment itself).

just some thoughts,

Kevin

Brandon spoke thusly:
>
> Why is it so important whether the "user" gets to reinterpret or
> rewrite everything? Why is their view somehow more paramount than
> that of the person who created a given piece of VR artwork? What if
> the user and artist are the same person? Then you simply have a
> "user" providing a finished product and saying "here come and see what
> I have done." You have the same authorial politics.
>
> I think the issue you are pointing at is "who should have control of
> online editing? How much control?" That all depends entirely on the
> whims of whomever owns a given piece of intellectual property that we
> are referring to as VR Art. That person may wish to make their
> creation alterable, or may not. There is no a priori reason to
> postulate one approach as morally superior to the other - they are
> just different approaches.
>