As advanced telecommunications, digital multimedia, and computer mediated systems continue to play an important role in the transformation and globalisation of culture, we can ask where will the creative individuals with the skills to imaginatively use and apply these technologies come from ? One answer is - from the Field of Interactive Arts at Newport School of Art & Design. (June 1995 is a landmark date for interactivity since it is the first year that students will graduate from Newport School of Art & Design with a BA(Hons) Degree in Interactive Arts)
This exploratory and innovative Degree, which is distinct within the British Art School context, develops connections between a wide range of media and disciplines. Through the development of multimedia projects, the interactive artists and designers of the future learn how to work with the relevant technologies of digital imaging systems, interactive software, telecommunications, robotics and electronics in association with the plastic and spatial arts. In this environment collaborative relationships are also encouraged with outside agencies in the realisation of interactive projects.
Of course, the system based nature of interactivity means that it is obviously easier to experience a system than it is to describe, or convey it pictorially. So the examples included here not only reflect the diversity of the work being produced by Newport students at the point of their graduation from college into the professional arena, but also reminds us, if we are in any doubt that in this emerging field there is as great a wealth of exciting images, events and experiences as in any preceding branch of art practice.
The Interactive Environment
To say the contexts for an Art practice based on interactivity are obviously much greater than those offered by traditional art and design courses is to state the obvious. Electronic, computer mediated and interactive systems are becoming an intrinsic part of our daily life. New concepts such as electronic community, the communications hearth, the electronic classroom have not only changed the way like speaks to like, for instance businesses speak to businesses. But it has affected the very ways in which we construct identity and define the self and this includes how we define art practice and art education. Today the boundaries between many functions and disciplines in society are merging, producing new cultural configurations, new job opportunities, new products and new markets.
This has in large part been made possible by the development of computer mediated systems and their occurrence within many disparate spheres. It is this spirit of connectivity made via these shared systems, which not only has begun the process of dissolving boundaries between the hitherto discreet categories that exist within contemporary art practice and other cultural forms. But much more radically, it also seeks connections with other fields of operation, for example architecture, technology and the sciences. Via the medium of interactive software, networks and global telecommunications systems, the artist, the scientist, the technologist to name a few can all technically be fellow passengers and co-drivers on the same bus, travelling on the same super highways.
The Artist’s role
Of course, artists traditionally have always been interested in the generation and manipulation of images. But now digital imaging systems and their application within Multimedia and Hypermedia environments allows the artist to treat the photograph and the video image as not simply information, but as part of data flow. And while a claim is not being made that artists will no longer focus on things seen, the question that looms large is not so much now on how we picture the world, but on the ways in which we negotiate a world that is already overflowing with images. And this of course is not only a question of how one reads images, but the extent to which these images can be transformed, manipulated and recontextualised. In multi-layered data and computer space, the digital photographic image has become permeable, unstable and transitory, not only to the artist, but to the viewer, who through the interface of interactive multi-media systems now has the opportunity to affect further transformations.
Transforming the Viewer’s role
In such an environment it logically follows that the role of the viewer as well as the artist is transformed. And while the artist still sets the conditions for that interaction, the principle of “dispersed authorship” means that the artist relinquishes sole ownership of the work. Once the user is no longer a passive recipient of transmitted information, they become liberated within an open-ended process, which allows them to contribute to and determine an unforeseeable set of creative outcomes. And once inside an open-ended system, which is responsive and capable of growth, the viewer significantly ceases to be a spectator and becomes a participant, or ‘user’ of the system.
Interface
The use and extension of existing interfaces as well as the development of new interfaces is a primary focus of the Field of Interactive Arts at Newport. Students learn how to create works in cyberspace, on screens, within networks etc. And while the screen as the dominant interface will not necessarily diminish, rather it will be balanced by new developments in the area of ‘intelligent’ interactive environments.
In the college’s Electronic Lab students explore the possibilities of ‘intelligent’ or interactive installations, which adapt and respond to the movements of people once they enter that environment. This directly parallells practices in other fields. In ‘intelligent’ architecture for instance, buildings are being constructed, which can sense our presence and behaviour, anticipate our needs, and whose ‘smart’ materials respond to fluctuations in temperature etc. in the environment. The interfaces in such situations are extremely various and while the computer is likely to be the driver of the systems and interfaces found in such environments, it is generally invisible. So for the artist the issue here is not how to create a world within computer space, but how to get out of the computer into the world.
There can be no doubt that the traditional view of what an art college is and what an art student is, and how they function is significantly changing. Inevitably, such shifts in the cultural paradigms affects the practices and terms of art as we traditionally describe them. Old categories are eroding. New languages and roles are emerging. The most progressive art colleges are those which are already working in the space, between art, science and technology.
