Identity Crisis of Interactive Art

I encountered “hands-on” an emerging phenomenon called “interactive art” on my very first visit to the Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) in 1989. One of the works on display was Deep Contact, a laserdisc installation by the American artist Lynn Hershman. Sitting in front of a display, the user was invited by (the image of) a seductive young lady to “reach through the screen” and touch her. By means of a touchscreen interface, the spectator-turned-into-user then entered a kind of garden of earthly delights, choosing forking paths and encountering erotically loaded incidents along the way. Another installation was The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw. By means of a stationary bicycle the visitor entered a virtual city consisting of letters, words and sentences. Choosing one’s routes through the spatialized database, one engaged in simultaneous acts of reading and writing with the combined efforts of one’s eyes, hands, and feet. I still remember the intoxicating feeling of diving under a giant letter “A”, as well as the questions it raised in the mind afterwards: what does cruising between and under letters, and even penetrating them, mean? What is the ontology of such an experience? Confronted with such uncanny issues, I had a feeling that something “new”, perhaps even the much anticipated (or feared) “rupture”, was in the making.