Interactivity and meaning

1
Interactivity and meaning
New Media is not the only genre.Fin McMorran
2
Historically, there are 2 ways of interacting
with art objects

• Cognitive interaction viewer completes the work
  inside her head
• An interpretive community with
• a shared language which can be
• mediation by experts

• Participatory interaction community arts/
  socially engaged practice
• Physical or discursive
• democratic
• mediation by artist

3
Other disciplines offer a model of social
interaction - as means of understanding not only
other viewers but concepts, knowledge of the world
4
Theatre and film/TV offers model of fandom,
interaction with narrative or character through
impersonation and improvisation to create new
meanings
5
Interacting with Art
New Media
tool
Cognitive
Fandom
Participatory
These have all fed into genre of New Media, with
other models including the computer science
notion of the computer as a tool with which to
create new form or meaning
Social
6
Meaning

• Postmodernism suggests work MAY have meaning, on
  a continuum from
• Meaninglessness
• Individual meanings - no one truth but individual
  interpretations
• Individuated meanings, personalised
• One True Meaning
• If utterance/ gesture/mark is intended as
  communicative, must be SOME restrictions on
  legitimate meaning

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Other people and their meanings
Which aspects of the work could contain or
facilitate these meanings
mediation
interaction
content
Meaning of experience
True meaning
philosophy
new meaning
form
artist
context
8
Example

• Having explored in my research definitions of
  Good interactivity, I found successful
  interactivity breaks its own rules -
• For example
• The Rocky Horror Show
• this was presented as an interactive
  presentation, so you have to imagine at this
  point a room of computer lecturers shouting

Janet
Slut!
Slut!
Slut!
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Rocky Horror Show

• Is a story of two clean living young Americans
  Brad and Janet
• slut!!
• And what happened to them when they meet Fran n
  Furter (charcterised by learned critique of the
  show as an anthropomorphised Id) and his
  experiments to create the perfect man
• oooooh!
• While Brad is destroyed by his encounter with
  Franks - and his own sexuality

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Rocky Horror Show

• Janet
• slut!!
• Is liberated in a positive way
• Rocky Horror is a cult show, whose audiences
  dress up, enacting the personalities, copying the
  actions of the play and inserting their own lines
  into the dialogue such as the response to the
  name Janet
• slut!!

If you didnt know this, you must be a Rocky
Horror Virgin - Tut!
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So - interactive?

• If we judge the audience participation as
  communicative interaction then - NO
• scripted, not spontaneous - but permitted and
  even encouraged, unlike heckling
• not truly dialogic - the audiences responses are
  semiotically linked to the actors lines but not
  vice versa
• It is therefore reactive not interactive
• plot script remains linear - not altered by the
  partici.pation

Rubbish!
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So - interactive?

• BUT - play contains strands of meaning -
  responses tend to emphasise only one - balance is
  altered
• Interleaving of writers original meaning and
  audiences meanings
• Together these create the meaning of the
  experience - part of which is belonging to a
  community a world we have helped to create
• Audience responses and etiquette/ rules created
  out of fan-fan interaction
• Asynchronous, shared via internet

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So - interactive?

• Time based element allows participant in the
  experience to move between immersion in the world
  of the play
• And critical reflection upon it,
• Which are suggested as two necessary stages in
  the construction of meaning

Reflection
Immersion
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So what does this presentation mean?

• New Media has a great deal to learn from
  disparate disciplines?
• Rocky Horror Show is probably worth further
  investigation? - e.g. http//www.transparencynow.c
  om/Evil.htm for some academic critique of the
  shows meaning (!)
• Fin is having more fun in her research than I am?

15
Here the audience is invited to gasp at the size
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Oooh!
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The Rocky Horror Show, by Richard OBrien 1975.
Numerous official fan sites including
www.rockyhorror.com www.cosmosfactory.org
www.rockyhorror.co.uk timewarp.org.uk
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But I wont
Ecstatic cheering applause
Youve been a wonderful audience