SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 35

Alan Rath.
Photo credit:
Johnna Arnold.

ground. I was an art major at Williams College but at a
time when computers were black and white, and I was
not interested in them whatsoever. I did a lot of painting, but I also made sculptural objects that viewers were
meant to pick up and rearrange. I also made pieces that
people wore—they were based on the idea that if you’re
wearing this strange thing you change your encounters
with other people.

use their bodies in really beautiful ways, even if they’re
not trained—the system elicits that. I think that if
there’s a way that these systems I’m making can shift,
even subtly, how people are physically moving in a space,
that maybe some of that goes with them when they
leave.

A couple years after I graduated, I started seeing CDROMs and early internet stuff, and there was the idea
that you could create a whole world for people where
you could change the rules about what was possible. I
liked the possibility to affect culture with what I saw
coming down the pike, so I decided to go to grad school.
I went to the Interactive Telecommunications Program
at New York University. There were a lot of people there
doing camera–based, motion–capture work. I had a
familiarity with programming language, so I was able to
work on some of that really early stuff. Once I started
using the camera for motion–capture, I found there
was so much possibility for how people can engage with
computer or software systems.

CU: Early on there weren’t very many models for how
you could create a social space with computer interaction. The focus in that era, while I was still at NYU, was
on immersive, virtual interaction where the user had to
put on headgear and gloves—it was a totally individual
relationship with the system. It was through experimentation with camera–input work that I noticed people
liked being able to interact with a computer without
having to suit up and be alone. It was such a different
model to engage with the system while not having to
leave your social situation and your body.

JF: Why is interactivity important in your work?
CU: I’ve always been interested in how an artwork can
change your lived experience and not be just a thing you
look at, but something you engage with in a much more
physical way.
In my pieces, I want to create situations where people

SciArt in America December 2015

JF: There’s also a social aspect to your work. Tell us about that.

I think we’re still struggling with that now. You watch
people on their phones completely losing sense of what’s
happening around them, attempting to multitask by
maintaining a conversation while walking down the
street gracefully. Hopefully we can learn to take advantage of what we do well physically and socially and not
give up on having a virtual presence or having distant
relationships with people.
JF: A traditional view of art appreciation relies on passive
reflection. How do audiences respond to your interactive pieces?

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