Gaia's Portrait in ars electronica

Gaia's portrait was displayed as part of the MIT Media Lab retrospective. Unfortunately it was poorly constructed and therefore changed the way people interacted with the work, but still I was proud to see it there.

In my talks about interactive installations I emphasize how critical it is do think about every aspect of the installation. Not just the content or technology, but also presentation, location, lighting, venue, other things around the installation that might effect it. Every little detail that might affect the viewer, from the second they see the work, through interaction, to the moment they leave can set their expectation and take them to a different experience.

In this case, the picture frame was mounted to the screen in a way that created a gap between the display and the frame, so people were intuitively sending their hands to that gap. The display is a touch screen, so when they touched it the cursor jumped to their finger and they thought that was the interaction and were waiting for something to happen. Fortunately most times there were Ars people around that demonstrated how to interact with it, most of the time. If it was built the way it should, behind a fake wall that makes it look like a hanged picture on a wall it would make people just stand in front of the picture, like they do in museums and then the interaction would work as it should.

One might say that when you label a work as interactive, it is setting a problematic expectation in the first place, as people want to interact. They are actively looking for the interacting part. Then again if we don't label it and people see it's a TV screen they expect a video. This is an excellent example to the challenges interactive and digital artists face designing their works. I don't have solutions but I am aware to the challenge and keep exploring the different possibilities to lead my viewers through the path of experience I want them to follow.