Thao, Michael

Reading Responses
Errki Huhtamo's Trouble at the Interface or the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art talks
about the relationship between the audience and artist of digital installations. An idea that
Huhtamo describes in his text that is integral to his practice is that most interactive digital art
installations needed the viewer or audiences participation in the pieces. He even goes on to say
that the active role of the spectator, turned into a 'user' or an 'interactor', was
essential(Huhtamo 1). This relationship although is separated by a fine line. The spectator
cannot touch the work, but only touch the 'virtualized' work.
Lev Manovich talks about the relationship between database and narrative. One idea that
he believes that is integral to digital art is that database is the correlation of the computer age as
it becomes the center for the creative process in the age of computers. As he says in his text,
database, in the most simple of terms, is a collection of items in which the user can use to view,
navigate and search through. It is a new structure of ourselves and the world.
Floran Cramer talked about concept art and the software needed to do this kinds of art.
One idea that he talked about that he believes is integral to practice is the idea that programmers
and programming is necessary and needed for the digital arts. Cramer talks about how ignorant
people are to the necessity of programmers for writing code that then allows artists to create
digital art.
Three artworks that I found that exemplify each of these three concepts are: Visual
System: A Digital Experience for Huhtamo, Lev Manovich's Software Studies Initiative for
Lev Manovich, Dragon Riders by moonworker1 for Floran Cramer. Visual System: A Digital
Experience is actually an art showing in which lights and music are put in an installation and this

combination of the two allows for the audience to actively participate as when they move about,
the shadows and lights differ. This is the type of interaction in which Huhtamo talks about. Lev
Manovich's Software Studies Initiative is actually research and art through the way that
Manovich's team used a supercomputer to analyze and study pictures, videos, gameplay footage
and such simultaneously from the internet as the database for their project. Dragon Riders by a
concept artist named moonworker1 is a digital concept art piece made on a program Photoshop
CS3. This piece describes what Cramer is talking about as art is made on a program such as
Photoshop.