Act React exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Here is the description of the exhibition, Act React, I'm curating for the Milwaukee Art Museum. It will be open from October 4, 2008 to January 11, 2009.

Act React explores a growing body of installation art where the interactivity involved is intuitive, non-technical and performed with the entire body of the viewer. Unlike earlier interactive installations that asked viewers to use a mouse and keyboard or other mechanical device to control it, these installations ask only that the viewers move through space, exploring how their motions change the work. This encourages not only individual exploration, but collaborative exploration by groups of viewers. In fact, one of the works, Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions, is only activated when two or more people are engaged with it.

Act React is not about the technology. With the removal of a technological interface, interactive artists today can construct works that are meditations on the larger interactive world. How it happens remains hidden and unobtrusive. Daniel Rozin explores the magic of mirrors. He examines the reflective nature of new media, reinventing the concept of the pixel, the defining unit of imagery. In his installations, each piece of falling snow in Snow Mirror, or spinning peg in Peg Mirror, act as a pixel creating the ‘reflection’ of the viewers actions, distorting their image in unique ways. Scott Snibbe reveals the manifestations of social boundaries, When two people walk across the Boundary Functions, a single line, drawn halfway between them, segments the space into two regions. This line changes dynamically, maintaining an even distance between the two. With more than two people, it becomes a paradoxical work, where the collaborative activities of the group are made possible by their stark definition as individuals. In Deep Walls, Snibbe uses one’s shadow as his primary metaphor. Walking (or running or hopping) in front of it causes ones shadow to be invisibly recorded on the screen in one square within the grid of sixteen, looping indefinitely. The work is the collaborative record of the last sixteen shadows that passed in front of it. Brian Knep presents a complex biological system that viewers disrupt and modify. When the viewer walks across Healing Pool, the pattern pulls away, creating a open space, a wound. Then pattern tries to heal itself and the wound closes but it can never completely go back to its original structure. The algorithms behind his Healing Pool are analogous to the mathematics that form biological patterns like Zebra stripes, where the pattern is always similar but no two are identical. Camille Utterback explores the action of painterly gesture. Untitled 6, Untitled 5, and External Measures 2003 are dynamic compositions that react to human motion creating imagery that is painterly, organic, and evocative while still being completely algorithmic.

In Act React, the audience will feel an profound sense of being encompassed by the art. The exhibition includes art on the floor (Boundary Functions and Healing Pool), art floating in the middle of the gallery space (Snow Mirror) and art on the walls. The two sound art installations, Janet Cardiff and George Miller's To Touch and Liz Phillips' Echo Evolution are both in small rooms that focus viewer's actions on their role in the creation of the sound environment. Within To Touch the audience is asked to gently stroke the worn surface of the rough, simple wood table. through their actions, they hear different male and female voices, sounds and music. “Your skin is so tender.” and, “I can feel your pulse and your sweat and the lines of your scars”, are phrases spoken by the table. One's touch generates a cinematic audio narrative that is eerily familiar. In Liz Phillips' Echo Evolution, the art hears the viewers. Echo location recognizes their movement through the room and lights it with glowing neon shapes according to their position and direction, while creating a spinning soundscape of elegant noise.

That the art in Act React is entirely interactive adds to the experience of being enveloped within the work, as one sees and creates ones’ own reflection, ones’ movement and ones’ relationship with others throughout the exhibition.