From a student's paper: "[in new media pieces,] interactivity should be allowed so long as it doesn't undermine the artist's intent."
Is it possible to create a piece that has the sole purpose of undermining the intent of the artist? Or is that a contradiction? If it's a contradiction, there must be a gray border nearby where the piece has intention and demands an anti-intention as well. Perhaps this is one way of classifying games without goals?
If you drop electronics components randomly, solder nearby ends together randomly, and pass some kind of signal through them... most of the time, nothing interesting will happen. Is there a way to do this where more interesting things necessarily happen? Perhaps if you were to modularize "interesting filters" and drop the filters at random? How simple could the filters be?
One way to implement this: use tons of through-hole components and multiple layers of randomly generated PCB layouts set up with the holes in a grid.
Two sonifications for cellular automata: imagined as the score (as in this example), and imagined as the sound — i.e., the wave itself. I imagine the second case would be incredibly noisy but with some really interesting structures. Perhaps a more useful tool would be a cellular filter or cellular instrument: where the filter starts with the input as the initial state and evolves it a fixed number of times to yield the output, or with the instrument where the note being played determines a basic square wave which evolves over the course of the note being played
Drop an iPhone somewhere. Whenever the accelerometer reads motion, have it record video and send it back to a server wirelessly. Create a collection of "found cell phone" footage, of people discovering the cell phone and deciding what to do next.
Inspired by the U.Frame Festival category, "Light Media (films made with mobile phones)".
In the last century a tradition has developed that places awareness at the center of art. One of my favorite realizations of this idea comes from John Cage's famous "silent piece"/4'33": the music consists of any sound the audience is aware of. Surely this can be expanded into other forms:
And by "is", I should say "requires", as it is possible to have awareness without art, but not art without awareness. And, perhaps, the only distinction between these two cases is the label applied to that which one is aware of (whether it is classified as/connected to other things called "art"). I can imagine "beauty" working the same way: requiring awareness (and perhaps, the label "art"), but then being nothing more than an additional label.
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