Week 01

Reading: Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art Author: Katja Kwastek

Félix González Torres stood out to me for two reasons. First, it's a Spanish name. Second, because Kwastek described him as devising "situations in which the emphasis was on negotiating relationships between different recipients or between artists and recipients." When looking over González's body of work, I didn't recognize in it Kwastek's description of "negotiating relationships" which had interested me the most.

Two of González's works stood out to me. "Paper Stacks" definitely falls within the category of interactive art, and I'm quite curious about what a (new) media re-creation of the work would look like. So much of digital mediums are fungible by nature. What would the equivalent of "taking" a "sheet" or two be when interfacing with the digital realm?

I found "Doubles" and specifically "Untitled (Perfect Lovers)" striking. Imagine a pair of computers where interfacing with either one of them results in the same effect across devices. I do not mean a mirroring of displays, but literally synchronizing the computational and mechanical state of two separate machines. An interesting juxtaposition of this idea would be a piece where another pair or identical machines are also displayed side by side but they are not synchronized, so while they begin in the same state the intention is to observe how the states of the machines shift over time.