The Implicit Body in Interactive Art: Performance, Embodiment, and Media
     a forhcoming book by nathaniel stern

In David Rokeby’s installation, Very Nervous System, viewer-participants might look to outsiders like they are dancing erratically to a strange sonic composition, but they are actually creating these sounds in a real-time, response-driven environment. Here interactors move, and are moved, to make music. Camille Utterback’s Untitled 6 complexly layers space, line and color to create an evocative and painterly composition in which contributors’ movements generate animated marks that cumulatively interact with each other over time. Like the “experience of embodied existence itself - a continual flow of unique and fleeting moments” – Untitled 6 is both sensual and contemplative in its interactivity. In Mathieu Briand’s series of “systems,” spectator-performers literally share, swap and interfere with each other’s “viewpoints.” Wearing custom headsets and earpieces, we see and hear what people in other times and spaces are looking at and listening to, while they simultaneously experience and respond to our own eyes and ears.

These artists are less interested in what we see, and more so in how we move. Their installations are not objects to be perceived, but relations to be performed. The contemporary artist-researchers behind the category of interactive art are newly concerned with how interactivity itself “matters.” Here, physical action literally and figuratively becomes the “work” that is the “work of art.” It is not merely that interaction is put on display for all to see. Rather, the viewing subject and media object emerge, together. Art work and audience, action and perception, body and world, are each and always already implicated across all others. They are collaboratively enacted, dispersed, entwined, interfered, differentiated, shared and continuously embodied. In this way, interactive installations exceed extant models for understanding art, which almost exclusively rely on signs, vision or form.

The Implicit Body in Interactive Art: Performance, Embodiment, and Media rethinks critical discourses on interactive and digital art, shifting from the visual to the performed. Rather than situating new media along trajectories of language-, image-, or object-based art, this book places emphasis on embodiment, relationality and emergence, providing some of the first in-depth studies of computer-based participatory installation. It shows how a combination of interactive artists, new media critics and embodiment theorists have paved the way for a new approach to digital art more broadly, one that recognizes such pieces as ongoing formations, per-formed in the exhibition space, rather than pre-formed by the artist’s hand.

The Implicit Body provides a theoretical approach, as well a critical framework, for the study of interactive art. How, in our interactions, does the process of embodiment relate to, for example, space, language or society? How does the ongoing formation of each influence and enact the ongoing formation of the other? What do we learn through these infolding relationships? The book then applies its approach and framework to case studies that demonstrate various interventions in the body’s performance. These thematic readings serve to productively complexify and problematize how we apprehend the body and/in art.

The Implicit Body contends that contemporary, interactive art is reconfiguring action and perception in ways that amplify bodiliness. It gives potential modes of thinking through interactivity, and shows their practical application towards furthering the fields of contemporary art criticism, creative production, and public discourse about the body more generally.

Coming Soon!