Interaction in Sound Art Installations

Introduction

Definition of interactivity becomes obscure when it comes to interactive art. Does the question whether to consider the philosophical point of view of including “participation of the viewer” as a form of interaction or not make the distinction even harder and more obscure? When “existence” is considered as “being inside the room or space which the artistic experience takes place in”, does it change in meaning?

Participation as Interaction

Katja Kwastek classifies interaction in four types. Kwastek presents “interaction as reciprocity” as the starting point and explains it as “… conventionally denoted ‘mutual or reciprocal action or influence.” Dieter Daniels also writes “reception as participation” as a leitmotif of modernism and gives Duchamp as a reference: “The personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” [1]

One of the dualities Daniel suggests about types of interaction is; ideological and technological. Considering Daniel’s classification, presence as participation can be seen as ideological. Viewer interacts with the meaning rather than the physicality of the artwork or “technologically” as in a human-machine interaction with sensors that translates physical properties into machine readable data. [1]

Presence as a way of ideological interaction can be questioned in a specific situation. When the space itself is designed for artistic purposes as a part of the experience, presence, or “being there” shifts from it’s abstract meaning to a physical meaning.

Space and Presence

Architecture and geometry term “spatial” - driven by the Latin word “spati”, meaning “space” - is defined as “existing or occurring in space”. Sound sources are spatial by nature because sound sources has a position in three dimensional space. [2] [3] [4]

In sound installations, artificial sound sources are placed in three dimensional space. Some sound artists like Iannis Xenakis and Bernhard Leitner use the spatiality of sound as a material in their sound art installations. [5] [6]

When the spatiality of the sound is used as an artistic material, the position of the viewer (or more precisely listener) plays a critical role in the auditory perception, and therefore the artistic experience. [3]

In addition to that, the existence of the listener’s body changes the acoustical properties of the space. In the existence of a hundred listeners, the auditory experience would be dramatically different than the existence of a single listener within the same room. [2]

Conclusion

When this physical aspect of sound is taken into consideration, meaning of participation shifts from its abstract basis, related to the meaning of the artwork. The importance of the change of perception due to these physical phenomena are open to discussion. But in any case, while studying the concept of interaction within the context of sound art installation, a special approach may need to be taken.

References

[1] Sommerer, C. (2008) [2] Roginska, A. (2017) [3] Kidd, G. (2008) [4] Blauert (2013) [5] Licht (2009) [6] Licht (2007)