- Maker: Cailin Rolph
- Genre: Eversion
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5400: Technical Writing
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Fall 2023
Description
An interactive art piece encourages audiences to touch, feel, and change the art with their interaction with it.
Why It Matters
The goal of this project was to encourage audiences to consider both how we interact with art and how our interaction changes our perception of art. With the long-held standard being that art ought not to be touched or held but only looked at, I wanted to encourage my audience to do the opposite. By potentially attaching the breadboard to the canvas, I essentially moved to ask my audience to go against their instincts, defamiliarizing the idea of not touching art. This hopefully resulted in some kind of change in the audience’s perception of their relationship to the art, and/or the art itself.
Reflection
For project 3 I thought a lot about what I thought critical making was, and what exactly I wanted to be critical of. It was not enough to create thoughtfully, I wanted to be able to engage in some conversation that existed beyond the product I was creating. Being incredibly limited in what I knew I was capable of regarding digital technologies required me to lean into this critical-making project’s physical process. I knew I was bound to the idea of creating some kind of interactive art because I already owned a breadboard and knew enough about how to operate it. That meant thinking about what I wanted my work to communicate, it was less about the work of art itself, and more about how I wanted people to interact and engage with the art. Due to this, it was less important to me that I create original art, my attention was focused on how I could force my audience to engage physically with the art in a way they would not have done independently.
Sources:
I intended to speak to a few different concepts with this project. The first is Viktor Sklovski’s Art as Technique (1917). It was this piece that inspired this project, specifically the quote “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” (Sklvoski, 1917, p.2). Sklvoski uses Tolstoy’s writing as an example of this, he points to Tolstoy’s ability to describe something ‘familiar’ as ‘unfamiliar’ “both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature,” (1917, p.3). I attempted to make the same choices with my art. In maintaining the integrity of the original art, while enhancing its effect, my goal was to change the nature by which the audience understands and perceives the art while maintaining its original form.
