Moving into the Art Work

Art Encounter Series Two

Key words: Snow Mirror, Deep Walls, interactivity


Perhaps few visitors have ever thought that they would become parts of the art work until artists began to apply interactivity as their tool in artistic creation. Recently, the feature exhibition Act/React in Milwaukee Art Museum brought me many new thoughts about this new form of art work. I become a curious visitor to this exhibition and plan to make a third visit.


Scott Snibbe’s Deep Walls and Daniel Rozin’s Snow Mirror are the two attractive installations for me. Deep Walls is formed by sixteen grids projected on to a screen. Each grid presents a silhouette of one visitor’s movement dynamically. For the visitors, their images are caught by the camera when they simply move through this wall. I spent up to half an hour in front of this installation. It is the ever-changing images that capture my eyes. When the first time I participated in Deep Walls, I found it was interesting and enjoyed myself very much. I couldn’t help to move through the wall again and again, trying to experiment my new images on the wall. The second time, I tended to pay attention to other visitors reactions. People are curious and children keep moving through the wall like what I did before. But you can never imagine how brisk everyone becomes in front of the wall. Some people perform swing dance. Some people keep turning around at walking. Some people (including me) keep jumping like a kangaroo. A couple kisses each other when they were walking…..It could be any kind of modern dance. Watching other visitors’ movement and images, I noticed that we were producing a movie. The visitors become a required part in art work’s completion. Actually, it is my favorite work in this exhibition for it brings so much fun for every visitor.


Snow Mirror is more mysterious compared to Deep Walls. In a dark room, standing in front of a magical mirror which is displayed by digital particles, visitor’s outline would be shaped by these particles. The images just like visitors are standing in a snow storm. But when they move, the images brake up. Similarly, most visitors enjoy the appearance and disappearance by moving around. But perhaps it is in such a dark and small place, few people would make dramatic movement. I particularly appreciate the black and white images in such rough style.


Snow Mirror and Deep Walls are both installations which can invite more than single individual to participate in the completion of the artistic creation. They display the effect of interactivity in black and write on the screen. Snow Mirror integrates the consequence of movement of every visitor into one dynamic image, while the Deep Walls displays interactivities of all visitors in separated images. The images of visitors’ movement are revealed in different mediums.


My experience in Act/React exhibition reveals the diversity of art encounters. When I was watching Robert Schaller’ My Life as a Bee, I was introduced to experience the bee’s little world and life with the changing colors and angles. My imagination was activated and kept recalling the experience for this film. I don’t have to move and jump in order to watch and think. However, all of the Act/React works require my whole body as well as my mind to complete the art works. I didn’t realize the significance of my participation as well as others until I went back. Without the activity of visitors, most of the installations are only a wall, a screen, a desk or a stack of wooden tubes equipped with computers. What is more, the activity requires the movement of visitors more than the thinking to the art work.


I have interested in that what inspires the creation of interactive art since I visited the exhibition. Although the art works in the Act/React exhibition are brand new to me as artistic creation. According to George Fifield’s Act/React, it is the capacity of digital technology to reveal our real actions in special ways serves as the inspiration or the technical supports for the art work. And the interactivity can be dated to 1950. Among many interactive art works mentioned at Fifield’s essay, I have a desire to experience the Christina Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s interactive work A-Volve as well as Karl Sims’s Galapagos which are based on biology, which remind me a software of Complexity science that mimic the evolution from Protozoa to Metazoa. Now the artists become more and more sophisticated in interactive art creation. Many technical products which enable you to interact with art at home such as iTouch are even available to consumers.

The tool of interactivity moves us into the world of artists’ creation in the name of contemporary art.

I was in the Snow Mirror and was taking picture.



A picture of Deep Walls.



You can click here to take a look at Act/React exhibition in Milwaukee Art Museum.