Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

After 2000, the examination of digital interactive installations shows a proliferation of artworks which engage the users’ body as object, instrument, and subject of the aesthetic experience, and as a source of activation, creation, and configuration in the construction of the living system (works of Scott Snibbe, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Daniel Rozin, Golan Levi, Scott Snibbe, studio NOTA BENE, artworks presented at the festival Ars Electronica etc.). However, despite their contemporaneity (2000 until present), in the academic discourse these types of artworks lack a specific definition and an ontological characterization of their features.

Foregrounding our research on the history of computer art, the study embarks in an analytical exploration, doubled by a cultural analysis, on the historical timeline of installations focusing on users’ body, depicting the conversion from in-absence digital body image representations to in-presence ones, marked by the apparition of Myron Krueger’s responsive environments, among which we identify the first form of digital body interactive installations. Following the same research design, using digital image content analysis, the article establishes the cultural and artistic production motivations to engage in a particular terminological demarcation within the broad field of digital interactive installations.

The early stages of computer art imprint digital body interactive installations with their focus on a mathematical digital imaging and find their expression in what we consider to be the forefathers of digital body interactive installations: computer art’s video body installations. Lee Harrison III’s ANIMAC or Vasulka’s digital video installations, despite using the human body in their works, overlook the presence of the body as digital subject, as they are focused on the technical procedures and the digital image’s understanding, processing, and transformation, approached in relationship with the real world, and not on the interaction human-technology. Dissatisfied by this, Myron Krueger changes the register of implication from indirect to direct interaction body- artwork in “Videoplace” and “Metaplay”, where the body becomes a source of space activation, creation, inscription, and experience.

This method of body employment follows an ascendent path, and empowered by the technological development, echoes in a plethora of installations that differentiate from the other types of installations through the status of the body (instrument, object, subject), the capacity of transposing itself into different digital entities (which creates different types of self-representation) and the collaboration between the users’ body and the digital forms created. Taking into consideration the dominant pivotal role of the body, we consider that these types of digital interactive installations require a precise framework of definition.

Therefore, we consider digital body interactive installation a sub-category of digital installations, where the body performs a set of operations (the body is: 1. A subject, object, and instrument of the creation process and of the aesthetic experience. 2. A source of activation and creation of the digital content. 3. A force of manipulation and control of the content. 4. A digital space inscriber and explorer) that facilitates, by digital translation, the marking of its presence on the interface through digital body representations. The body is, simultaneously, a data container and a data provider for whom the digital installations become a space of body expression. Each term of the syntagm given (“digital body interactive installation”) to the type of installations described beholds a meaning that imprints with specificity and substance the artworks, and without which they would represent alternative typologies.