Sunday, September 28, 2008

Participatory? / Godspeed you black emperor!

I feel like it may seem that participatory/interactive art means to some that there must be an active audience performing actions set forth by the author or artist.

Is a beautiful painting not interactive? It grabs your attention and activates you, demands that you come up close, stare at it from the side, squint at a distance, bringing you into its diegesis. A film that makes you ponder its meaning for weeks later is in full interaction with your life and mind, your mind changing the movie and vice-versa. 

These are sort of abstract examples of how far away i think interaction can stray from performance.

having said this, it starts to seem that the internet is a nexus of communication, reference, and interaction and that art can be separated from its original author to be stretched, mashed, and chopped by an anonymous stranger five thousand miles away or right next door.

Thanks to the internet and its fracturing of real space, creativity is not limited to source material and there are no boundaries for exhibition, which is where I come to youtube.

I've been recently trying to find fan created video's for the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor (who are worthy of their own post.) I found this video extremely interesting and exemplary of this odd sort of interaction or involuntary collaboration, as you might call it: Godspeed You! Apocalypse Now!

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