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Artists experimenting with interactive technology have only been moderately
successful, so far. The experiments have tended to be complicated and tedious
ways of doing things you didn’t particularly want to do anyway.

I remember an interactive music machine a few years ago that was of
bizarre complexity. It was triggered by the movements of passers-by. You’d
have needed a lifetime of practice to ‘play’ the machine, and the sounds
it made were so spectacularly uninteresting that you weren’t inclined to
waste any effort on it at all. It was as though the technical effort of
getting the whole thing going had completely exhausted the poor artist,
who was now protesting ‘What – you want it to sound good as well?’

This is the story so far. People are spending a lot of time making the
technology work only to find that they then don’t know what to do with it.
This is why I think the real beginnings of interactive art are likely to
be found in more innocent places than art galleries. Karaoke bars, Nintendo
parlours, multiple-user dungeons on the Internet, network authorship systems,
hypertexts, screen savers and remix-it-yourself hi-fi sets all provide glimpses
of how interactive art could be.

At the moment artists are trying to use information technology to make
entertainment. It would be more fruitful to use art and entertainment to
present information in irresistible ways: to make an art of information.
A friend told me that the most interesting CD-ROM he’d seen was a complete
street map of the US – designed so that you could zoom down from space onto
a particular street. He said that groups of his friends would sit around
playing for hours, rediscovering the streets where they were born, their
first homes and schools. This is interactive.

The most interesting impact of interactivity will be its blurring of
the distinctions between artist and audience – what I call the diffusion
of authorship. Increasingly, new-media audiences are being required to at
least finish the work, and then even to become co-creators in it. This erosion
of the active/passive duality in our cultural experience translates (I hope)
into social and political dynamite. Accompanying this role-blurring is the
disappearance of the cultural centre: if everyone’s making culture, or at
least adding to it, the old image of broadcasting from the centre disappears
– instead of a point that beams stuff out to peripheries, everyone’s at
the edges, sending things across space to each other.