Reading Response on Interaction

In “Responsive Environments,” Myron Krueger introduces several interactive media projects that collectively present part of how his exploration with responsive environment has shaped his understanding of response as a medium. So how does response act as a medium? Without a doubt, response carries messages and/or information and passes them from one end to another, just like books, radio, or any other media do. At the end of the day, any medium is a way of human communication, whose job is to connect its artist and its audience. In this case, the artist makes the rules for an responsive environment to obey, so that the audience’s behavior will generate particular actions by the environment, which will hopefully allow the audience to understand and/or get interested in their communication with the environment (essentially, with the artist). The rules are algorithms programmed by the artist. This way, the artist does not necessarily know what action of the environment will be generated by a given behavior of the audience; instead, the artist takes care of the algorithms to ensure whatever actions they generate bring pleasure to the audience. It is interesting to notice that “pleasure” is a loosely defined term that can be achieved through many more specific emotions, such as curiosity, the desire to generate some certain action of the environment, or even empathy from successful immersion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.