Week 2: Thoughts on Krueger's "Responsive Environments"

I liked reading about this type of interactive technology-art hybrid because they seemed to me more like experiments than art. There were a few spots in this essay that reminded me of interactive technology that I have seen heard or read about. I'll take excerpts from Krueger's list titled "Control and Composition":

"5. An instrument which the participants play by moving about the space. In Psychic Space the floor was used as a keyboard for a simple musical instrument."

This reminded me of a YouTube video I saw, in which researchers turned a flight of stairs into a piano, making notes depending on which step you were on. If I recall, it was a social experiment to see if making stairs fun would get the public to use them more. Essentially the same principle.

6. "A means of turning the participant's body into an instrument. His physical posture would be determined from a digitized video image and the orientation of the limbs would be used to control lights and sounds."

This reminded me of the later version of the PowerGlove - the Xbox Kinect, the Wii or any of the Just Dance/Dance Central video games. I remember when they were advertising it, the commercials had the tagline "YOU are the controller." In my experience, and for many of the commenters on the commercials, there was some false advertising as to the ability of the game to precisely capture movement:

"Only problem is, in the real world, Kinect can't do half of those things. Sorry Microsoft, but this is completely false advertising. The responsetime, and amount of limbs the Kinect can recognize, and will recognize in this commercial, is simply not true" - Tage Fosse

"it will take another 5 year+ before we see that kind of flawless tracking." - catha86

8. "An experimental parable where the theme is illustrated by the things that happen to the protagonist - the participant. Viewed from this perspective, the maze in Psychic Space becomes pregnant with meaning. It was impossible to succeed, to solve the maze. This could be a frustrating experience if one were trying to reach the goal. If, on the other hand, the participant maintained an active curiosity about how the maze would thwart him next, the experience was entertaining."

The idea of an interactive game with an objective that is impossible to achieve reminded me of the Fantasy Game in the book Ender's Game, which was essentially a complex mind game built into the school's computer system that was filled with meaning and had profound pychological effects on Ender. In the game, he played himself, and was able to penetrate farther in the game than anyone else had gone. While other students became frustrated, Ender was continually exploring the confines of the world within the game.

"In each environment, a single person walks into a darkened room where he finds himself confroned by an 8?x10" rear view projection screen. On the screen he sees his own life-size image and the image of one or more other people. This is surprising in itself, since he is alone in the room. The other images are of people in the other environments.... The visual effect is of several people in the same room.... By moving around their respective rooms, thus moving their images, the participants can interact within the limitations of the video medium."

This description reminded me of the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, because it is the same setup of one person alone seeing themselves surrounded by other people in a created space of the mirror/screen. And like the limitations of video, Harry can really only look at his parents, or interact with them in the mirror-space; we see him trying to feel their actual presence when he touches his own shoulder, seeing if their reach extends beyond his reflection.