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Ed Keller and Carla Leitao of A|Um Studio, SUTURE, SCI-Arc and TELIC galleries, Los Angeles, California, November 2005–January 2006An expanded cinema installation, SUTURE at SCI-Arc encouraged visitors to experiment with media assemblage and play with the possibilities of film.A landscape of sculpted furniture and pressure sensors embedded in the floor organised circulation flows and points of view, allowing visitors to createnew signal paths and new cycles between the images projected on multiple screens. By acting as catalysts, the users were able to make newconnections between gestures, objects, characters, materials, spaces and narrative arcs, ultimately remixing events. A month later a parallel installationat the TELIC gallery, Los Angeles, was opened to provide an additional networked interface to SUTURE. It allowed TELIC visitors to remotely alterparameters in the programming environment at SCI-ARC, observing the results and embedding themselves as video participants in the project.

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COPYRIG

HTED M

ATERIAL

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The days in which conventional architecture was driven by a social agenda are now far

behind us. They are secreted in the distant past of the most senior generation of

architects when professionals worked for local authorities and housing projects were

solely publicly funded. Interactive design environments are, by comparison with postwar

utopian projects that could tackle large-scale urbanism such as new towns, and swathes

of residential tower blocks, small-scale interventions. This is not to undermine their

potency; their power to transform people’s experiences and perceptions. They may not

aspire to irrevocably change an individual’s quality of life or life course; what they can

do, however, is shift the way people interact both with those around them and also with

the space around them. In an urban context, where the major cities of the world are

densely populated, often with populations often over 10 million, they turn the anonymous

passer-by from just another face in the crowd into an individual, and often a playful one

at that. In museums, they allow the visitor to enter into a totally different relationship with

works of art. Whereas conventionally the visitor is asked to stand back and view in awe

a cordoned-off venerated object, with an interactive artwork touch and noise, if not a

prerequisite, are generally encouraged on the visitor’s part.

The aspirations of interactive art focusing largely on the experience of individuals or a

small section of the public partaking in a particular project may seem modest. Its widest

purpose is in an educational capacity. As Lucy Bullivant outlines in her article ‘Playing

with Art’, digital projects that have been undertaken by London’s museums and galleries

have been successful in bringing a wider public both into the galleries and online. It is,

however, the encouragement of sociability where the interactive is at its most potent,

where it has the ability to transcend the everyday – causing the individual to pause a

minute in a street corner or a gallery foyer to have fun, be playful and have occasion to

smile out of unassailable joy. 4

Helen Castle

Editorial

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Ed Keller and Carla Leitao

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