75% of interactive art is bad.

it's funny how we all have blogs and we don't ever have time to write in them. at least i don't. i'm too busy drinking my college money away.

so tonight we saw jim campbell speak. he pretty much said it straight. i wasn't as star struck with him as some people where but his work is good and he looks at things honestly. here's the rub tho. really it seems in my mind and in some of our classes, we have been discussing the whole data mapping as art thing and where to draw the line. as far as interactivity is concerned campbell suggests that when you deal with 1 to 1 ratios for translating data, it gets boring... in a different conversation, someone suggested that it wasn't art at all. which i feel has some foundation. so as to not be too wordy and also so i can go to bed this is what i think:

alot of data mapping art, interactive or no, verges on not being art at all. while this is true at the same time that translation of context and information can definitely be art. duchamp's urinal? pure translation. nothing to it. that's art. most everyone can agree on that because of the context. thinking machine 4 by martin wattenberg? i'm not so sure.. yes it charts the proccess of a computer plotting moves for mind numbing number of games of chess, and very aesthetically, but does it have the same intention of truly shifting the viewers consciousness surrounding the experience of it? sure people can be wowed by all the decisions a computer can make, but these are things that sit just under the surface of what we do everyday, and bringing them to light isn't such a drastic context shift as duchamp's choice. i know it's unfair to compare them in some respects, but honestly, between utterback's deal with herman miller and wattenberg's design of the smartmoney java applet, which in turn they licensed to the smithsonian museum, at this point we are talking about technical and innovative information design and craft or simply nice looking vehicles to put marketing goo into. ???

sleep.