The San Francisco Media Arts Council (SMAC) hosted an exhibition of reactive artworks and a discussion exploring concepts and developments in Reactive Art in the context of our current cultural climate and the field of interaction design.

Today interactive technologies have evolved into a medium through which we interact not so much with our computers as with other people and with our environment. The computer itself has become an interface to culture. As wireless networks, body-sensing apparatus, and smart appliances proliferate, the old challenge of exchanging messages with a machine has given way to a scenario in which the machines are capable of tracking our every move.

Rather than requiring viewers to choose from a predetermined set of prerecorded outputs, the 'reactive artwork' poses a system in which viewers' actions constitute an integral yet extemporaneous component, and it displays an immediate reflection of a state in perpetual change. Through mimicking and engaging our cognitive faculties, such work prompts us to examine our habitual ways of perceiving, while it invites improvisation, resulting in potentially lyrical, multi-sensory meditations on the nature of reality. These concepts, as well as themes of perception, memory, control, and everyday space, are common to the sensor-laden media exhibited artworks of Jim Campbell, Scott Snibbe, and Crevice, a Toronto-based art collective. >from *REACTIVE ART ... MEANS NOTHING WITHOUT YOU*, january 23-25, 2003

related context
> Scott Snibbe. Artist's Statement
"Phenomenological perception contrasts with intellectual, reasoned, verbal and even metaphorical ways of knowing... I hope to continue in these traditions by constructing environments that meaningfully react to the presence and engagement of the viewer."
> Jim Campbell. Artist's Statement
"Attempting to create systems that respond and progress in recognizably non-random, but at the same time unpredictable ways, I have tried to create works that have destines of their own."
> Crevice
"An interdisciplinary art collective that has formed to explore the possibilities of inmersive multimedia. Playing in the intersections of the physical and virtual."
> flow: the design challenge of pervasive computing november 6, 2002

imago
> reactive - not reactive