Gathering Ecologies: Thinking Beyond Interactivity (Immediations)

What might an interactive artwork look like that enabled greater expressive potential for all of the components of the event? How can we radically shift our idea of interactivity towards an ecological conception of the term, emphasising the generation of complex relation over the stability of objects and subjects? Gathering Ecologies explores this ethical and political shift in thinking, examining the creative potential of differential relations through key concepts from the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Michel Serres. Utilising detailed examinations of work by artists such as Lygia Clark, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nathaniel Stern and Joyce Hinterding, the book discusses the creative potential of movement, perception and sensation, interfacing, sound and generative algorithmic design to tune an event towards the conditions of its own ecological emergence.

It seems that in the very moment of its triumph “interaction’ has exhausted itself—in both concept and practice. In art, and surprisingly even in engagements with technology, interactivity as often thought or practiced seems inadequate to what’s really going on. It too often leads only to an impoverished and prescriptive set of relations that are neither interesting or fun. Gathering Ecologies explores rich alternatives to this now exhausted interactivity. It navigates a series of valuable paths through new ways of thinking about relation in art in general, and relations between art and technology in particular. In opening up new ways of thinking the dynamic ecologies involved, Goodman provides an exciting and complex “post-interaction” view on how events do gather in art, and how they might also gather differently, given the change. - Andrew Murphie