Interactivity: A New Category of the Fine Artistic?

(introduction)

Nebojsa Vilik: I appreciate when the ideas which are born in the office one day become reality. I will use this opportunity to open the first symposium within the Second Annual Exhibition of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts "Icon on Silver"organised by the Centre, on the subject of Interactivity: New Artistic Category or Not? I would rather like that to be in the original Greek sense of the word, and that we have all those bananas and oranges that we had in the yard of the Gallery Duplo, on the day of the presentation of the project.

Since the subject of this symposium is Interactivity as one of the categories for interpreting or evaluating the new technologies, particularly for the CD-ROM, (which is also the topic and medium of the Second Annual Exhibition of the Centre) we will try to be provocative enough in order to initiate interactivity among ourselves, both from our as well as from your side. The presentations of the participants will be short, with exception of the simultaneous translation provided for our guests, since we believe that the discussion that might follow could bring forth another important segment to these ideas, and besides that, I would rather have you understand these presentations as an introduction to the topic itself. We expect that later, through the discussions among ourselves we can develop the topic to a stage when it will become necessary to organise this kind of discussion again. In other words, the purpose of this discussion, of this symposium is to encourage and not to resolve.

The duopole conclusion in the text of Melentie Pandilovski was not randomly selected to be the first text of our discussion, because with the very title of our symposium we question the new within this category. In addition to this, the texts of Valentino Dimitrovski and Bojan Ivanov will cover the approaches to these new technologies, which will bring us to an field of communication, that is, one of comparison or the interrelation of what we considered as an already given category, to that which familiar to us, that is awaiting us, or to what is already an uncertainty; both texts question the new within the interactivity as a possible fine artistic category, since it would sound far too modernistic if in the end, we conclude that it concerns something new. The reflections of my colleague Ivanov cover one of the very important aspects of the CD-ROM, and that is the technological aspect, i.e. walking on the thin edge, that the artist can move on, at the same time bearing the danger of falling on the side of the entirely technical and losing the artistic, and vice versa. The presentation of Eddie Berg is related to the anticipated possibility or creatibility, or the boundaries of creatibility or interactivity, as one of the categories of the CD-ROM technology. Penetrating into the subtle notions of the term interactivity and the extent to which it is present in the art, the text of Janos Sugar will provide an extensive approach towards the issue of interactivity, through a specific form of artistic activity. My presentation will raise the question of the position and the status of the artist in the interactive media arts, a position which transforms the role of the artist, by retaining only his authorship. According to the materials submitted for the symposium, Ivan Dzeparovski will in some way continue the discussion in the same line, through a hidden Baudrillard-like concept, which will bring us to another concealed notion in the text of Susana Milevska, who poses the question of whether interactivity is promiscuity or Gesamtdatenwerk. Nikola Gelevski illustrates another perspective, which according to the material received is in fact a personal experience, a voyage that replaces pluralism with monism by believing that "interactivity is not such a new artistic category".

I will not expand more, let us hear now the presentations on the Interactivity: A New Category of the Fine Artistic?