With uncharacteristic lassitude, the New York Times today bit into interactive art with a piece on the current Boston Cyberarts Festival; the author, Sarah Boxer, advances four "problems" with this medium, or genre, or trend, or adjective, whatever it is. Her four "problems" are neither specific to the phenomenon, nor particularly problematic, I daresay, but the ways she gets it wrong are informative. With her main point, I agree with her: "Interactive art is irritating." I'll drink to that. But why is it?

Let's take the four "problems". First, "potty-mouthed machines." She cites some piece that, when you lean close, whispers gross banalities at you. Plenty of contemporary art (not to mention modern) has obscenity as its only apparent goal. Associating this with machines is either ignorant or in bad faith.

Number two: "Two much ritual, too little time." It's not clear what ritual has to do with anything. Breaking this down, she notes how visitors shy away from one knobbed noisemaking device, and when someone finally turns the knobs, it's not clear how they're affecting the sound. These are good points; lots of electronic pieces don't take their physical form seriously enough. The work is conceptual, perhaps. Fine; but to make interactivity an element, the piece must afford relevant interaction. I wish more of these technical artists would take note of how their pieces beckon or repel human beings, and of the machine's presence in the room. Oh, and if interaction doesn't seem to affect the piece, you've really failed the "interactivity" test. At that point, you're nothing but an artist in the medium of wall-labels.

The next example, of the Roshambo machine, "Janken," sounds intriguing, but the way she describes it, it sounds simply slow. This machine just sucks. Machine-art that fails as an evocative image, and also sucks as a machine, is somewhat disappointing, to say the least. Let's hope there was a dimension to the interaction that our happy reviewer didn't grasp. "Ungraciousness" is the problem derived from this one; by some tortuous associations I suppose this could be understood as a point against the inflexible machine's sluggishness & a detraction from its value as a work of art.

Lastly, problem four, "moral superiority." The piece illustrating this point, "Applause" sounds like it may in fact succeed in coaxing the viewer into an uncomfortable, illuminating relationship with the piece, and also with history. This isn't superior, though it's apparently moral. If it's discomforting, I applaud it.

Even to consider "interactive art" as a knowable thing is doubtful at best. She seems to impute "electronic" as part of its definition, which is poppycock. One of the best pieces of art I've ever interacted with was a basin of warm milk in which I was advised to wash my hands; I did. The fact that "interactive" has somehow become synonymous with "electronic" in society at large is a sign of something; maybe a loss of interactivity amongst the unwired, or maybe a diminished attentiveness on the part of art critics and historians. I suspect the latter.

After all, it's a classic sophistry of the philosophy of art that any art is interactive. The viewer projects his own experience even when he's sitting, apparently passive, oggling a Gaugin. But "interactive art" is interactive in a different way. It calls for you to step up in the gallery space and project yourself in a way that other people can see. This is deeply embarrassing, of course, for someone trained to view art only as a distanced critic, someone whose smarmy, learned derision is deferred to Section C of the Sunday edition.

This is bad criticism, written by a critic trained to deal with artists' surprising creations, but lost when those creations pop surprisingly off of the canvas.

In fact, one of the decisive problems in this kind of art is the overwhelming tendency for cosmopolitan urbanites (the audience) in a public space (the gallery) both to remain aloof and also to try to make something interesting happen. To "make a show," that is—yet without stooping to some indignity, without falling into some trick of political incorrectness, or of cultural ignorance (how gauche). The piece is incomplete until it is touched or entered into (overtly). This puts the consumer on the spot. It's no wonder most artfans are left either making some gawky show, or else stuck watching the other fellow flounder gawkily.

The flux of articles like this, that purport to cut through the pretension of the work, really displaces the important critique that should be happening on this art and its principles. Fascinating artistic possibilities are opened up by computers, because they can give rise to this complex & mysterious behavior. This raft of interactive artists need to be told just how they suck, and need to be held accountable. But let me be more specific.

Even though this body of work posits wholly new relationships between artist, object, spectator, and community (to name a few participants), it needn't be ignorant to older, more static values in art or in image-making. Scott Snibbe's piece, Shadow Play (the only one mentioned that I've had the good fortune to see) is a terrific example of this. The looped silhouette movies that visitors create within the piece are connected to moving images and performance. These little pieces have everything to do with silent cinema, with interstitial fragments in TV ads, music videos, and other filmic venues. In this piece, the mind catches on such things as the many shapes of bodies, the fetishism of gesture (how many people have this!), the sense of drama that silhouettes bring. At least these things will circulate in your head when walking through the piece or watching the loops.

We could write a pensive ethnography of the ways people act when they are creating a silhouette loop. Some flap their arms, some dance, some just try to walk as natural and un-signify-ingly as possible. When I saw Shadow Play, the most interesting loop of all was made by a child of about one year, who sat in front of the projector's blinding light, and did nothing more than to look into it, with curiousity. The projector's own beam denied the machine's effort to make silhouettes, and instead, the child's features were illuminated in flat black and white (no grays). For half an hour, my companion and I watched this 10-second (?) loop repeat, and repeat, and repeat, in a cell alongside fifteen others: fifteen movies about cosmopolitan grown-ups trying to make something interesting happen.