{"id":671,"date":"2008-10-24T02:16:25","date_gmt":"2008-10-24T06:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/?p=671"},"modified":"2008-10-24T02:16:25","modified_gmt":"2008-10-24T06:16:25","slug":"my-lost-blog-about-physcial-vs-mental-interactivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/2008\/10\/24\/my-lost-blog-about-physcial-vs-mental-interactivity\/","title":{"rendered":"My Lost Blog About Physcial vs. Mental Interactivity"},"content":{"rendered":"

When some people think of an interactive art form, they intuitively think of literature and painting in a digital format. They think that as long as an art form can be physically <\/em>interacted with through their laptop\u2019s keyboard or mouse it has to be interactive \u2013 like ergodic literature and cybertext. People often forget that there is a different type of interactivity, one that has been around for thousands of years, and as such predates and is the precursor for the digital era\u2019s physical<\/em> interactivity. As Scott McCloud had proved it in the context of comic books, there is a sort of mental<\/em> interaction between people and a given art.<\/p>\n

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While McCloud didn\u2019t spend a lot of time on addressing the issue of interactivity with his concept of closure, he did inadvertently question the novelty of the interactive digital art forms. After all how can interactivity be a novel idea if it has been around for thousands of years in the form of various arts \u2013 albeit in a different form?<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not a novel idea, however, some people forget that because they take their psyche\u2019s gift for granted. They believe that in a book words and sentences give rise to what they envision \u2013 which is true in a sense \u2013 but forget about how their psyches contributes to what they see. If reading was not interactive than we would all envision a book\u2019s events the same way, but are there any two people who had read the same book and in the end had imagined the events the same way? I don\u2019t think so. Not unless they have an identical psyche \u2013 a prospect that is impossible.<\/p>\n

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Andre Bazin, a renowned French theorist from the 20th<\/sup> century, had argued that nothing can be more interactive than reading a book, because the reader is part of the book and the book is part of the reader, due to the reader\u2019s gift to convert words into unique images. Thus interactivity is not a novel idea, only the concept of physical<\/em> interactivity is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When some people think of an interactive art form, they intuitively think of literature and painting in a digital format. They think that as long as an art form can be physically interacted with through their laptop\u2019s keyboard or mouse it has to be interactive \u2013 like ergodic literature and cybertext. People often forget that … Continue reading My Lost Blog About Physcial vs. Mental Interactivity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[74,83,82,76],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-comics","tag-mental-interactivity","tag-physical-interactivity","tag-scott-mccloud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":672,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}