- dEsiGn for tHE nEtworkEd worLd (^) | 319
f gure 14-2. i a higher fidelity prototype of the electronics and enclosure for the
skis^3
HAPPENINGS, CONVERSATIONS, AND EXPLORATION
In late 1968 Jack Burnham, a writer and art history professor, wrote the
following in his paper System Esthetics:
t he specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art
does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people
and between people and the components of their environments.He was looking at the emergence of large-scale interactive artworks
and art events in the 1960 s. Artists began to see their work as more
than the object itself; they began to think about how the object interacts
with the audience and environment to create a conversation.
Artist David Rokeby explored the emotion and aesthetics of environ-
mental feedback systems in his early works Reflexions, Body Language,
and Very Nervous System in the 1980 s. Rokeby created one of the earli-
est examples of gestural interface by building his own 8 x 8 pixel digital
camera and programming his own software to read the video input and
3 Copyright Normative, 2013