Interactive Art’s Entrepreneurial Urge

In 1935 Marcel Duchamp nervously awaited the public in Alley F, Booth Number 147 of Paris’ 33rd Concours Lepin. This exhibition offered inventors a chance to showcase a new product before the public and financial backers. Over the years many notable inventions debuted at the Concours including the ballpoint pen, the steam iron, and the contact lens. However, on this day Duchamp offered a series of abstract interactive artworks called Rotoreliefs, which he had just patented.

Duchamp’s invention was a series of circular disks printed with abstract patterns. When placed upon a spinning record player, the discs created optical illusions of depth, color, and movement. Duchamp won an honorable mention in the Industrial Art category for his invention, which he also mischievously referred to as silent music. Unfortunately, Duchamp’s investment was a failure. He received few orders and was ignored in favor of more practical inventions like those of his neighbors: a pre-Cuisinart food processor and an early trash compactor. Most of his first run of 500 units were lost or destroyed.

Rarely have painters and sculptors attempted to mass-market their works of art the way musicians and filmmakers do. What is it about the genre of interactive and time-based media that brings out the entrepreneurial urge? I believe it is the inherently personal nature of interactivity. An experience like Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs is best encountered privately in an intimate space. Over the course of weeks and years the viewer becomes increasingly familiar with its time-varying and reactive properties, getting to know it like a favorite song. More fundamentally, we recognize that artistic interactivity is modeled on intimate face-to-face interactions with other human beings, in constrast with the less intimate “broadcast” experiences of a gallery, performance, or exhibition.

Duchamp was not alone in his dream of reaching out directly to his “customers.” Now nearly forgotten, but groundbreaking in his time, Thomas Wilfred pioneered light performances decades before their rise in the 1960s. His performances, called Lumia, were created with his Clavilux, a color organ of his own invention. These performances, which took place mostly in the 1920s, were infrequent, expensive, and ephemeral. Seeking to broaden his audience, in 1930 Wilfred premiered sixteen Home Clavilux devices, also known as Clavilux Juniors.

These devices imagined a world where families would sit down after dinner, open a handsome hinged oak cabinet, and enjoy an evening of time-varying abstract light. The “visual music” inside the box was created by lights modulated by colored disks that reflected and refracted across miniature mirrors onto a translucent screen. In a gesture anticipating John Cage, Wilfred named each Home Clavilux numerically, based on the amount of time before the performance began to repeat: one device was subtitled 8 Hours, 15 Minutes, 42 Seconds. Each Clavilux also included interactive controls to modify the tempo, shutter, and color of the pre-programmed performance. Unfortunately, these devices, like Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, proved commercial failures, and none were constructed after the initial run. Wilfred almost got it right—people did want to watch a cabinet of light—but preferred the greyscale forms of Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball to waves of color. Most of the original Home Claviluxes have been lost or destroyed.

Oskar Fischinger, the master of abstraction animation, also flirted with distributing interactive abstraction. While living in Los Angeles during the latter years of his life, Fischinger invented a “real-time” method to produce abstract imagery. His device, which he named the Lumigraph, consisted of a flexible white screen that he pressed into with his hands, intersecting sheets of colored light controlled via interactive dials and pulleys. Fischinger made several performances over the years with the Lumigraph, and a patent issued in 1955 attests to his hopes to commercialize and distribute the device. However, his dreams were never realized. The broadest distribution the Lumigraph achieved was via Hollywood in the role of a futuristic erotic stimulator in the 1965 film Time Travelers.

Today we have more hope. With the introduction of the iPad and its smaller mobile cousins, the problem of a device and distribution is solved: interactive artists can now focus on the software “scores” for our intimate, interactive performances. These highly useful devices can be exploited for useless purposes. I feared for several years that my career would go the way of the ignored precursors I revered like Wilfred and Fischinger. In 2002 I stopped creating abstract screen-based interactivity after a dozen years of showing in galleries and museums without sales or wider distribution. Now, after two months in the app store, I have an audience of hundreds of thousands that grows daily. Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph are enjoyed by people all over the world, bringing the unique joys of abstract interaction to anyone with a mobile device, and taking their minds away momentarily from more neurotic activities. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing modern masters of interactive abstraction like John Simon Jr. and Camille Utterback turn their efforts to this small screen and delight viewers worldwide. Could abstract interactive art become as widespread, and easily “consumed” as music and movies? Stay tuned.

REFERENCES

H.P. Roché, “Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp,” in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 79 and 86. Originally published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, June 1953, 79-87

Thomas Wilfred: A Retrospective. Concoran Gallery Exhibition Catalog. Washington, 1972.

Fischinger, Elfriede, “Writing Light,” reprinted in First Light, Robert A. Haller, ed. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1998: 30-34. http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/WritingLight.htm

Personal conversations with Elfriede Fischinger and William Moritz, August, 1995.

Thanks to Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music (http://centerforvisualmusic.org) for up-to-date references on Fischinger’s Lumigraph.