Collaborative Forms

• Présentation: Formes collaboratives
• Speakers: Jean Cristofol & Douglas Edric Stanley
• Conference: Participation, Interactivité
• Location: L’école supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Date: 7 February, 2006

Jean Cristofol and I have just been speaking at a three-day conference my collegue Pierre Paliard organized, entitled “Participation, Interactivité”. There are a few other speakers talking on the subject, so I might feel different about this when its all over, but ultimately it smells like an old debate, a mute point; whatever the case something I’ve moved far beyond. Jean agreed and we spent most of the talk distancing ourselves both from the term “participation” (which we replaced with “collectives et communautés émergeantes”) as well as from the term itself “interactivité”.

For, ultimately, we are no longer in a general debate on interactivity, and are instead in need of a debate on its components. Perhaps in fact we are beyond the question itself of interactivity. I suspect this is why Jean-Louis Boissier, director rien de moins of the Laboratoire Esthétique de l’Interactivité, recently displaced the term interactivity, opting instead for a more specific one, Jouabilité (Playability). And after publishing my Lexique de l’interactivité way back in 1997, I very quickly moved away from the question of interactivity and starting exploring the dynamic nature of the machine, its algorithmic qualities if you will, which for me are a more urgent question than the general (and interminable) debate on what constitutes an interactive artwork.

I have placed links to all of the in-talk references on the website of my atelier for anyone who might want to read them.