Art foregrounds the dynamic, ongoingly relational pole. Everyday experience foregrounds the object-oriented, action-reaction, instrumental pole. That pole comes across as stable because it offers our action perches -- “affordances” in J.J. Gibson’s vocabulary. We attend to the perchiness, and let the other side of that same coin, the passing-relation side, slip behind the use we can exact from the perception. Art brings back out the fact that all form is necessarily dynamic form. There is really no such thing as fixed form – which is another way of saying that the object of vision is virtual. Art is the technique for making that necessary but normally unperceived fact perceptible, in a qualitative perception that is as much about life itself as it is about the things we live by. Art is the technique of living life in -- experiencing the virtuality of it more fully, living it more intensely.
This also suggests a way of dealing with the question of interaction in art, and why the question of whether it is art or not comes up so insistently. A distinction of Whitehead’s is useful here. He calls the experience of the flow of action “causal efficacy”, and the qualitative, vitality affect, aspect he calls “presentational immediacy.” You can’t have one without the other, but presentational immediacy tends to disappear into the flow of causal efficacy. OWe see with and through it to the affordances we take as the actual form of things. Only rarely do we do the opposite -- see with and through the actual form to the dynamism of life. Now, you have to take interactivity at its word. Its flow is a flow of action. It’s true that the flow is two-way. But the back and forth is of action and reaction. It always comes back to causal efficacy, instrumentality, affordance. This backgrounds the qualitative-relational aspect – even when it is supposed to be all about social relation. By putting relation so fully into action, interactivity backgrounds its own artistic dimension. That’s the dimension of relationality in its own right, as opposed to a particular relating-to, for this or that already determined purpose
http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n1_massumihtml.html
This also suggests a way of dealing with the question of interaction in art, and why the question of whether it is art or not comes up so insistently. A distinction of Whitehead’s is useful here. He calls the experience of the flow of action “causal efficacy”, and the qualitative, vitality affect, aspect he calls “presentational immediacy.” You can’t have one without the other, but presentational immediacy tends to disappear into the flow of causal efficacy. OWe see with and through it to the affordances we take as the actual form of things. Only rarely do we do the opposite -- see with and through the actual form to the dynamism of life. Now, you have to take interactivity at its word. Its flow is a flow of action. It’s true that the flow is two-way. But the back and forth is of action and reaction. It always comes back to causal efficacy, instrumentality, affordance. This backgrounds the qualitative-relational aspect – even when it is supposed to be all about social relation. By putting relation so fully into action, interactivity backgrounds its own artistic dimension. That’s the dimension of relationality in its own right, as opposed to a particular relating-to, for this or that already determined purpose
http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n1_massumihtml.html
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