Barry, Andrew, "On Interactivity"
Chapter develops three themes in forms of interactivity
1) contemporary political resonances in interaction
- Concerns public participation, empowerment and accountability pg98
2) issue of interactivity as a theoretical concept
- With the contemporary museum, the technology of interactivity can be intended, if not necessarily to obliterate, at least to reconfigure the distinction between the human visitor and the non-human exhibit pg 99
3) The political anatomy of the museum visitor – interactivity of the body
Today the visitors of the museum or the science center is often encouraged to interact or to play with the exhibit, the subject is valued. pg100
The modern science museum originally developed in the nineteenth century as a place where the successes of the Imperial state could be displayed and where “European productive prowess was typically explained as a justification for empire” people where given resources and contexts to self educate and regulate pg100
Define interactivity and outlines two functions pg 101
- Range of technical functions - cost control, visitor research, quality assurance, marketing and customer relation (see handout to see how interactive can lure in sponsors)
- Functions in broader thinking of Left or Right - imposes sovereignty
The radical message of the Explanitorium was one of democratic empowerment. Pg 102
- In practical terms, the exploritarium “let the visitor be the laboratory subjects of their own perceptual experiments, the are trying to encourage the visitor to experience the process of discovery and thus to become an experimenter, shift to interactivity pg 103
Problems, some exhibits, it was said can be interpreted in ways which lead the museum visitors to false conclusions pg 105
Example of experimental gallery Pg106- 107
Spatial affordance of the interactive affordance – last paragraph pg 106
2 levels of criticism that can be made of the development of interactivity in the contemporary science museum pg11
- a series of questions have been asked about the use and effectiveness of interactive, not least by museum professionals and interactive designers themes. Interactivities are sometimes simply amusements or distractions or experimental games for the well educated pg111
- it is important to interrogate the forms of political reasoning which have justified this remarkable level of investment in interactivity. Pg 112.
