During EXCELLENT and descriptive midterm presentations pertaining to our experiences, I posed an unexpected scenario to everyone in the group.
You’re sitting at a cafe with a good friend of yours, sipping at pipping hot mugs of pumpkin spice latte. The topic of Public Interactives happens to come up, your friend asking you to describe what it is you are researching. How would you introduce and describe Public Interactives to someone who has no prior background in media or communications studies, or technology?
The responses were intriguing:
- One student responded in beginning to describe Public Interactives as kind of like interactive installations…. but not really. They further described that Public Interactives seem to commonly use technology as an intervention between you (a viewer or user) and someone else, that technology seemed to function as a type of middle man within a type of conversation between individuals. Ultimately, that Public Interactives utilize technology to engage in conversation with others.
- Another replied that Public Interactives are digital media assemblages that function as dynamic media objects situated in communal spaces. The dynamism refers to various feedback forms, from those required for the technology to function as a communal device, to aspects of the communicative in terms of encoding, decoding, sending, and receiving.
- Another in the class described Public Interactives as a type of portal into alternative spaces that are situated in public space. They made an important distinction to clarify that, with respect to Public Interactives, all public space is immersive space, that Public Interactives are all about scale, and that they generally work to modulate the ambient.
- One described Public Interactives as digitally mediated experience in a public space. To further explain, they specified that Public Interactives happen in public or communal spaces, and that the experience is collective. In terms of interactivity and scale, a Public Interactive is something that a person cannot ignore.
- Lastly, a student described Public Interactives as a media insertion in public space that changes perception of the ambient.
In addition to describing our experiences thus far this semester (where Magritte and Baudrillard were referenced) the group also brought into the discussion Guy Dubord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as theoretical proposing points in beginning to describe aspects of the Public Interactives phenomenon.
