Cutting Edge – Too Much Interactivity Doesn’t Serve Art

“These days, any film for which a studio’s marketing department has sufficiently high commercial expectations is issued on DVD in a ‘special’ or ‘limited’ or ‘collector’s’ edition that makes an Arden Shakespeare look skimpy by comparison. The contemporary desire for interactivity in the experience of art derives, obviously, from the heady sense of control over information to which we’ve become accustomed as users of computers. The problem with applying that model to works of art is that in order to get anything out of them, you have to accept that the artist, not you, is in control of this particular package of ‘information.’ And that’s the paradox of movies on DVD: the digital format tries to make interactive what is certainly the least interactive, most controlling art form in human history.”