Act/React Show

After visiting the Milwaukee Art Museum's Act/React exhibit, I was quite amazed by all the exhibits but there were two I found most intriguing. Daniel Rozin's Snow Mirror as well as Scott Snibbe's Deep Walls were easily the two pieces I found to be the most interactive and provocative. Since the exhibit was basically empty except for my two friends and myself it allowed us to get more comfortable and creative in interacting with the exhibits.
Deep Walls was the second piece we ran into and my personal favorite. We soon realized that the screen held the most recent sixteen scenes in it's frame and from there tried to make overall themes of the piece, such as by making alternating rows of videos of us running left to right or right to left directions. I think a line from the information card for this piece best captures one of the greatest underlying ideas of this piece saying, "We may no longer believe that photography captures our soul, but having our shadows trapped is an experience that might give us pause." In my opinion the piece really did this and in a way made me somewhat think of the pictures in fantasy novels that were moving images of their friends and families.
Snow Mirror was the next piece we interacted with and were a little thrown off at first. Unlike the last one, we had to stand still to bring out the best in this piece. We were soon positioning ourselves so that our heads were taking up the entire screen and allowing the snow to fall and create beautiful portraits of our faces. I found this piece's true meaning to be that it's like watching the progressive building and creating of a piece in an almost instantaneous time. After standing in front of the screen for only few seconds, a snowy portrait is created that is 100% original and never been done before.
When asked to compare these pieces I immeadiately thought they were very different. In Deep Walls it requires movement, in whatever form it may be, to create the piece whereas in Snow Mirror you need to be standing still for full interaction with the piece. However they were both similar, as with all the interactive exhibits, because they both created pieces that were like I said before, completely original and can in no way be identically duplicated.
Relating this to the essay by George Fifield I thought of the part where Fifield talks about the introduction of the projector. Fifield says, "With the projector, the installation could become an immersive environment. The projectors immersive capability allowed interactive artists to create virtual stage sets." Both of the installations I talked about utilized the capability of the projector, to what I believe is to some of the fullest extent.