Art Systems for Interactions between Members of a Small Group of People

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a type of art system that involves a small group of people interacting with one another in an activity without set goals. Persons in an unfamiliar situation try to 'make sense' of it, even though initially it may appear to consist of random factors. Their major problem is to comprehend the situation in question; some would say that the problem is to discover its logic. But I wish to avoid this notion, as it seems to imply that there is only one way to understand it, whereas in practice different people often make sense of the same situation in different ways. It can be said that when one has learnt how to deal with people one understands their actions, not always in the strict sense of being able to predict them but simply of not being bewildered by them. The idea expressed briefly above has provided the stimulus for undertaking the projects that I shall now describe. But in no sense are the projects based on a theory of cognition (indeed I know of no adequate theory), although participants in one of the projects may be led to question their ideas about cognition. In each project, participants are able to make contact with each other only through very restricted interfaces, i.e. with a very limited set of possible actions and responses. One might say that they try to make sense of the responses that they receive. The responses are such that the participants are likely to understand each other's actions only partially and even that understanding may be transitory. Certain motivations for constructing interactive art systems have been outlined in Ref. 1. Two of the projects discusses in this paper, 'Rover' and 'Rover g2', I devised with Stroud Cornock who has described his own theoretical approach to them in Ref. 2.