8

More Control

(excerpts)

Some possibly interesting things to think about in terms of control versus interaction:

the notion of making the control that the viewer has be perpindicular to their desire.

What this tends to do is overpower the feelings of control that a viewer might have if their control and desire is in the same direction. For example: you walk into a space that has a proximity detector in it: As you walk closer to a wall an image of a person walk towards you. The closer you get the closer he gets. You can choose to walk close enough to see his face or not. You are in control of the situation and feel it.

Now invert it. As you walk closer to this person the person in the image walks away from you. Again proportional to your position. You are controlling this person, but it does not feel like it. You cant get what you want.

Control: Is the viewer interacting with a character in the work or the structure of the work in space or the structure of the work in time?

It's kind of analogous to first person or second person in literature. A simple example: A person walk up to an image and the image dissappears. The closer they get to the image of the person the more the person disappears, fades to black. Or in the second the closer the viewer gets to the image the figure in image walks away from the viewer.

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Some notes on the subject of randomness:

I would like to start off with a simple observation: that a person is incapable of making a random choice without the aid of an external tool. Simply because a person is incapable of removing themselves from thier conscious and sub-conscious motivations. Try flipping a coin in your head when you know the consequences of each possible outcome. The point is that randomness is a fundamentally foreign thing to the human psyche.

what I'm trying to get to is that often it is interesting to add the elements of unpredictability or mystery to a work or maybe to add irrationality in a character. What will this person do next?

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Randomness in a computer is easy. It does have the characteristic of unpredictability, but it does not make a very good model for irrationality, because it by definition doesn't refer to past or present.

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