Untitled 6 and Boundary Functions

All of the art pieces in Act React were interesting to me. The two that I found most interesting was Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions and Camille Utterback’s Untitled 6. It is not necessarily because they were the most aesthetically pleasing pieces, like I would choose my favorite paintings, but they were interactive in a way that I could tell how I was manipulating the piece. While I was creating a painting through a computer program with Untitled 6 I could really feel the physicality, were as with pieces like Snow Mirror by Daniel Rozin you were using the depth of the space around you, which did not feel as hands on to me. The certain touch was just not there. Boundary functions created a certain social atmosphere with me. It was not just I completing the piece; in fact with just me I was quite lonely on the white dimensionless white floor, but it was multiple people working together to create these borders that halved us all together.

I could see what John McKinnon meant by the halving theory, and relating it back to the piece Boundary Functions. He said that we could never actually touch one another but only get half as closer with every movement. As I stood inside the boundary of the pure, virgin white floor by myself I was not standing inside an art piece I was standing on nothingness. Then my friend, Bo, joined me in and instantly a beam of energy halved us. This glowing beam constantly stayed between in a diligent manner. I had left this piece for a while to go explore these other interactive wonders when I noticed a group of people standing on the outside of the boundaries of the Boundary Functions piece just staring. This spectacle was one of wonder to these people. They seemed almost afraid to touch it considering they did not have any clue of its purpose.

One asked, “What does it do?”
I simply responded, “Just walk on it.”

In one instant at least ten people jumped on. This particular piece was impressive when more people used it. A stranger tried cornering me with his light, when I ran around him leaving a line directly between us. It was like a crowded dance floor in which everyone stared bashfully at their feet as they tried to avoid their partner. As people started to leave it was me and one girl, she looked at me to with a disappointed look and exclaimed, “Well this isn’t very fun anymore” and left me standing again on a blank white space in a desolate spot of a room on top of a now defunct art piece. Which brings me back to the theory that we can never touch one another, but only get half closer with every movement.
Untitled 6 was the piece that made me feel most like an artist. I can now say, for a brief moment, my art was hanging on the wall in the Milwaukee art museum. I ran on its interactive palette that interacted with a projected computer program on the wall. I watched as people danced around its framed boundary coloring a picture on the wall. Most people enjoy this for the asthetic value; however the moment in this piece I found most interested was when nobody was on top the interactive palette. The picture still made swirls. Except now the swirls were slowly losing their color and dying. After a few minutes of these swirls dancing with no master to manipulate them they turned to very monotonous tones of gray white and black. This was also when the piece was prime to play with. I watched this dead digital painting dance around for a while when an older women walked up to me. She said “When you walk across it with your arms spread out wide you can change it the most.” So I disrupted this artistic silence I was enjoying with this piece and walked across Untitled 6. Every movement was vaguely recorded as if I were moving across the wall leaving a specter like presence behind me. The old lady who saw me clearly enjoying the piece thought it was “some sort of security cameras recorded what we [were] doing.” As I am writing this essay now I am still not positive on how it worked. My guess was as good as any spectator around me.
I noticed a child, of all people in that room, really challenge the pieces ability. He laid his body across the floor and waited for his painting to come to this dimension upon the wall. Colors whirled all around his body in an almost rhythmic motion, but where his body was there was something very intriguing. A black void appeared in his frame. No color danced around, no digital paint appeared on this dimensionless display
only a hollow frame of a child.

The difference between Boundary Functions and Untitled 6 or any other piece in this the act react program is how you react to it. What senses are you using? And how are you using them? I argue that these pieces, even though both interacted by walking on the floor are in fact different from each other. They say that no piece of art is indeed art unless that audience makes it an art. The Untitled 6 piece was explored through a solitary conception. Where as Boundary Functions visibly had a better reaction with a bigger audience. Does this make it a more popular art piece seeing as it has a wider audience? Is this question of paintings validity false when no audience is around? Boundary Functions would simply be the second dimension without a group of humans interacting with it. Untitled 6 would be a dead painting existing in a redundant and non-operational order. Although different in appearance and interaction these two pieces serve the same purpose of how you enjoy them, how you interact with them, how you make them become art.