N_DREW
N_DREW (aka Andrew Bucksbarg) is a media artist, experimental interaction designer, VJ/audio-visual performer and a professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University.
N_DREW ’s work and interests reverberate in the space of new technology/media practices and theory. As an experimental interaction artist, N_DREW concerns himself with technologies and social systems that support tactics of ambiguous, autonomous social creativity and exchange. +++
INTERACTIVE CINEMA AND THE VJ
Changes in media and technology in society appear to evolve at an ever increasing pace. Humans continue to push technological innovation, which reflects back and shapes society. We have a sense of how quickly and deeply the speed of innovation has affected culture, but what about the immediacy afforded by interactive technologies? Live art is intrinsic to the human condition, expressing and sharing momentary experience, using new means of communication, to the kinds of activities, techniques and technologies used in performance. Live and interactive cinema is an expanding area of production and research that encompasses momentary lived and shared experiences. Interactive cinema embodies the participatory culture, reciprocity and immediacy of interactive media.
Digital technology can also be viewed as influencing media production in two interrelated streams, the virtual and the physical. On one end is the simulation of content virtually via the computer and on the other is how media extends out, through physical interfaces and actuators, from the input of sensors, into material experience. Interactive cinema and VJ practices incorporate both the expressive potential of simulated content, as well as how content extends into and interfaces with our material experience.
SOCIAL INTERACTIVITY
Socially interactive media and technologies are immediate, co-evolving, communicative, reciprocal, embodied and collaborative meta-design systems. As social technologies change, there is an ever more complex trajectory for media that encourages collective creativity in a medium that renders artifacts of this social or collective experience and draws distinction away from the individual and onto this social realm.
Regardless of whether one can argue that interactive media embody collaboration and interdisciplinary work or that new media are expanding in ever more complex, social ways, people are using new media and technologies socially, to communicate, co-author and co-perform in ever-deeper ways. We see this social interactive content form in blogs, wikis, chat rooms and forums, social software on the Internet, mobile device exchanges and networked multi-user environments. These all attest to the proposition that we immerse ourselves in ever more technically mediated and increasingly socially augmented contexts with communications and design technologies. Scholarship, research and creative practice must account for the evolution of socially interactive media and the media designer must become a meta-interactive designer, interacting or collaborating with users to propose systems that mediate these socially interactive environments.
