Gentes, Annie

Am I an author too ? Or interactivity as a source of hope and despair on the internet

Abstract

Since Duchamp, artists have repeatedly questioned the idea of authorship, to the point of introducing hazard in their composition, following Cage, as the ultimate way of denying the necessity of an author in the process of art. On the other hand, with Fluxus, the viewer not only completed but actually became the work of art as he participated in the event. With internet, oneีs speak of interactivity as the technical response of a machine to a user. Despite the limits of this personification of the machine, the word is recurrently used by artists who want to define the actual working of their artistic devices. Interactivity is thus mostly concerned by the many different ways you hand over the controls to the internet user. Not only viewing and actively deciphering the meaning of the work of art but actually intervening in its development and possible evolution. The author, as such, does not disappear. In fact, on the internet, the word " author " covers new practices and new areas of responsibility. Studying several interactive pieces on the internet, we propose to study what are the new scopes for authorship and how they relate to different types of interactivity. We will thus show how the concepts of author in literature, cinema, plastic art are all played upon by internet artists giving us the best and the worse of what it is like to be an author on the world wide web.