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Comments to:      iaspace@aol.com

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"I think, therefore I am" - Descartes.
"I interact, therefore I am" - the interactive way.

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THE INTERACTIVE WAY   version 1.1 - 9/9/99 (modified 1/31/00) with glossary

• Interactivity is as old as art (as old as science, as old as life)

• And as young as the web where all is next to everything else (as young as the primordial digital soup)

• Life is interactivity. Death is not (it's that simple?)

• Products & things are whirlpools that come and go in interactive flows (like reflections & truths)

• Metamorphosis rules (so do Murphy's rules)

• Laws are very practical human creations (they facilitate and manage interactions)

• Play is the thing (we are how we play, we are the games we choose)

• Art, like science, models and simulates life (art deals with the unique, science with repetitions)

• Interactivity celebrates diversity and multiple perspectives
(and we can still treasure our own views)

• Favor paradox over irony (favor curiosity over disdain)

• The complex is more than the sum simple parts (the interactivity of parts is at the heart of complexity and in the end parts may even seem superfluous or interchangeable)

• Emergence is interactive magic (emergence being the creation of the new)

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It is fabled that life emerged from a primordial soup:this interactive concoction hasn't stopped brewing yet. Let's have a sip.

Imagine interactive space as a catalyst for innovation:
a net sifting through space to filter out precious things linked or waiting to link in new ways.
What surprises will emerge? Can we make a wish?

Here is a model: a virtual space with human filters.
I sketch on unchartered space. You visit as you please.
Computers let us interact for mutual enhancement.
It adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Reward: innovation will emerge from this interaction.

Ideas emerge from interactions and move our world:
from virtual reality to walking on the moon.
It is quite fitting then to cultivate the art of interactivity,
and play with the unknown giving it our best,
like an invitation for the new to be born gently.

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INTERACTIVE LIFE (a work in progress):

Interactive Life maps out a fluid sense of who we are. Interactively, rather than victories we see celebrations. Defeats are pauses to retool. Confrontations become chances to cooperate. Monopolies yield to diversification. Centralized systems give way to democracies.

An interactive perspective restores a playful flexibility which helps navigate creatively in a complex world along the directions of our dreams. An interactive approach can be used anywhere. It is more difficult yet more far reaching than a classical approach. The fascinating question is: are we missing most of life by rendering the world objective, by closing artificial borders, by holding on to dogmas?

In a classical approach, goals are pictured as fixed But imagine that goals shift in time. Of course, some things lend themselves better to objectification: a stone is more objective than a flower blooming. But this is only a matter of time scales. Stones bloom as well. Continents shift. The solar system is not necessarily stable. An objective approach confuses the snapshot for the living picture. An interactive approach looks at the changing side of things.

Interactivity is basic to language, art, commerce & others delights which make us human. Our growing ability to model and simulate with computers is only now starting to open this brand new field of inquiry. What could be the main features of an interactive perspective? Consider these four:

• Invites play - The world is our playground. Gently we must play. When we stop playing, something deeply human dies in us. Play can be constructive. It takes hard work to play well and enjoy it too. For more on play see the page on Jean Piaget and the page on flow.

• Is a catalyst for emergence - Does the design come first and then the creation? Or could creation make itself up as it emerges? This second option is a radical departure from previous philosophies Call it perhaps a new existentialism, pragmatic, playful, interactive.

• Favors a concert of points of views even if contradictory - Since we can't even assume that the universe is based on a preexisting plan of any sort. Then we cannot exclude multiple views as long as they work This should cut down on fights about who is right and who is wrong What we choose depends on what we like among the many options which work.

• Tends to be practical - Our creations are fictions, from physics to philosophy, and everything in between All work in their own ways and that is truth. Truth that cannot be shared and put to good use is nothing at all.

Some irresistible interactive tendencies:

• Diversify (cast the net wide)
• Tinker (reassemble components in new ways)
• Reflect (readjust course continuously through feedback)
• Link (reach out and reach in)
• Trade (give at least as much as received)
• Build (with openings and other connective features)
• Explore (without preconceived outcomes)
• Enhance (select options with greatest distributed value)
• Transform (change in continuity)
• Celebrate (treasure diversity in concert)

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Interactivity is about relations rather than things in themselves
(it is the play upstaging the actor, and having a cast party afterward).
Classically, there is us and the world out there viewed objectively. But from an interactive point of view, there is no such sharp separation between us and the world, or between things. Boundaries are our own practical inventions rather than essential features of nature.

An objective (classical) view is a matter of convenience. It delimits and simplifies observations in order to build static models in closed systems. An interactive perspective blurs classical borders. It recognizes that we live in an open cosmos.

The questions then is: what is left out of objective views? Perhaps life But, of course, an interactive perspective is more complicated than a classical view

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The web is starting to take interactivity to new heights, yet the inventor of the web,Tim Berners-Lee, thinks that we barely begin to understand its interactive heart. Mark Pesce, co-creator of the Virtual Reality Markup Language, feels that the digital world still has to develop an emotional voice. Pesce also thinks that science fiction is shaping reality This opens a fascinating question: How much can we model the self?

Model the self? Could the self be pictured as an interactive whirlpool? A few books on my shelves touch on this issue: Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John H. Holland, The End of Certainty: Time's Flow and the Laws of Nature by Ilya Prigogine, Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard, On Dialogue by David Bohm.

Prigogine suggests that life is governed by both laws and play. Living things are whirlpools of identity in flows of change. What science can look at life this way? The sciences we have are good at picturing permanent structures. It is much harder to deal with change. Would a new science emerge?

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COMMENTS: The emergence of the internet generates interactivity unknown before. Could it add to what we are? Transform us? How? Is this a threshold like the discovery of atomic power, but of a safe and peaceful sort?

How do you mark space on the web where everything is next to everything else (like in mind space)? Is it an affective metric? A metric of associations and links? Pages on the web are all next to each other but are also insulated from each other. Unless links are established and reinforced, adjacent pages will never see each other. Ideas won't connect.

This is the fascination and frustration of the internet: The more you embrace, the faster you freeze from overload. Well then, let's cultivate the art of interactivity in personal ways and see where it leads us to.

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COMPACT GLOSSARY (eclectic and in non-alphabetical order) :

SIMPLE: an abstraction we create to help model a situation with least effort.  In geometry, for example, a point is defined as a place without extension.  In physics, a horse--for example--is described in simple terms as a round horse without friction. In literature, an example is a plot with beginning, middle, and end.  In philosophy, simplicity is a conclusion.

COMPLEX: what cannot be broken down into the sum of SIMPLE parts.

CREATION: a magical INTERACTION of SIMPLE and COMPLEX. Also known as EMERGENCE.

EMERGENCE: a magical INTERACTION of SIMPLE and COMPLEX. Also known as CREATION.

IRONY: a narrative technique which happens when results contradict expectations. The opposite of irony (PARADOX) is captured in the saying: "If you get a lemon, make lemonade ."

PARADOX: the opposite of IRONY. It is a mighty engine of creation. It keeps things open, in flow, at PLAY.

PLAY: perhaps the most basic interactive engine, a source of CREATION. It is not a game. It is an action.

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Interactivity is at the heart of any marketplace.

The marketplace is the epitome of interactivity. It exhibits quite well emergence, flow, and pragmatism.

Business antitrust laws encourage diversity. Competition is a byproduct of diversity. So is cooperation. Diversity is a prime ingredient for the emergence of new ideas, products, outlooks. Diversity provides flexibility. It favors an overall sense of pragmatism and flow. What works, works. If you get a lemon, make lemonade. Ideas are engines of creation.

History shows that trade has been our prime interactive tool. It still is. It is fitting then to celebrate the art of trade (just as we practice the trade of art). It is remarkable to see how the trade of intangibles is gaining value. Top intangibles such as know-how, services, and links are also top interactive elements. Are we redefining values? Are we changing aspects of the game? What game?

Game theory is gaining importance in economics and the world of business.. Nobel prizes in Economics in 1994 and 1996 were in this general area It is about time. But we have only scratched the surface. We still have to look at the more general field of play. The new field emerging from this could be called "Interactive Studies."

The Globalization phenomenon is of primary interest to Interactive Studies. The dynamic balancing act of globalization is to nurture diversity when driving forces tend to homogenize economies and cultures. This calls for something like global antitrust structures: *Diversify like in the stock market. *Embrace and resist at the same time.

The 1994 Nobel prize in Economics went to John F. Nash, John C. Harsanyl, and Reinhard Selten, for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.
The 1996 Nobel prize in Economics went to William Vickrey and James Mirrlees in the area of asymmetric information (how to make decisions based on incomplete or changing data).
Economist Paul Romer argues that ideas are what drive economic development. In his 1999 book Changing Tastes, he argues that ideas, tastes, preferences and values are neglected keys of economic analysis and issues that lead to a high quality of life.
Columnist Thomas Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree argues convincingly that globalization favors individualism and democratization. This constructive paradox is also at the heart of the internet. He points out that all depends on how well each of us manages the filters needed to protect our cultures, while getting the best out of everyone else's -- so in the end we have more choices, not less. This is in the best spirit of pragmatism.

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Emergence depends on the flavor of the interactive soup from which it arises.

Is the universe built following unchanging laws? Or does the universe make itself as it goes?
How could we possibly approach such issues? Classical science rests on eternal and universal laws. The new science of complexity, however, deals with change. The manifestation of such change is the phenomenon of emergence. Emergence happens when a new, dynamically stable form comes into being unpredictably. The phenomenon of emergence happens in a region between total chaos and absolute order in a space of play where things can come together without preconceptions so that unexpected arrangements can come about by themselves. Play is an engine of emergence To what extent is life an emergent phenomenon? To what degree are we emergent beings? These are fascinating open questions. They do not need to be answered. Pondering them is enough

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The idea that existence is interaction is a new existentialism.

Existentialism has celebrated the freedom to create our own lives, liberated from anxieties coming from external doctrines of any sort. In other words, nothing outside of us can tell us how to live. We exist, that's all. Then we build our lives from the inside out.

Sartre and Camus pushed existentialism to extremes. For Camus, the absence of any preexisting absolute codes meant that we have to face our ultimate choice as well: why live at all? Why not commit suicide? Our freedom is as absurd as our destiny, he argued. We are like the mythical Sisyphus condemned by the gods to push a rock up a mountain and let it roll down only to start all over again. In the face of death, our day to day tasks seem absurd. We are all strangers in life. Yet, for Camus, we have to imagine Sisyphus happy. For Camus, the existential choice is to decide to live in the face of life's absurdity. and this absurdity comes from the senseless nature of life. Where are we going? Why?

For Sartre, the discovery of our existential condition gives us nausea. Life is dirty as mud. We have as much right to life as the roots of a chestnut tree anchored deeply in the earth. Nothing makes sense by itself. We have to pull ourselves up from the mud by our bootstraps, and create our lives from scratch. We are what we do, and that's that. We have to negotiate the hell of existence to build lives worth living. Sartre's grim portrait of the existential condition had a shock value meant to awaken us from any false sense of philosophical security. The existentialism of Camus and Sartre was rooted in war-torn Europe, when the most advanced cultures were tearing each other to pieces. What could have gone so wrong? Europe had fallen victim to its own grandiose ideologies. It could happen again. The only protection from the totalitarian power of doctrines was to show how absurd they were to begin with.

Could we now envision a more human existentialism? Yes, this sense already has roots in history. Call it a festive sense of life, as opposed to a doctrine-oriented sense of life. This new existentialism embraces many things such as pragmatism, flow, play, emergence, interactive life. The view is quite simple (and quite complex in its consequences as well): While on earth, we strive to enjoy life in gentle ways. The rest is an unknown from which we get no mandates. That's all. That's plenty. The problem is how to live in harmony with others and with our environment, while enjoying the life we have been granted. To do this and remain at peace with ourselves is no easy task. Our way of life has to be renegotiated on a daily basis. A sense of living as an interactive process could help us navigate more at ease and in creative ways which celebrate what we are.

Existentialism does not deny religion, as Kierkegaard and the theologian Paul Tillich have argued. But religion should not have the weight of a doctrine. What pertains to life has to be negotiated in living rather than theological terms. Karl Jaspers imagined that existentialism is best pictured in boundary conditions of extreme hardship or solitude which break with existing dogmas. Yet the new media, paradoxically, breaks similar boundaries in a positive way. New existentialism comes from a pragmatic sense of optimism rather than as a reaction to gloom. The lost center of postmodernism turns to simple celebration in the new media with its native sense of inherent decentering and fluidity. The problem of domination by concealed dogmatic authorities has receded rather naturally. Ideologies are all out in the open. We pick and choose what we want.

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Why not make choices which yield the most mutual enhancement?

Interactivity happens in a field of choices. How to choose? That is the question. A key issue is the perspective from which we choose. Choices are not neutral. They are not objective. They depend on how a problem or situation is looked at. Most of the time we are caught in a perspective and choices are automatic But if we can take a step back to reflect and consider multiple perspectives. New fields of choices open up as if by magic. To manage interactivity is to dance reflective steps.

The world of business is driven by choices made in decision-fields that change constantly. It provides a growing number of models on how to negotiate decisions in all types of situations. The study of such models yielded Nobel awards in Economics in 1994 on non-cooperative games and in 1996 on how to make decisions based on incomplete or changing data.

How do we make personal choices? Many fields influence our decisions: ethics , religion, cultural background, education. Freedom maximizes the options from which to choose from. But too many choices decrease our ability to act (it is an existential issue). Paradoxically, structures in society help us manage our choices by limiting them. Choices can produce convergences or divergences. They can have dramatic results or make little difference in the end. When making a choice, a sense of its impact helps us gauge how seriously to take it.

I like a practical approach to making decisions. I tend to favor outcomes which increase diversity without hampering the ability to act. I believe this difficult balance maximizes interactivity. And increased interactivity invites more play and the possibility of emergence: something unexpected is more likely to happen. This is the heart of exploration and discovery. Of course, we can only hope that the surprises will be for the best. Whatever the case may be, it leads to further balancing choices.

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Links should not be forced. It is best if they come out of a certain play.

Play is a slippery concept. We all seem to know when we are doing it but have difficulty figuring out what it is and what it does.

Think of play as a jiggling within structures. Games are play engines: they provide structuring rules with lots of room to jiggle. Nature is a fantastic play engine but, contrary to games, its structures are hidden. The most effective definition of play I know belongs to Jean Piaget. Piaget explains play as an adaptive behavior. Our adaptive behaviors range from imitation to play. In imitation we accommodate to adapt: we try to change to fit the model. In play we assimilate to adapt: we take in the model: we jiggle it, squeeze it, taste it, and so on, to make it ours, so to speak. Imitation makes us follow the world. Play makes us flow with the world.

Think of the world (the universe) as our playground Think of ourselves as children playing in the world Imagine we try all sorts of ways of playing Consider that our only rule is that the play must go on Could we accept such destiny and be pleased with it? This is the basic question of a new existentialism. Play gives us total engagement with the world. Playing calls for a pragmatic approach to life and a constant awareness and management of interactivity.

To be self-aware of our play in the world gives us the basis for managing our interactive potentials. What are our playground rules for the world? Julio Cort‡zar explored them in narrative. Jorge Luis Borges created all sorts of models of possible worlds. Artists tend to play with play. Scientists like Bohr and PoincarŽ tend to structure games to play. In theatre (a medium for which play is native) we have festive play. Ultimately: play is the thing.

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Let's be practical (pragmatic) since we don't know ahead of time what works and what does not.

Simply put, pragmatism is a practical approach to life. Our way of life comes from interacting in our world without rigid preconceptions and through freely achieved consensus. It supposes that the negotiated wisdom of many is more stable and creative than the rule of the few.

Pragmatism focuses on practice rather than theory. Influential pragmatists have been William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. More recently, Stanley Fish championed in the area of literary studies a pragmatic sense of reader-response criticism to replace authorial control. Richard Rorty offers the widest contemporary view of pragmatism in his celebration of the values of diversity. He favors the strategy of unforced agreement as a basic tool of negotiation.

Pragmatism has recently been associated with democracy. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty argues that theory pales next to practical action in the shaping of a nation. Such practical action freed from dogmatisms and doctrines is the work of democracy. Following John Dewey, Rorty sees democracy as a human construction in which authority comes only from freely achieved consensus. But democracy can only be optimized when a society has diversity as well as equal opportunity. A comprehensive education then is one of the basic needs of all who belong to a democratic society.

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Take time to let thoughts interact: dream.

Dreams are haunting products of mysterious interactions.

A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud published his extraordinary book The Interpretation of Dreams. It was the first major attempt at a theory of dreams. Most of it was devoted to attempts to analyze (make narrative sense) bizarre dreams. He assumed that a dream is the fulfillment of a hidden wish. Dream analysis then is a tool to uncover repressed wishes which in clinical cases could reveal a neurosis. But the most significant part of Freud's work was undoubtedly his model of the dream-work found in Part VI of his book--especially the concepts of condensation and displacement. Working in a classical scientific tradition, Freud assumed that a dream is the manifestation of something far simpler in form which exists prior to it. He singled out wishes as the causes of dreams. His conjecture was brilliant. Now, a hundred years later, Freud's conjecture appears too restrictive. Dreams overflow such confining theoretical strait jackets. Still, Freud's conception of the dream-work itself remains quite productive.

A century late, we still don't know what dreams are, but we do know a great deal about how they function. Dreams do seem to play a crucial role in our lives, not so much as oracles of our subconscious or our destiny, but as one of our basic systems of interaction. Dreams help our minds reflect and play unrestricted by any conscious norms or distractions.

I like to view dreams as our mind's digestive system. It is a fascinating metaphor. In this sense, dreams help shape who we are. Rodolfo Llinas, chief of physiology and neuroscience at New York University's School of Medicine, noted that at night the brain dreams in the absence of sensory input. During the day the brain dreams in a more limited way because the senses limit its capacity to imagine. This limitation has a survival function. It helps us construct continuously living maps of the world (a "reality emulation" in his words). These maps allow us to interact in the physical world, but they should not be confused with reality itself, whatever that is. For Llinas, our waking life is a dream guided by the senses.

Dreams could also function in ways we have never dreamed before. For example, former Cambridge and Harvard scholar Rupert Sheldrake has proposed the hypothesis of formative causation (or morphic resonance). He thinks that there are morphogenetic fields which influence our development and help pass the form and function of all living things to succeeding generations. Although the evidence he presents is indirect, highly speculative, and has defied scientific testing, the model is nevertheless plausible. As for dreams, they could tap like an umbilical cord into this unknown field which for now belongs to the realm of hard science fiction.

Freud's student, Carl Gustav Jung, already proposed that dreams tap into a field. The field he had in mind, however, was mythical and human. He called it the the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell 's studies of myths, following Jung, exemplify what I would call the collective consciousness which is also closely linked to dreams at a more practical level.

Dreams remain a haunting mystery. Whatever they might be, we have gained a better understanding of how they function in our lives. We can easily say that dreams are the play of the imagination. For us, they are one more powerful interactive tool.

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Don't enclose ideas: let them flow.

University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. His book Flow investigates the state of consciousness of optimal experience. He looks into why and how at times we achieve high enjoyment, high yield. He examines those moments which achieve lasting impacts in our lives. What does it take to live in ways which maximize such experiences to enhance the quality of life? How do we get to flow better? Csikszentmihalyi followed up his work on flow with one on creativity. He finds a direct relation between the two. It is not surprising to conclude that we create better when we achieve a state of flow. Using examples drawn from decades of work, he suggests that creativity can be nurtured and that it is necessary we do so to make a better world for all. In other words, creativity is not the gift of the very few, but a potential we all have based on highly personal preferences and aptitudes. The myth of the creative genius works against individual creative potentials. It resists the emergence of new creative manifestations.

Naturally, I see flow as an interactive phenomenon deeply rooted in play. To maximize flow we have to be in touch with our environment. Feedback (reflection) becomes essential. We have to sense the shores, so to speak, feel the terrain, and at the same time remain faithful to the ways we play best. This continuous reflexive negotiation makes us flow along our optimal ways. Our flow defines who we are. This is a new form of existentialism.

I think that flow, being a form of play, is a gateway for emergence. When we are entirely absorbed and in tune with an activity, things begin to appear as if by their own will. This creative flow bypasses restrictions we tend to impose upon our ideas to streamline thinking. In this sense, when we flow we seem to be beyond thinking: IT thinks for us. This state achieves optimal interactivity between the thinker and what is thought. In flow we surprise ourselves. Flow is a breath of fresh air across borders.

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Interactivity is immensely easier thanks to the emergence of a new media.

The New Media has taken us by surprise with its interactive, participatory quality on a global scale. The New Media's closest kin is, paradoxically, our oldest one: Theatre--but in its original sense, when theatre was more of a festive form of play. (Second of kin is the written word, the icon). Of course it is also a reincarnation of the traditional sense of marketplace: a global gathering to exchange goods, ideas, and to celebrate.

The internet's world wide web is a new stage: the new "seeing place" (the original term for theatre). Users perform with digital media on this virtual stage. As with theatre, the net can be a type of entertainment based on accepted conventions and protocols. It can also be a space of incantations, the way Antonin Artaud conceived of theatre: the double of an unknown with which it seeks to link.

The young history of the internet is fascinating in its diversity: From the Pentagon's ARPANET of the late 60s to its use for multimedia with Tim Berners-Lee's development at CERN of the world wide web. (Two books which cover this history are Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet and Weaving the Web by the inventor of the WWW).

A special characteristic of the Internet is its design as a distributive network. It has no center, no scattered centers. Everything is next to everything else. The Internet may be a good model of how our mind works. The net is a space of play and creation linking all forms of human knowledge. Because of its interactive structure, the Internet may also be a stage for emergence. Surprising connections may give rise to something radically new. The web is taking interactivity to new heights, yet Tim Berners-Lee thinks that we barely begin to understand its interactive heart. He dreams of a web which could allow us to detect new relationships and unveil entirely different ways to see our world. The web has not taken us that far yet. As Director of the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], he works on that dream. In his book Weaving the Web Berners-Lee wrote: "Whether a group can advance comes down to creating the right connectivity between people--in a family, a company, a country, or the world." The right connectivity depends on the quality of interactivity: it has to promote intuition (the ability to link creatively half-formed ideas). The raw ideas must be at play rather than tied down to rigid structures. Special filters & search engines must help sift through massive amounts of information. Such interactive spaces become nets & catalysts to facilitate connectivity.

And what about fiction and human expression? Mark Pesce, co-creator of the Virtual Reality Markup Language, has argued that hard science-fiction is shaping virtual reality and he forecasts the emergence of information artists who "transform the textual meaning of a query into something tangible, sensual and sensible." Virtual space feels rather cold. But one day the web will awaken to emotion. The Internet is becoming another engine of creation. Once again: play is the thing--but at a new level. Who knows what surprises wait patiently for us. Or do we need to conjure them?

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Art doesn't have to be framed.

Arts and sciences are two aspects of one same human impulse: our playful desire to interact with nature. Nature is a fantastic play engine but, contrary to games, its structures are hidden. The sciences focus mainly on repetitive phenomena. Scientific fields create models of repetitions observed in nature. This is a way to gain some level of control, from flying to medical intervention to save a life. The arts focus mainly on the unique.

Artistic creations try to picture something special in a person, a moment, an aspect of nature. It is often said, of course, that what appears unique actually reflects hidden truths which the inspired artist has managed to express. But such commentary has little to do with art.

Unfortunately, science is often subjected to similar commentary. Science tends to be associated with the discovery of basic laws of nature (the rules of the hidden game). This is a divisive distraction from science at its best. It tends to arrest new developments and decrease interactivity. Claims to absolute truths in nature tend to build walls which eventually must be knocked down to see further. That is why it is more inspiring and productive to think of scientific theories as models, procedures, fields of competencies. All in flow. That is plenty and it leaves the door always open to surprising discoveries.

Bohr, Piaget, and PoincarŽ exemplify the scientist's dilemma: does science give us a deep knowledge of how the cosmos is in itself? or does science give us increasingly better adaptive tools to interact with our world? Who knows where science is taking us to. Such uncertainty makes it all the more exciting. The area of complexity studies is one of the scientific fields which emerged recently. The artist, like the scientist, is driven by an irresistible curiosity. The artist bows to the unknown and plays with it according to personal preferences. Here I think mostly of Borges and Cort‡zar. The sign of vibrant art is the recognition of such tempting curiosity with its dramatic and inviting sense of wonder. This sense of wonder radiates from the works of Bosch, Bruegel, and Goya, for example. The artist can't help but invite the viewer to share in the adventure of creation.

Art is interactive at heart. The object created is only part of a process. A book on a shelf calls to be read. A painting invites reflection. Quality is something fuzzy, more subjective than objective. Value is an interactive process (look at how value emerges in any type of marketplace). Art education is not about reverence to objects hanging on museum walls. Art education provides a language of sorts which allow us to interact with creations and helps us feel an inviting, vital breath (in the works, in us, perhaps both).

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THERE ARE OTHER IDEA SPACES

What happens to books that sit unused?
What happens to writers when the writing is done?
What happens to us when we finish interacting?
What happens to the life we brought about by interacting?
For some thoughts on such issues, check these artists from the list of my favorites:

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) Argentine writer who played with all sorts of metaphysical ideas falling in love with life shortly before his death. For Borges, writing was a way to model life in all possible ways, creating multiple perspectives often contradictory with each other. There is no irony in Borges: only the fascination with paradox. In the end, his favorite model of life turned out to be living itself: his ultimate paradox.
He imagined there could be an eternity in every instant.
People are reflections of one self.
The noblest death is the one we can imagine.
The flow of time is an insidious illusion.
The wildest labyrinth is a desert of sand.
Paradoxically (typical of him) Borges fell in love with life shortly before his death.

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Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) Argentine writer who believed that readers should be active rather than passive. He imagined that reading is actively interactive. Like playing hopscotch, a book can take you from earth to heaven and back if you do the hopping. Cort‡zar admired the fantastic. For him literature had an emergent side. It could connect the playful reader, as if by chance, with the unknown.

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Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Chilean poet who celebrated life as a sensuous residence on earth. He wrote striking odes to his socks, laziness, cats. He composed over a hundred love sonnets. He also explained a few things about the horrors of the Spanish civil war that Franco had unleashed. Neruda fought for civil justice. He had the pleasure to see his friend Salvador Allende become become president of Chile, only to witness two weeks before his death the ghost of Franco shatter his once democratic homeland. But 25 years later, his spirit blesses Chile again. Neruda celebrated the interactive side of life where the individual blooms in relation to others. His favorite interaction was love. For example:

Pudimos no encontrarnos en el tiempo.
Esta pradera en que nos encontramos, oh peque–o infinito! devolvemos.
Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado, y as’ como no tuvo nacimiento no tiene muerte,
es como un largo río, sólo cambia de tierras y de labios.
Cien sonetos de amor XCII

(We might not have found each other in time. This meadow where we are, o tiny infinity! we return it. But this love, my love, has not ended and since it had no birth it has no death, it is like a long river, only changing lands and lips. One Hundred Love Sonnets XCII -- my translation)

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Octavio Paz (1914 - 1998) Mexican writer who fell in love with poetry as a way to feel the world more intensely. He was an inspiration to those who heard him (like me--he changed my life). His work remains a model of how words come to life in the poet's hands to sing what could well be. His images caught on. They have taken root. They are starting to form. Octavio Paz is the poet of transformation and emergence. His poems sing the sensuous metamorphoses of things, starting from water, stone, and wind.

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Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) French poet "maudit". A Don Quixote of the lowlands. His condemned flowers of evil and other mostly forgotten works were resurrected by Jean-Paul Sartre and made to bloom in all its misunderstood beauty. He celebrated an interactive world where sounds, colors, sensations, communicate with each other. He wrote of closed windows that glowed in the night inviting him to imagine interior scenes. Paradoxically this introspective imagining made him feel more alive and in touch with the world. Perhaps Baudelaire was born a century or so too early. He would have loved the digital age.

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Henri Poincaré (1854 -1912) French mathematician and physicist. A genius by definition. Although dated in spirit by now, his more popular books on science are (or should be) required reading in any comprehensive physical science program. He was a walking contradiction of classical method and groundbreaking modeling. We have still to catch up with him in many ways. One of his key concepts was that science can only deal with relations among things, rather than with things in themselves. Young Einstein was inspired by this fascinating concept. In 1905 both Poincaré and Einstein published papers which defined special relativity. But Poincaré focused only on the electron. Einstein left his equivalent formulations open to all matter. Poincaré remained silent on this difference and praised Einstein only for his work on the quantum concept of light. Paradoxically, Einstein never quite accepted the inherent uncertainties and complexities of quantum mechanics. One of Poincaré's greatest discoveries was to note that we cannot conclude that a system such as the solar system is stable. With this he inaugurated the area of complexity studies but it would take a century for this field of science to bloom.

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss genetic epistemologist and psychologist who celebrated the creative play of children. His studies of how play functions suggest that also adults can remain creative when they continue to play with an open spirit (see the page on play for more on this subject). The function of play should not be confused with playing highly structured games and other frozen edifices. For him, to understand is to invent.

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Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a most versatile Spanish artist of hallucinating imagination. Who else would do a mural in his dining room of a wild-eyed Saturn devouring his own child as if he couldn't stop himself? His etchings about the lower depths of the human condition have a cathartic, festive impact. They are strangely redeeming. His unsettling festive "Burial of the sardine" evokes hope inseparable from storm. No idealism here. No dogmas. No chains. Nada. Only raw power of life with us in the middle.

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Hieronymus Bosch (1453?-1516) Flemish painter who would have felt at home among modern surrealists and science fiction writers. His triptychs "The Temptations of Saint Anthony" and "The Garden of Delights" (shown here closed, presenting the earth) explore timeless visions in which everything interacts with everything else in a web of human dreams and nightmares. Bruegel admired his work. My amazement never ends.

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Pieter Bruegel (Breughel) the Elder (1525?-1569) Flemish painter easily seen as a down-to-earth reincarnation of Bosch. The two shared a wild festive vision of the world. His "Tower of Babel" is an endlessly fascinating meditation on interactivity.

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Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926) Spanish (Catalán) architect with perhaps the most playful and spectacular imagination to date. His parque Güell in Barcelona plays out a rich fantasy without veneer. His cathedral "La Sagrada Familia" (The Holy Family) still under construction long after his death, is the most poignant, open, and participatory celebration of faith I have ever experienced. Gaudi is buried in the crypt of his unfinished masterpiece.

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Niels Bohr (1885-1962) Dutch physicist and key founder of quantum mechanics. He developed the notion of complementarity as an interpretation of the uncertainty relation native to the mathematics of quantum theory. The notion of complementarity was also his way to view the paradox of light behaving in experiments sometimes as waves and other times as particles. Bohr proposed that light can be both particles and waves, but not at the same time. Light's qualities are mutually exclusive but complementary. Bohr's coat-of-arms has the Yin/Yang symbol and the inscription: Opposites are complementary.

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