Act/React, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent exhibition of interactive installation art, presented work by six contemporary artists: Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. While all employ some combination of customized computer software, surveillance cameras, digital video and projection, electronic photocells and circuits, microcontrollers, synthesizers, and amplifiers, the resulting artworks nonetheless conceal their technological underpinnings. Focusing on “non-technical” interactivity, which guest curator George Fifield specifies in the accompanying catalogue as activities that are “performed with the entire body of the viewer” (31), the exhibition elicited kinetic play, as one body moved toward and away from another, individually and collaboratively coaxing forms to emerge and retreat across the floor, on the walls, and upon different surfaces.

As the exhibition title contended, interactive art is composed of objects, images, and bodies acting and reacting to each other. It was this dynamism of call and response, of instigation and accommodation of embodied action and sensorial awareness, that was most compelling about the exhibition and the larger questions implied. What does it mean to act upon things or each other, and then to react? Is the activity of action opposed to the responsive passivity of reaction? Or might we be able to resuscitate reaction as a process of acting again and again, opening up its definition to take into account an expanded series of specific actions catalyzed, continuously or discontinuously, across various yet particular sites, times, objects, images, and bodies? We may, then, acknowledge that our responses are not only tied to the stimuli that motivate them, but rather open onto further and ongoing actions.

These provocations from within the art world are not especially new, though technological developments allow us to reconsider them with different emphases. The avant-garde movements of Futurism and Dadaism, as well as their re-imaginings in Conceptual, Process, and Performance Art, made and continue to make permeable the boundaries between activities undertaken in art and life, while the history of activist art in the twentieth century has tracked art’s material efforts to impact the wider world. Embodied action is central, to be initiated in a number of ways by the viewer; thus begins the formulation of an equally celebrated and maligned leap that persists in art today, from receptive contemplation to active undertaking.

More recently, this leap has been reframed according to the social relations produced between viewers during art events and procedures. Whether designated as “relational aesthetics” by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, or “social aesthetics” by the Danish curator Lars Bang Larsen, these participatory forms of contemporary art provide conditions for social exchange. Yet Hal Foster has warned against any easy inscription of a democratic politics into this art’s sociability, for an open frame with an undecided material outcome does not necessarily make for an egalitarian community free of contradiction and conflict (Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Participation, Claire Bishop, ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, 190–195). Instead, critical illegibility and the confirmation of social hierarchies seem more likely. Now what about interactive art? How does interactivity fashioned through digital technologies engage with, and then translate and re-imagine, the art world’s ties to a politics of action, or at the very least, to its means of rendering porous the divisions between art and world, and the actions occurring in each?

The first artwork in the exhibition to invite viewers to act and react was Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions (1998). An interactive platform remained blank until at least two people stepped on it, at which point a thin line was projected halfway between them. When more people joined in, irregular polygons began to form as multiple lines surrounded individual bodies, isolating them within islands of personal space. The growing desire was to break through the lines, which only happened when two or more people touch, a discovery that often occurred by accident. Playful collaboration and spontaneous discovery also activated Snibbe’s second piece, Deep Walls (2003). As viewers crossed in front of a video projector, their bodies created shadowy movements that were recorded, looped, and sequenced in a fugue-like manner upon a wall grid.

Around the corner from Snibbe’s pieces, and within its own darkened room, was Liz Phillips’s Echo Evolution (1999), which sensed the presence and movement of viewers and responded by outputting various combinations of sounds and lights. At first, the work was visually and conceptually ambiguous. It demanded that time be spent with it. Sounds from spinning objects were emitted alongside flickering neon tubes, as the collective activity of participants left behind certain settings and proportioned tunings that remained in the space for the next group of bodies who, unbeknownst to them, entered a differently balanced environment. The perceptual invisibility of these past presences, as they affected the actions and reactions of other viewers, was significant, if not so easily translated into visual form.

Whereas Phillips’s piece digitally stored viewer activity, slowly laying a groundwork for new actions, Brian Knep’s Healing Pool (2008) provided immediate visual recognition of the ramifications of embodied action on the ever-changing spatial landscape. Knep’s large floor-projected surface was replete with biologically patterned, cell-shaped forms that seemed to pulsate and replicate autonomously. When viewers stepped onto the surface, their feet cleared away orange cells, cutting swaths of green between them, which Knep calls “wounds” and “scars.” Like many of the Act/React artists, Knep categorizes the viewer as a performer whose pathways temporarily though irrevocably initiate marks upon the environment but who is also responsible for its healing.

Both of Daniel Rozin’s pieces, Snow Mirror (2006) and Peg Mirror (2007), emphasized the material trace of our actions as they impact both our reactions to others and our interactions with objects around us. In a darkened room, upon a diaphanous piece of fabric, Snow Mirror projected thousands of digital particles that fell around the fragile, broken outlines of entering bodies. As viewers moved, the particles followed, sifting around their changing forms and bleeding through the fabric to create a doubly diffuse image along the back wall. Hanging outside was Peg Mirror, a collection of 650 circular wooden pegs, beveled into regular angles that spun to form a silhouette of whatever form was presented before them. The resulting likenesses had a stable weight; each peg paused solidly in place, while the transitions between the emerging forms, which sounded like a rush of rippling water, also had a material presence unlike the exhibition’s many projections.

The material objecthood of the wooden pegs was echoed in Janet Cardiff’s To Touch (1993). By running their hands over the surface of a table, viewers elicited bits of pre-recorded conversation between two lovers, along with snippets of background noise, sounds of breathing, and fragments of old films. Marked and scarred with indentations, the table was literally embedded with the narrative residues of its history, which could be re-activated by new users who received only fractured but evocative glimpses into an unknowable past.

As the final series in the exhibition, Camille Utterback’s External Measures (2003), Untitled 5 (2004), and Untitled 6 (2005) returned to the numerous possibilities that infuse our present actions. Each of her works consisted of a large wall screen containing abstract, colored shapes. When viewers stepped in front of the screen, their bodies attracted existing shapes toward them and created new forms that grew organically across the canvas.

In tandem with the artworks exhibited, Act/React also successfully launched an interactive network associated with the show. All accompanying information defied the conventions of the static archive, in this case made continuously present and active. Expanding its reach both spatially and temporally, the exhibition included a website that allows past and potential viewers to access details on each artwork by manipulating images and texts on their own computer screens. The website also supports a blog that documents reactions to the show and instigates new conversations. In addition, Act/React’s text and DVD catalogue contains a collection of artist statements and commentaries that can be navigated in many ways. The catalogue features essays by Fifield (on the history of interactive art) and new media theorist Judith Donath that in their most provocative moments challenge readers to think about interaction as hinging upon the autonomy of participating bodies and objects.

As artists are increasingly called upon to take action to repair disappearing social bonds, their work must also recognize a loss of “the very sense of the co-presence of beings and things that constitutes a world,” to quote Jacques Rancière (Jacques Rancière, “Problems and Transformations in Critical Art,” in Participation, 90). As a response to this loss, interactive art can be most active. The Act/React exhibition suggests a changeable, vulnerable, yet insistently intimate co-presence of beings and things, each that is alternately autonomous and responsive, and that temporarily transforms the other to allow new and fragile co-presences to reform. While embodied performance is key, as it has been to both the expectations of activist art and the unfolding of relational art, for interactive artists re-performance is even more important, as images, forms, and embodied collaborations can be re-done, re-presented, and re-activated. If we can speak of a politics of this interactive art, then it exists in its ability to re-act—to act again upon the material residues of past acts undertaken by others, onto and by means of other things—and to allow us to do so as well, when we enter the exhibition and when we leave it behind. Perhaps we may then recognize not only that what we do has a sustained impact on the balance of things and beings around us, but also that our impact is never final, that we have the ability to re-think our actions, to act again with different outcomes, and to pose that possibility for others to take on either with or after us.