Expectations
As discussed elsewhere, I designed the installation to appear like a square room viewed at an angle: more precisely, it looked like a theater set with two rear walls ("flats" in theater parlance). A small chain blocked visitors from stepping into the installation set, except for a small entryway, marked with a sign reading "Only one visitor in the space at a time."

As other visitors watched, I intended that some daring soul would enter the set and begin to touch objects, activing the the projection of video and text (see thumbnail links at right: spaghetti, teacup, etc. to view this content) on the rear walls. The video played only so long as the visitor touched an object and objects could be touched in any order.

As a result of all this, I intended that the visitor would become, whether he knew it or not, a performer. Not only would other visitors be watching the projections, they would be observing the performer's behavior: the length of time he touched objects, the order in which he touched, how he touched and so on. The essence of the work was not the installation itself but the interaction of a person with the installation, as some sense of my inner life, my imagination, was invested in the outer, physical realm and experienced by another person, who of course would bring his own inner life (if still hidden) to the experience.

My expectations were met, but only up to a point. I found, for example, that when a couple, a mother and child or several friends approached, they would elect one of their number to enter as the performer and the remainder of the party would act, not as audience, but as director. For example, in many cases a mother and father would send their child onto the set and order her about: "Honey, touch the spaghetti. OK, good. Now, hold it, hold it, hold it a little longer honey; daddy is still reading. Good, now go and touch the photograph." I found this, often, charming, but it also revealed that these visitors were less interested in the unique behavior of another member of the audience as he or she moved about the set than in the content of the set itself--the videos and text. Yet other visitors present at the same time--people with no relation to the child moving about the set--would, in fact, focus their attention on both the content and the child's behavior.

Four Is a Crowd
Crowd size also affected visitor's behavior. Whenever a large group of people were present, the performer moved through the installation quickly. It was apparent most visitors did not want to be observed by large numbers of strangers, although small groups seemed to be acceptable to the performer, who would then spend more time experiencing the set--but still less than if they were alone.

Most interesting--though not surprising--was the effect that I as the artist had on visitors. Most visitors, when they noticed my prsence and surmised that I was the creator, moved much more quickly through the set, spending, say, four or five minutes at most touching objects and viewing the videos. When I was resting in the back and could not be seen and when the installation was empty, visitors would often spend 10 or more minutes moving through the set. In a few cases, when I was hidden in back, a couple or group of friends spent half an hour or more in the set, touching things, watching videos and discussing the installation.

I sensed the emergence of a kind of intimacy in these cases: intimacy between visitors and between visitors and the work. In retrospect, this is not surprising. The work itself feels highly personal and because of the objects--a half finished plate of spaghetti, someone else's photograph, etc.--and the nature of the content, visitors may have felt as if they were intruding upon, or at least crossing some line into, the artist's privacy. In line with this, most reactions to the installation were emotional, rather than intellectual. I, who have struggled against intellectualization in my work and my self, found this gratifying. For these visitors, the abstract art/science concept behind the installation mattered not at all, only the experience of the work. There are artists who would be horrified by this. I pity those artists.

Not Fresh Enough for Me!
Speaking of intimacy: was the set so intimate that it scared off some visitors? At least a few visitors who walked away rather than enter the set upon being asked why indicated that they did not want to invade the space. Related to that, some others expressed germ-fear because of the food and the tea. One man who forced himself to briefly touch the fork on the plate of the spaghetti immediately recoiled and practically ran from the room. This was in general the exception.

What Didn't Work
From the conceptual standpoint, since I had "invested" my imagination into the installation objects, I thought it fitting that projections would only occur so long as the visitor maintained physical contact with an object. As soon as the visitor let go the object, the projections stopped. This, frankly, was a failure. Visitors treated the objects like buttons and touched them only briefly to activate the video, which would then of course stop almost immediately. Visitors thought this was how things were supposed to work and early visitors--before I made adjustments--never saw more than a few seconds of media for each object. Later, I changed the behavior of my code so that touching an object caused the projections to play for 30 seconds. This could have been extended further.

Entering Another Dimension
Visitors to the installation, depending on their predilications and conditions, experienced a mild curioristy or entered into one of two dimensions: either they entered partially into the artist's (my) imagination, or into some emotional/imaginative merger of their inner world with my externalized one. Large crowds watching a performer reacted with little more than curiosity to what they saw and few stayed long. Smaller groups spent more time, and often studied the content carefully, but few seemed to relax their guard enough to enter into a personal relationship with the work. It was only very small groups who entered when the installation was empty and when I was not present (ie., hidden) who fully engaged with the work and allowed it to become, not an external object of study, but an environment in which to "live."

I maintain an interest in forcing the visitor to be on display as a way of breaking their passive, critical relationship to a work. But I intend to focus my next experiment on promoting and exploring the second dimension I mention above. I will abandon the public performance aspects of the work and instead focus on creating an "intimate" environment in which visitors feel safe to enter and let down their guard. In keeping with this, the set will be designed to be an actual room, rather than a performance space, one in which visitors can enter, get comfortable and spend the time required to allow the imaginative plasma invested into the space to permeate them.