ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 132

ICUL CTION
C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

Mark Franz

R e v i e w

Special Issue

blocks toward a communicative dialogue.
Even non-objective work has this dialogue,
and can be qualitatively analyzed based on
the viewer’s response. One of the more
effective practices in game development is
play testing, and though in commercial
ventures the purpose is driven by
economics, the same practice can be used to
gauge an audiences’ ability to engage
productively with an art work. Interactive
work gets labeled as game-like because that
is one of the most popular incarnations of
interactivity is in games. This is changing
due to the pervasiveness of mobile devices,
but the design goals are limited in that
venue. The problem of the audiences’
reception to serious games and interactive
work that is built for purposes other than
entertainment is to guide the viewers
reception in a way that helps them to feel
like they are engaging with serious work that
self – reflexively critiques technology.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing
your thoughts, Mark. Finally, would you like
to tell us readers something about your
future projects? How do you see your work
evolving?

I am working on producing letterpress prints
from interactive, custom coded, applications.
In this way they are all data visualizations,
but my interest is in activating the space
between these two technologies. The
letterpress was stigmatized as an antihumanist industrial form when it was first
conceived. As familiarity with the technology
occurred, passed, and drifted into antiquity,
the nostalgic quality made it a treasured
humanistic process. Expressing images
derived from computer code through this
process is an experiment in linking two very
human technologies together and therefore
creating a discourse about time, technology,
mark making, and the meaning of hand –
made work.

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