- When an interactive artwork
forms an engagement with
people in the audience,
you can watch a sort of
conversation develop.
The artwork's not really fully realized
until those interactions
have been allowed to occur.
My name's Geoffrey Drake-Brockman,
and I'm a cybernetics artist.
I work in the most
isolated city in the world:
Perth, Western Australia.
For a long time I had two parallel lives.
I was an IT guy, a computer programmer,
and I was also a painter.
I kept the whole idea of art
completely separate from computation.
And that just sort of led to a crisis.
I thought, what am I doing?
Who am I kidding?
So I let it in,
and suddenly I was making
artworks which were robotic.
(soft piano music)
Cyrernetics is about interaction.
It can be made out of
any kind of technology.
You can use electronics,
computers, even clockwork,
to enable conversations to take place
between people and artworks.
For me, the whole point
of using technology in art
is to make an artwork interactive.
With interactivity, you can
get deep audience engagement.
People look at a piece for hours on end,
instead of just a minute.
When I complete an artwork,
I like to watch it
respond to its audience.
I watch to see how the
play between the artwork
and the audience develops.
Sometimes I saw people who
were treating the artwork
as though it was a person.
They were smiling at it,
waving to it,
talking to it.
I thought, how far can we take this?
The part that I love most of all
is when it's done, when
the vision is realized,
when I can set the artwork free,
and watch it interact with people.
It's actually doing what it's meant to do,
and creating what it's meant to create.
(intense piano music)
(electronic ping)
