Digital Interactive Art Showcase – Group Show (Andrei Panghe, Anna Zhu, Andrei Boar, Cristina Pop-Tiron, Andreea Cristina Mircea, Toma Barbulescu, Jura Ruža), a review by Maria Rusu

Initiated by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and currently sponsored by the Council of Europe, UNESCO, and the International Council of Museums, the Night of the Museums is an internationally successful European event, now in its 18th edition. During this event, every museum or cultural institution opens its doors for a few hours in the late evening for people to visit. 

This year, Centrul de Interes was one of many cultural and artistic institutions from Cluj-Napoca that held an art exhibition during the Night of the Museums, which was opened only for that night. The group exhibition consisted of a selection of the best works made by the students from the Digital Interactive Arts, a master’s program from the Faculty of Theater and Film, Babes Bolyai University. Curated and coordinated by Cristina Pop-Tiron, together with the 2nd year DIA master students, the selected artists were: Andrei Panghe, Anna Zhu, Andrei Boar, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Andreea Cristina Mircea, Toma Barbulescu, and Jura Ruža. The exhibition included projects created by master students in the courses given by Klaus Obermaier and Cristina Pop-Tiron, two projects created in a workshop organized by Reactor de Creație și Experiment together with DIA, and two dissertation projects. 

Interactive art is a type of art that includes the audience in such a manner that it achieves its goal. Some interactive art installations do this by allowing the observer or visitor to "walk" through, on, and around them; others invite the artist or the audience to participate in the artwork. Interactive art installations are generally computer-based and frequently rely on sensors, which gauge things such as temperature, motion, proximity, and other meteorological phenomena that the maker has programmed in order to elicit responses based on participant action. In interactive artworks, both the audience and the machine work together in dialogue in order to produce a unique artwork for each audience to observe. However, not all observers visualize the same picture. Because it is interactive art, each observer makes their own interpretation of the artwork, and it may be completely different from another observer's views

The theme of the MA program from the Faculty of Theater and Film is an innovative, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to new media art production, i.e. the creation and development of art projects using interaction in different ways: between artists and technology, artists and audience, works and exhibition space or simply between subject and visitor. The public is invited into a setting with various installations that invite introspection and reflection, which are achieved through interactivity.

Going up the stairs to the fourth floor of the venue, there was a lot of unintelligible noise coming from the exhibition itself. The dark hallway, where faces were not visible, and every person seemed to be just a silhouette, combined with the sounds of people screaming, singing, or laughing welcomed the visitors with a very peculiar, odd feeling. There were five rooms hosting one work each, and in between them, there was a considerable amount of empty space around for the centerpiece, a massive screen that had three microphones in front of it. This was Toma Barbulescu’s work, “The Howling Lights'', an audio-driven interactive installation that proposed a synesthetic exploration of the link between sound and image by using the human voice through a microphone linked to projected images, influenced by the characteristics of the voice in itself. The ambient in which the work was set, contributed to the performativity aspect of the installation.

The second sound-driven work was Anna Zhu’s video projection of a woman giving birth to a lot of babies and them being thrown on the floor like objects, called” The Birth striker”. Anna Zhu is actually illustrating a concerning question that a lot of women have, and that is ” What kind of mother would I be if I brought a baby into a world where I couldn’t make sure they were safe?” Also, this work suggests that many young people are reconsidering their personal life choices, including having children, as a result of climate change. At the same time, falling birth rates throughout the world represent a challenge to our current economic system, which is based on continuous financial expansion. These negative implications are still profoundly ingrained in our society's perception of women. Even if they live independently, women of a certain age who do not have children are harshly criticized. ”The Birth striker” is an interactive installation that highlights the irony of having children in today's world - a difficult and painful option for most young women.

Anna Zhu’s second installation was a motion-driven projection of an eye following your every move, called “The Witness''. This work brought the public into an introspective mood, letting them think about whether or not they are judging their every action themselves, not God or Karma, as many would believe. 

Andrei Boar (“Ki”) and Andrei Panghe (“Primavera”) approached a similar theme, and that is the eternal rebirth of the vegetation and the power of the human, or the public, to actually influence and manipulate nature through their actions, which include body or hand movements. Both of them had a plant-like subject projected in front of the viewer, a tree or a flower that grows, deteriorates, or burns.

“Body language” by Jura Ruža, a motion-driven video projection, was an experiment that tried to fragment the human body through the usage of space, image, and sound. A specific movement of the body dismembers its projection and initiates the innate bodily “noises”, like breathing, teeth-clenching, and vocalizing. Jura was interested in the idea of creating a spontaneous choreography while the unity of human senses is distorted and put into a new correlation. The subject’s motion, tempo, and position in space dictated the audio-visual representation of his/her body. 

Cristina Pop-Tiron and Andreea Cristina Mircea created a Motion-driven sculpture installation called ” An Error Occurred While Searching for an Update”, made from old T.V.s or monitors that were no longer or barely functional. Those monitors showed the person standing in front of it but in a very distorted way, while also increasing the volume of a very disturbing sound while coming closer to the installation. It shows the soul as an incompatible outdated software, an object that doesn’t exist anymore, a pile of slightly outdated elements.

Overall, this exhibition showcased the fact that the aesthetic impact of interactive art is more profound than expected. The space in which the exhibition took place was chosen wisely, it was a part of the experience. Also, the relationship between very human intrinsic values or defects suggested by the artists through their themes or subjects and the digital world which is the tool used in order to complete the work, and also the final artwork is very contrasting.