Enchanting Tales: An Immersive Journey through Animal Motifs in the NMH Collection

Tate places the start of interactive art in the late 1950s, when artists were looking for less alienating, less exclusive places to show work, such as the street, the warehouse and the shop front, and the work itself grew more participatory: sculptures made to be touched and played with. One example is Niki de Saint Phalle’s Golem, a walk-in sculpture in a Jerusalem park that includes a children’s slide. Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia traces the question of how a work and its audience act on each other through Futurism, kinetic art, Allan Kaprow’s environments, and the happenings, performance and conceptual art of the 1960s onward. The term is now most often tied to computers. The Daijisen dictionary describes the typical case as a work in which a sensor picks up a visitor’s movement, or in which input on a touch panel sets off some change. According to Nipponica, such work drew notice from the late 1970s, once the media-art festival Ars Electronica began in Linz, Austria; it adds that much of it resembles a game and that firm criteria for judging it have yet to emerge. Tate also connects interactive art with relational aesthetics, a term for art that takes human relations and their social setting as its starting point.

Try one small action, such as stepping closer, moving, or touching if the work invites it, and watch what the work answers and how quickly.

• Immersive exhibition 沉浸式展覽→Immersive exhibitions also bring the viewer into the work, with projection, sound or virtual reality surrounding them.
• Generative Art 生成藝術→In generative art a system the artist sets up decides part of the work; at some shows visitors can change its parameters.

The idea of wrapping the viewer in a picture is older than electronics. In 1787 the painter Robert Barker patented a painting that ran all the way round a circular room, seen by viewers standing on a platform at the centre; such paintings came to be called panoramas, and in 1793 a rotunda built to show them opened in Leicester Square, London. Today most immersive exhibitions use projection. Projection mapping uses software to fit images onto walls and floors, and even onto trees and buildings, so that the picture follows uneven surfaces. Another way is virtual reality: with a headset on, the view changes as you turn your head.

First stand still and watch for a while, then walk or reach out, and compare whether the images change because of you. Notice, too, where the projection comes from.

• Installation art 裝置藝術→Installation art also lets visitors walk into a work, but it usually builds the space from real objects and materials rather than projected images.