The History of the Interface in Interactive Art

The six artists Söke Dinkla uses to demonstrate the six categories of interactivity are:
Myron Krueger
Jeffery Shaw
David Rokeby
Lynn Hershman
Grahame Weinbren
Ken Feingold.

The six categories of interactivity are:
Power and Play
Participation vs. Interaction
Proximity and Manipulation
Strategies of Seduction
Nonlinear Narration
Remembering, Forgetting, and Reconstructing

“This may seem complicated, because Interactive uses the same technology it comments upon, meaning, there is a certain lack of distance. The situation of Interactive Art is therefore comparable with Video Art, which had to gain certain independence from the language of television.”

The “language” of television or video art, differs not only from each other but from video games as well. When a cut scene occurs in a video game, someone speaking the television language may look at it as “where can we throw in some product placement here” or “do we really need every bit of this one scene, we only have so many minutes in one television show.” Where as some coming from a video art background will be looking more artistically at the piece. Finally the language of video games would see the cut scene as a way to help further the plot or storyline in a video game.
These “languages” or perspectives are different for a reason. It may seem reasonable to have television and movies compared to video games; they are in fact totally different and should not be compared. You start a movie, you watch it all the way through – your only options are to pause it, skip ahead or stop it and not even watch it. In a video game, you control the character, you are able to decide his or her destiny. You do not know how it ends until you fight that final boss. You are interacting with the game, you are helping to write a story for this game. You have no way of altering a movie, or interacting with the characters. It is these reasons that television/movies and video games are spoken about in different “languages.”