Alex Pitre Week 4 Response

Physical interaction would involve contact, stimulus, and response equally between two components directed toward each's experience. So not only do the two components need to respond to the physical action, each's physical experience changes as a result of the other's action. When I think of a good interaction, I think of it as a success: feeling an accomplishment of effecting the kind of change we wanted or being surprised by an outcome we did not expect but that we like, while simultaneously feeling we contributed something to the situation through physically interacting. Interacting with the MTA always seems unsuccessful, but no matter how you try to improve your own functioning the system never reciprocates with its own improvement. Good physical interactions sometimes take longer to be seen, like maybe it takes multiple loops to work out kinks in spontaneous interactions. Thinking in terms of two people, both are receiving input at their own speed. Learning how to hold someone's hand comes to mind. Whenever you hold a new person's hand it takes a few moments, sometimes a few different scenarios, to get the right fit for both.

I kind of agree with Crawford: "You can turn up the reaction volume as high as you want, but playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 20,000 watts does not make it a painting." I also question whether this is a good sentiment to have when encouraging imagination and curiosity. Artists constantly transcribe work into other mediums and I think to ignore that is to ignore a MAJOR component of human interaction: our willingness to change/transmute things sometimes for practical reasons and sometimes just for fun. While turning it up wouldn't change the recording of Beethoven's Ninth it does drastically change my take on the work and I may indeed make a painting in response and because a recording of Beethoven's Ninth isn't really Beethoven's Ninth to begin with, it's an idea organized into a certain medium(sound), my painting could be considered just as much Beethoven's Ninth. My interaction with the piece has changed its medium. I came these olympics thinking about John Cage's 4'33 and how some say it was a response to Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting and how they could really be the same thing.