An Interface to the World: Evoking Environmental Responsibility in Responsive Environments

Abstract

The late twentieth-century art form Responsive Environments (REs) comprised interrelations between artist, artwork, and audience, wherein response-ability and responsibility to the social and/or physical environment of the artwork could be tangibly evoked. Wherein participants’ collective behavior within an artwork-as-environment serves as a proxy for the cumulative effect of human behavior on the more-than-human environment. As an extreme form of interactive art, behavior within a Responsive Environment, both to fellow human participants and to the installation itself, thus offers an interface to the world. In so doing, this art form offers a particular capacity to address human understanding of self and other at an amoral level that can encompass the scale of the self-other/response-responsibility crises facing contemporary Western society. To articulate what this capacity entails, this article uses theoretical analysis and case studies of Responsive Environments by Allan Kaprow, Myron Krueger, Simon Penny and David Rokeby, to explore the interaction between responsiveness (the motor dimension of interactivity) and responsibility (its moral/social dimension). Such questions of selfhood and otherness, especially as they relate to responsibility, are highly pertinent to current society, where individual responsibility seems invisible, and our sense of engagement with that which is ‘outside’ our personal ‘inside’ seems severely lapsed. Wherein, the article explores how the dynamics of response-ability and responsibility within Responsive Environments actually manifest, in order to untangle where authorial responsibility ends, and the unpredictable act of participatory art begins. Therein, the article re-examines the potential of REs as an important and valuable art form moving into the twenty-first century, drawing on a body of historical artworks whose mechanics reflect some of the most pressing social, cultural, and political conversations needed in a global community facing down the Anthropocene, which apparently has no mechanism for conducting that conversation.