Interactive art represents a radical phase-shift in western esthetics.
Designing the interactive experience adds an entire dimension to the esthetic endevour, one without precedent in the visual and plastic arts. In the west, the visual arts have no tradition of an esthetics of interactivity. Six hundred years of painting has resulted in a rich esthetics of the still image, of color and line, shape and area, of representational geometry and perspective. But as yet we have no culturally established esthtetic of real time interaction. The implications of this observation are resounding.