Interactive Experience in Public Context: Tango Tangle, by Zafer Bilda, Constraints and Creativity in the Digital Arts, by Linda Candy

This paper,“Interactive experience in public context: tango tangle”, is about a pilot test of an interactive artwork named Tango Tangle. This test belongs to a lager project which aims to install a series of interactive works in Federation Square in Melbourn, Australia. By the test the evaluators observed how people get aesthetics satisfaction from an interactive Artwork. For example: how the audience construct meaning, pleasure and enjoyment from an interactive artwork.
The second one “constraints and creativity in digital arts” is about an aesthetic meaning of technique used in the digital arts. The author said that constraints are not only restrictions but also creativity of the used media. To explain which role constraints play in the art history, she starts with the atonal music of Schoenberg. She wrote that constraints in creativity are both limiting and liberating because they are inherent to the context, the genre and the medium.

I think that the first article shows us some characteristic factors of a digital art how it attract people and the second one how we have to understand the attraction of the digital arts: the characteristics of the medium and it's constraints.

In digital arts, the creative process is fundamentally the same as in any other field of creative work. Constraints in creativity are both limiting and liberating. By choosing particular forms, materials and tools for a creative work you have choosen the kinds of constraints shaped the process and its outcomes. Constraints impose fundamental limits on our ability to think, perceive and create: for example, mental blocks are less amenable to change or control by the individual concerned than those that are self-imposed.

An important characteristic of digital technology is that to use it to its full, you have to be prepared to make explicit the implicit assumptions that are in your mind as you develop the work. It is the very need for explicitness that makes it both challenging and rewarding to many artists. In order to work digitally, the constraints have to be specified in such a way as to make the computer generate an outcome that is satisfying to the artist. But, more importantly, the process of specifying the constraints in digital form can be best understood as an integral part of the creative process. The choice of whether to program or to use a software application can be critical to how much the artist has control over the character of the constraints to be specified