According to the new media artist and theorist
Maurice Benayoun, the first piece of interactive art should be the work done by
Parrhasius during his art contest with
Zeuxis described by
Pliny, in the fifth century B.C. when Zeuxis tried to unveil the painted curtain. The work takes its meaning from Zeuxis' gesture and wouldn't exist without it. Zeuxis, by its gesture, became part of Parrhasius' work. This shows that the specificity of interactive art resides often less in the use of computers than in the quality of proposed "situations" and the "Other's" involvement in the process of
sensemaking. Nevertheless, computers and real time computing made the task easier and opened the field of virtuality – the potential emergence of unexpected (although possibly pre-written) futures – to contemporary arts. Some of the earliest examples of interactive art were created as early as the 1920s. An example is
Marcel Duchamp’s piece named
Rotary Glass Plates. The artwork required the viewer to turn on the machine and stand at a distance of one meter in order to see an optical illusion. The present idea of interactive art began to flourish more in the 1960s for partly political reasons. At the time, many people found it inappropriate for artists to carry the only creative power within their works. Those artists who held this view wanted to give the audience their own part of this creative process. An early example is found in the early 1960s "change-paintings" of
Roy Ascott, about whom
Frank Popper has written: "Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation". Aside from the “political” view, it was also current wisdom that interaction and engagement had a positive part to play within the creative process. In the 1970s, artists began to use new technology such as
video and
satellites to experiment with live performances and interactions through the direct broadcast of video and audio. At this time,
Gordon Pask came up with the "Conversation theory". This theory emphasizes the dynamic exchange of information between participants in a system. As a two-way dialogue, this concept of a conversation between the user and the system has shaped artists' thinking about interactivity. Interactive art became a large phenomenon due to the advent of computer-based interactivity in the 1990s. Along with this came a new kind of art-experience. Audience and machine were now able to more easily work together in dialogue in order to produce a unique artwork for each audience. This continues today and is only expanding due to increased communications through digital media. , Augmented Reality Multiplayer Game, Art Installation using
smartphones A hybrid emerging discipline drawing on the combined interests of specific artists and architects has been created in the last 10–15 years. Disciplinary boundaries have blurred, and significant number of architects and interactive designers have joined electronic artists in the creation of new, custom-designed interfaces and evolutions in techniques for obtaining user input (such as dog vision, alternative sensors,
voice analysis, etc.); forms and tools for information display (such as
video projection,
lasers,
robotic and
mechatronic actuators, led lighting etc.); modes for human-human and human-machine communication (through the
Internet and other
telecommunications networks); and to the development of social contexts for interactive systems (such as utilitarian tools, formal experiments, games and entertainment, social critique, and political liberation). == Forms ==