Introduction
Imagine a space, it can be a building divided into many rooms, or it can be a virtual place that people can enter through the screen. The space is full of shapes, lines and points of various sizes. Some of them have colour and some are white or black. These shapes seem to move interactively with internal tensions, line dance with the line, colours are pushing and pulling the eye. People walking through the space gradually realize that it is full of living. These shapes, lines and points invite people to generate some attention and to have a conversation. How people can communicate with these objects? Perhaps the same as they would communicate with the stranger: at the beginning carefully examining it and gradually exploring a way to understand it. People go from object to object exploring and changing them, and trying to understand their metaphors. Then people go away, they are not the same as they used to be. Communication with these moving shapes and dancing lines changed them. Why did they come?
Kandinsky was one of the first artists who observed that there is no interaction between art work and viewers. Therefore, with scientific precision he explored characteristic of point, line and plane that could engage the sight, emotion and mind of the public. Kandinsky tries to find a way to create a dialog between the viewer and the art work by using the point, the line and the plane. Arjen Mulder writes that Kandinsky figured out how the line operates in the two dimensional force field and interactive art continues its research. Moreover, Arjen Mulder elaborates that Kandinsky provided us a model for media art. Therefore the question arises:
how can today’s media art be seen in the light of Kandinsky’s theory of interactivity?
To answer this question it is important to describe the concept of interactivity and see how it is corresponding with Kandinsky’s attempt “to find a living [and] make its pulsation perceptible”. Moreover, visual perception plays an important role in understanding how interactivity can occur. To see how media art can be seen in the light of Kandinsky’s theory of the point, the line and the plane it is important to describe the fundamental points of his ideas. Finally, in the book Point and Line to Plane Kandinsky gives examples of the point and the line in other forms of art than the painting. In this thesis, these examples will be compared with today’s media art projects that explore the same forms of art.