Permanent Shutdown is an interactive installation in which a computer has the ability to initiate its own destruction. In the initial versions of the project, this control is accomplished via serial port radio communication with an electromagnet, which suspends a cinder block over the computer. The system stands posed on the brink of self-destruction, with only a click of a button by the user to consume and complete the work.

In an age where the ideas of artificial intelligence and neural networks have become highly refined and where computing power gives such programs the ability to approximate the size and complexity of the human brain, at what point does the termination of such a system become more than mere property damage? At what point will such devices be seen as more than slavish automatons, and their termination seen as murder or assisted suicide?

In experiencing any piece of art, the viewer almost always has the option of destroying it; this interaction is rarely exploited, however. It has been addressed, such as in Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning drawing. But when a work instigates its own obliteration, does the work require that eventual destruction for it to be complete? If a work of art is created totally from commercially available stock components, does it become disposable or renewable? How does decentralized access to a work of art affect its experience?

By limiting the user’s choice of interaction to one sole possibility, one single instance of that interaction, that interaction becomes exclusive and off limits to the majority of it’s viewers. What does it mean to have an interactive piece that can not be interacted with? Does an interactive work require the interaction to be experienced fully? Who feels justified in completely experiencing the work themselves, thereby rendering it unusable to anyone else? Does the artist, by offering the interaction, share the responsibility with the viewer in exercising it? And how does the idea of interaction change when the cost or consequence of that interaction is greatly increased?

In an environment where art has been totally commoditized and electronic trust is auctioned online, the two must inevitably intermingle. Ownership of such a work is multileveled – while only one person can possess the actual sculptural element, an unlimited number of people can be given the right to destroy (and complete) it. Furthermore, the person that initiates the piece’s eventual destruction has possessed it in a unique way. This brings up issues of trust, security, and privacy, and questions the idea of art ownership.

Permanent Shutdown is one work in a series that explores interactivity by minimizing it through various means. Another work, Webwheel, trivializes user interaction by using it as input into a chaotic system, thereby divorcing any specific output from a user’s actions, which become noise to the system. The upcoming Digital Gas Mask wards off user interaction by associating with it the potential for severe physical illness.

By treating interactivity as an axis along which an artist and their audience must negotiate, then carefully restricting this territory, one can elucidate and differentiate interaction as art.