My Journey to Making Interactive Art

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I came to interactive art through my sketchbook, and returning to a love for paper-cutting.  A long time ago my main medium for a few years was cut paper.  Even though I was sketchbooking then as I always have, I never thought to combine the two.  One day, years after I stopped papercutting, I had a ‘duh’ idea to do a papercut piece in a sketchbook, and that way when you flipped that page, the single cut design would have two different backgrounds.  I was endlessly entertained by this idea.  Normally, my sketchbooks are a no-rules playground for any random idea, experimentation, or doodle.  But one day I decided to start a sketchbook with actual watercolor paper, and limit myself to creating the entire book only using paper cutting and watercolor.  Then I just had the crazy idea of having mushrooms popping out of a person’s eyes, and making them moveable.  I felt such child-like joy at being able to truly play with my own art!  From then on I was hooked.  I dreamt up so many other interactive concepts, toiling over trial and error to figure out the paper mechanics to make it all function.  Since these were in a sketchbook that was only meant for me, I allowed myself to truly follow my intuition and create art as weird as my inner soul.  After eventually sharing some videos online I realized that the art I made most for myself, from my deepest, most authentic desires, happened to be the art that other people connected with the most.  This really gave me permission to continue to pursue this extremely fun and interesting direction of interactive art.