Have been thinking today about interactivity.

Was worried about creating a piece of print work when the title of this course is 'Interactive Media'. How do you interact with a piece of paper?!

Spoke with Mary and she outlined a few thoughts which have been growing in my head over the last few hours.

I interact with the software to make an image.
Different softwares interact with each other.
Different mediums interact with each other.
The viewer interacts with the work through it being thought-provoking and through a gradually developed understanding of its aims.
The viewers interact with each other discussing the work.

Hooray - lots of interaction!

Have also found a really interesting paper on the nature of interactions between computers and humans. In it the researchers show that:

'experienced computer users do in fact apply social rules to their interaction with computers, even though they report that such attributions are inappropriate. These social responses are not a function of deficiency, or of sociological or psychological dysfunction, but rather are natural responses to social situations'.

That is, the interactions between humans and computers are perceived as being social - we interact with them as if in a two-way dialogue. In this sense then, computers could be envisioned as having imaginations, even if these imaginations are imagined by humans.