From gallery to the globe: evoking environmental responsibility in Australian Interactive Art, 1990–2010

The late twentieth-century art form Responsive Environments comprised interrelations among artist, artwork, and audience, wherein responsivity and responsibility to an other, be it the social and/or physical environment of the artwork, could be tangibly evoked. This article illustrates alternative, but complementary, approaches to address challenges inherent in evoking environmental responsibility in Responsive Environments, through the exemplary work of three Australian artists—Garth Paine, Jon McCormack, and Keith Armstrong—during the art form’s peak popularity between 1990 and 2010. This discussion considers how context- and content-appropriate approaches can maximize complexity and interactivity, while reducing artists’ authorial authority (and associated responsibility) and increasing audience authority (and their associated responsibility). By examining these practices, the article considers how the debates once evoked by Responsive Environments might contribute to those trying to create art commensurate with self-other relations in an age of human-induced planetary rupture, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Such self-other understanding has become existentially critical in the context of the Anthropocene: wherein the “authorship,” meaning the usual ecological/climatic parameters within which we know our planet to function are irreversibly transgressed, because the “participants” took over the interaction with such autonomy that all responsibility, along with the benign stability of the Holocene, has been lost.