Ed Burton is Research and Development Director at Soda Creative Technologies Ltd and creator of the Soda constructor. His work is featured in AMODA's exhibition, Inside the Display: The Digital Face of Interactive Art. Ed recently joined AMODA's Vice President Rob Turknett for a friendly instant messenger chat.

Rob: howdy!

Ed: hello Rob!

very pleased to, er, meet? you

Rob: er, yeah...likewise!

Ed: so then, soda and I are chuffed to bits to be at amoda, my thanks to you and all the team there, I'm in your hands, probe at will (!)

Rob: thanks to you and everyone at soda for helping us make this exhibition happen. Here's my first question:

the term "interactive art" has been bandied around so much that it has largely lost its meaning. A few years back, Hollywood studios were claiming that "interactive" movies were the next big thing, but they fell flat. What makes interactive art successful?

Ed: mm, in the long run I think the aspiration will be to lose the interactive preface, so the question becomes synonymous with what makes art successful, but that's a big can of worms that's always being open and never gets closed...

so to accept and focus on the interactivity, I think for me it gets interesting when the interaction if flexible enough for the audience to actually add something of themselves, to bring value to the experience through their presence and interaction

Rob: there has to be an openness to it...

Ed: there is certainly room for many modes of interaction, but my personal agenda tends to be that of using interactivity to facilitate creativity in the audience, so in that respect it opens the traditional model of artist as creator and audience as passive consumer

sodaplay is kind of an extreme representation of that agenda, there are thousands of models in the sodazoo, and none of them are made by me, and very many of them are beyond anything I imagined when I first created sodaconstructor

the fact that my audience has gone way beyond the limits of my own imagination is extremely fulfilling, through internet it really took on a life of its ownby AMODA

I just made the tool, it's the extended family of users worldwide that explore its potential so exhaustively and express their individual personalities through it

Rob: so your role as an artist here is to create a sort of "structure for improvisation". Do you see a parallel with your role and say, the role of a jazz composer?

Ed: in this instance I think my role is even less prescriptive than that, I'm more like the guy who made the saxophone!

Rob: indeed!

much of the art in the twentieth century has been a kind of meta art, where artists not only paint in a style, but they create the style itself. Your work strikes me as sort of going the next step beyond that...

Ed: I suppose I am trying to flex the previously distinct roles of artist and audience, an aspiration I'm sure I share with many others in the arts from theatre to writing etc

not that I'm painting myself into the role of being invisible, with all creations being equal. Good art isn't easy, and if the audience are included in the creative process that's demanding a lot of them. What's been amazing to see emerge in the sodazoo is the appearance of power-users who have stretched the application with mould breaking sodaconstructor models

Incidentally, I'll be taking the level of meta creation to a further level later this year, at http://www.sodarace.net/ we'll be facilitating researchers to create Artificial Intelligences which then in turn create sodaconstructor models, meta meta creation, where will it all end?

Rob: oh wow, that's great! The sodaconstructor seems to tap into the same collaborative, creative spirit that fuels the open source movement. Have you ever considered making the sodaconstructor open source? This sounds like a step in that directionƒ

Ed: Aah yes, THAT's where it'll all end!..

Rob: lol

Ed: it's certainly something we're thinking about, and sodarace is very likely to be a leap in the open source direction...

Rob: I can't wait to get my hands on it. When is the expected release date?

Ed: of course as well as being an artist in this context, I'm also a company director in others, so commercial realities lie heavily on my shoulders. Hence we think long and hard about how we go about giving things away!

but sodarace is due to start being built in June, and launched in September. However later this month we'll be opening http://www.sodarace.net/forum so we can discuss and develop all of this in a community forum

Rob: have you ever seen Karl Sims' work with "evolved virtual creatures"?

Ed: oh yes indeedy, Karl's work has long been an inspiration of mine

those evolved block creatures were lovely, and the way their "nervous system" was integrated into the morphology of their bodies was extremely elegant

Rob: there is an almost unsettling life-like quality them

the sodaconstructor creatures share this seeming "aliveness". I sometimes feel sorry for them when they are limping around...

Ed: ah, so what exactly did you do to them to make them limp in the first instance?... some sodaconstructor models do seem to inspire a certain sadism in the audience!

Rob: no, just incompetence on my part!

Ed: somewhere in the small print of the FAQ we assure our users that sodaconstructions do not feel pain, so worry not

Rob: have you ever tried to 'evolve' sodacreatures?

Ed: it's not something I've tried yet, but it is exactly what sodarace will be facilitating. Sodarace is a competition where models made by humans are raced along with models created by Artificial Intelligences. Anyone who can programme can enter an Artificial Intelligence that learns to build sodaconstructor models, and if I can find the time I certainly want to create one of my own to enter sodarace

However in my estimation, sodaconstructing is what in Artificial Intelligence fields is called a "hard" learning problem! Right now my money is on the humans winning the sodarace by a long shot

Rob: have you ever thought of giving the sodaconstructor models sensory apparatus? So they would know when they are approaching a wall, for instance?

Ed: I have thought of it, but the reason I've stayed away from that degree of sophistication is that the process of actually building sodaconstructor models is already waaay tricky enough. The task of also designing control systems for virtual sensors would potentially make sodaconstructor much less accessible. One of the great pleasures of seeing sodaplay grow is the unusual breadth of our audience..

...adults, engineers and artists send us models, but we're also big in schools with kids making models, it's real cross generational stuff. Hence I wouldn't want to make it much more techy than it is

Rob: okay, one last question before we sign off...

you mentioned earlier the commercial reality of giving things away. One typically goes to a museum to see a one of a kind art object, but your work can be viewed on the web, and infinite copies can be made. You can't sell the "original" to an art collector either. How does this affect your career as an artist, and how is the exhibition of your work in a museum relevant in this context?

Ed: good question!...

first off, I don't particularly aspire to a career as an artist, and I think in large part that might be because the art market doesn't appeal to me. I did in fact have one gallery approach me to produce a signed limited edition cd-rom edition of sodaconstructor with luxuriously lithographed cd inlays...

...it just seemed so bogus to me to generate a pretense of exclusivity when it's greatest strength is its accessibility.

I'm afraid I can't tell you where that would leave me if I was relying on art to feed and clothe me, but right now I'm too busy building soda.co.uk to worry about that

This article © 2002 Rob Turknett