7 Music Video Games in Interactive Art

The audiovisual installation Small Fish (1999) by Masaki Fujihata, Kiyoshi Furukawa, and Wolfgang Münch is based on computer games in its functionality, yet it is not a direct appropriation but rather a completely independent development in the field of interactive art.

Small Fish is an interactive graphical score that enables users to couple circles, dots, and lines with sounds by mouse click, and to set these visual elements in motion so that a musical structure emerges. Accordingly, the installation invites users to play with various graphic and sonic parameters. This type of algorithmically controlled generation of musical forms can also be called active score music—a term that is based on the title of a live performance event during the Ars Electronica Festival (2000), where Scribble (2000) by Golan Levin, Gregory Shakar, and Scott Gibbons and Small Fish Tales (2000) by Kiyoshi Furukawa were presented. Small Fish Tales uses the software developed for Small Fish for a performance before an audience. Scribble is based on Golan Levin’s Audiovisual Environment Suite (AVES), a collection of seven different interactive systems that were developed especially for the real-time performance of abstract computer-generated animations and sounds. The AVES instruments also represent an experimental investigation of innovative interfaces that, although they are intuitively accessible, provide great variability and countless individual settings for performers.

The music interface fijuu (2004) by Julian Olivier and Pix appears as an innovative and independent work that is aware of its proximity to computer games, but explores new approaches to the interaction between image, sound, and users beyond the realm of direct modding or appropriation.