Phonenix Magazine’s Optimism issue features Tine Bech

“I create unique experiences for people, using our behaviours and social abilities with interactive art, technology and the materials around us“, says Bech, who has developed a model for creating a new type of interactive art, placing the audience’s experience at its centre. “I think art is actually a collective, quite a social, experience.”

…Interactive and installation art is still at the cutting edge of the art world, and its relative youth means that it actively engages with making positive changes for the future; they are, in a word, optimistic. Holler’s slides, apart from being exploratory sculptures that offer the possibility of unique inner experiences that can be used for the exploration of the self”, are actually changing architects attitudes to different ways of moving between spaces.

Perhaps this is what makes playgrounds not just art, but great art. While, on the surface, it all seems like mindless fun, in reality the art is making us think. It challenges us to envisage and play out the kind of world we want to live in, how to solve the problems we can see as obstacles to that future, and how to confront reality and make a difference. Bech says it best: “Being optimistic about the future doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be sceptical or critical – we should be able to be independent thinkers. …means believing that we all have an interesting future ahead of us, what-ever it may be. I hope that it’s one full of play and great art,” Bech concludes.

Read the full article here (PDF) as posted originally published in PHOENIX SS16 issue.