After hearing Rachel Greene's call for discussion ["Ken Feingold at the
Tech90s lecture series," RHIZOME CONTENTBASE, 4.23.97], Joseph Nechvatal
wrote:

Ken [Feingold]'s piece brought to mind the fact that ninety years ago El
Lissitsky wanted to create an art which would remake the relationship
between the work of art and the spectator so that the artwork would no
longer be reducible to an object-in-itself but would come into being
through the relationship between the object and the spectator. El
Lissitsky had been struck by the demonstrative behavior of the devout
before Russian orthodox icons; by how they would bow and genuflect and
kiss the images as if through their actions they hoped to invoke some
power or energy or as if they themselves were bringing the divine into
existence. He was equally affected by elements of Jewish theology which
hold that God exists not in things but in events. Translated into the
secular terms of the modernist avant-garde these phenomena provided him
with a model for a new art in which the spectator's role in the
production of meanings would be privileged as never before - art as
imaginary materialization.

Thus in the manipulations of its activity, the soft, non-causal
interactive art Ken outlined gives to society no cures or certainties,
but in their own way these artworks counter the fatalism of recent
Postmodernism by refusing to use for their art the very conditions that
appear to diminish us. They challenge the domination of the singular
linier matrix without resorting to reassuring sentimentalities. Their
(and thus our) method is revealed to be a shifting seeking process.