Zbigniew Kupisz’s original Dog was created in 1994 as an interactive object that reacted to the presence of viewers.

In Paweł Janicki’s restored version, the work was placed in a new technological environment, taking the form of a networked and portable experience, thus giving rise to the Miniatures series.

Dog remains faithful to its original model – still alert, playful, and communicative – while reminding us how long the history of new media art has been developing in a dialogue between technology and human response.

The original installation, “Dog,” is an interactive object created in 1994 by Zbigniew Kupisz, with animations by Jacek Szleszyński and an interactive system by Wiesek Kościukiewicz (Mikrokom-soft). The work was created as part of a special edition of the WRO Biennale held at the Large TVP Studio in Wrocław. The “Dog” suddenly reacts by leering and barking at people passing by, eliciting cheerful and friendly reactions.

In later years, the “Dog,” reconstructed by Paweł Janicki, who restored the animal’s sight and overall vitality, became an integral part of the “Interactive Playground,” a now-famous exhibition of contemporary art for both children and adults, organized by the WRO Art Center. He lived in a comfortable wooden kennel (also restored by the artist himself, Zbigniew Kupisz) and greeted exhibition visitors in over 20 cities around the world with his loud bark.

Each subsequent staging of the “Interactive Playground” involved updating and redesigning the exhibition. In conversations between Janicki and Małgorzata Gawlik, who planned these activities together, the idea emerged, initially treated jokingly, of creating miniatures of the exhibition’s works to facilitate planning for future exhibitions. The idea materialized (or “softened”) at some point, and “Dog” became the first official Miniature (initially as an app for popular mobile devices, and later, like other miniatures, as a script run from a web browser). During the WRO 2015 Biennale, a miniature of Kupisz’s installation could be made independently thanks to a doghouse template that allowed for assembling it from stiff paper and inserting a mobile device inside with a dog “avatar” reacting to the surroundings by “seeing” through the device’s camera (this version of the work premiered on May 13, 2015).

Another important aspect of the “Dog” story is the specific pattern of the interactive system’s need to be redesigned to keep pace with technological advances. Each subsequent iteration of the system’s interaction control mechanism employed more complex technologies: a USB camera instead of an infrared sensor (in the first version, it was a simple alarm “sensor” plugged directly into the printer port [RS-232]); more powerful computers to handle a simple program playing animated video files; and more complex programming tasks. This seems to illustrate the fundamental shift of commercial media infrastructure into a closed mode, preventing manual modifications and inhospitable to experimenters.