With the «Exposition of Music–Electronic Television» festival staged in the German city of Wuppertal in 1963, Nam June Paik drafted a first blueprint for viewer interaction with the electronic television picture. Using devices such as a microphone or magnet, the several versions of «Participation TV» (1963­1966), which was first presented at the festival, and of the later «Magnet TV» (1965) allow the viewer to produce oscillating patterns on an electronically modified TV screen. Typical of this early phase was the interactive «re-use,» the détournement,[12] of broadcasting media like TV and radio. The implied demand for a change in the one-way structures of the (analog) mass media amounted to a massive critique of the passivity mass media consumption produced in viewers.

Other concepts of interactivity came into their own concurrent with the transition from happenings to performance in the 1970s. Artists like Dan Graham, Peter Campus and Peter Weibel used closed-circuit installations to confront spectators with their own

mediated image, while in Bruce Nauman's «Live-taped Video Corridor» (1970) the viewers found themselves being radically conditioned. These interactive installations were the first to meet with success in the art world, and were the products of a fundamental distrust of the ideals of openness and participation aspired to in the 1960s: «I mistrust audience participation,» is a documented Nauman statement. The closed-circuit installations produced in the next decade therefore represented not so much participatory projects as «situations reflecting upon the relationship between viewer and medium.»[13] Valie Export's noted «Tap and Touch Cinema» (1968), which made interactivity ‹graspable› as a direct, sensory and tactile experience, presented a stark contrast to this mediaaesthetic self-reflection. For her street action, Export strapped to her chest a box that was open at the front and back, thus allowing passers-by to put their hands through a curtain at the front and feel her breasts. This «mobile installation»