Art does not reside in the artwork alone, nor in the activity of the artist alone, but is understood as a field of psychic probability, highly entropic, in which the viewer is actively involved, not in an act of closure in the sense of completing a discrete message from the artist (a passive process) but by interrogating and interacting with the system “artwork” to generate meaning. This field provides for transactions to take place between the psychic system “artist” and the psychic system “viewer”, where both are, to use Umberto Eco’s phrase, “gambling on the possibility of semiosis”.
Roy Ascott, Towards a Field Theory for Postmodernist Art (1980)