ON THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY
Erkki Huhtamo
University Turku, Finland
In this presentation I am going to use the word 'archaeology' in a double focus: first of all, it refers to my research strategy which is centred on the analysis in interactive artworks. While I do not want to neglect the aesthetic integrity and uniqueness of these works, I am, however, using them as "excavation sites", as traces or indexes, to refer to some of the wider issues related to the development of interactivity as a cultural form, and not immediately visible in the current applications. These issues circle around topics such as interactivity & automation, immersion, tactility & remote operation, etc. within the wider sphere of the social and cultural functions of technology.
It needs to be added that the word interactivity is used here exclusively in the context of the "machine culture" - to refer to the human - machine relationship, whit its different cultural and social implications.
Secondly, I am using the world "archaeology" to refer to the artworks themselves. As I hope to make clear, there is a specific tendency or approach - to the point of forming a genre - among recent media artworks which could be labelled as "media archaeological". The artworks belonging to this genre are - more or less explicitly - concerned with investigating the possibilities, the limits and the historical becoming of interactivity, and as a consequence, their own roots. This happens by re-enacting technological forms of the past, combining with order elements and recontextualizing them. One of the proposals I will make is that these media archaeological artworks can be seen as kind of philosophical instruments or intertextual sites for discursive exchange, enquiry and reflection.
While I am fully conscious about the theoretical problems related to combining these to forms of archaeological approaches, I hope that what follows will be able to create a synergy between them.
The works by the Japanese artist Tochio Iwai represent "media archaeological" art perhaps in its most explicit form. Throughout his career Iwai has been concerned with building what a Japanese television program recently called "another evolution of the moving image". Since the early 1980's his works have been moving along the whole historical repertoire of moving image technologies, appropriating ideas from flip-books and zoetropes as well as from different projection systems and videogames. Instead of maintaining a linear and chronological order of things Iwai constantly recycles, modifies, assembles and deconstructs incredients from different periods and traditions.
Interestingly, Iwai has referred to his dreams as a source of inspiration behind this endeavour. He has recalled for example the following dreams: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if a painting or an object in front of you begins to move?" And another: "I wish I could go into the animated space I made myself."
It is interesting to note that rather than belonging just to Iwai these kind of "dreams" are commonplace elements, or discursive motives which have largely delineated the development of the moving image culture. They have been activated many times earlier - already thousands of years before William Horner constructed his ZoÎtrope in the 1830's or Oliver Wendell Holmes described his virtual voyaging experiences made possible by the stereoscope (one successful model of which he designed) in the 1850's.
Although Iwai's work could be seen as a personal "dream vision" or "dream history" of audiovisuality, it can also be characterised as a site of laboratorium, which offers the user a possibility to probe and re-enact these discursive traditions, activating them and deactivating them in turn. It also emphasiyes the possibility of different, potential, and multiple histories of the moving image, encouraging one to ask questions, such as "What if certain conditions had been different, how would it have developed?" "What if it has actually developed differently from the linear and chronological textbook version we are accustomed to (and which is perpetuated by even the structure of "progressive" institutions like the MOMI in London?)
Another, somewhat different example of a long term artistic involvement with media-archaeology is provided by the work of Jeffrey Shaw. I will touch on its work briefly. Shaw's whole artistic output can be seen as a far-ranging and open-ended conversation with different mechanisms of representation and simulation ranging from visual machinery's or "scopic regimes" of the Renaissance and the Baroque to the different manifestations of the electronic image. Shaw continuously places and displaces the spectator in highly complex perceptual situations and makes him/her actively investigate his/her own relationship to them. These perceptual mechanisms do not work just as formal devices. Rather, the carry traces of the discursive traditions that have informed and moulded them historically.
Inventer la terre (1986) is an extremely dense and layered cluster references to history, myth and power. The central trick is a kind of detournement through which the one way pan optic device of the periscope - a machine with unrestricted scopic power - is turned into an instrument for reflecting on the relativity of different world views.
The Legible City (1989) takes the motive of the immersion into the screen, which emerged with the phantom ride film in the late 19th century, and puts it in the context of the simulator interface, equally known from the late 19th century on. He then developes these motives in the context of digital real-time imaging. One of the remarkable things is Show's success in transcending this models deriving from entertainment or professional training environments by turning physical action and the pleasures of the simulacrum into an intellectual activity, that of reading and writing. However, his approach doesn't exclude the pure pleasures of cycling in a virtual world.
Recently, a similar conversational and cyclical relationship with the technologies of the past has emerged in the work of several other artists - often, however, expressed in a less complex manner. Lynn Hershman has used the peepshow machine to analyze and deconstruct mechanism of voyerism in her A Room of One's Own (1993), Paul De Marinis has constructed ingenious para-historical sound machines , ranging from old Jericho to contemporary laser technology via the phonograph cylinder in his Edison Effect (1993), Rebecca Cummins has combined a real gun, Marey's Chronophotographic Gun (1882) and the shooting arcade from an amusement park in her installation To Fall Standing (1993), suggesting ideas related to photographic representation and death the Australian feminist group VNS Matrix has build a reversed Nintendo Game-Boy videogame console in their All New Gen (1993). From recent works I would also specifically like to mention Catherine Richards' the Virtual Body and Michael Naimark's Kinetoscope, but archaeological elements can be found in many other works as well Perry Hoberman's installation Faradey's Garden. By combining old film projectors, radios and electric kitchen tools Hoberman pays attention to the fact that from the point of view of the human - machine interface these belong to the same register. The work is especially interesting from the point of view of the historical relationship between automatic and interactive technology. It important to find out when and how the ideology of automation, intertwined with the discourse of modernity came to be challenged by the idea of interactivity.
As I have stated before I consider these artworks as some kind of laboratories cum playgrounds, or philosophical instruments cum toys or observation towers cum time machines.
Beside the obvious differences in approach and design, there are several similarities between the strategies used in these artworks.
1) The use of cyclical rather than linear conception of the past - the recycling and merging of motives which derive from different periods and traditions. This emphasises the recurrence and the "eternal return" of motives, rather than unique innovation and progress, which makes technologies of the past and their applications obsolete. A spatial metaphor prevails instead of a temporal one (this is related to the use of the installation form).
2) The focus is on technologies as cultural forms, in other words as bearers of culturally and socially assigned meanings, rather than merely as technological gadgets. This emphasises also the utopian are purely discursive side of the history of technology: for example, the reality of the so called 'discursive inventions', which existed only as discourses, not as realised artefacts (an example of this is the 19th century telectroscope).
3) The use the element of play and (pre-constructed) spontaneous reaction instead of a didactic approach, marked with instructions, maps and menus. This emphasises a direct relationship with the interface. This, in turn, encourages a spirit of discovery by making the user re-enact different subject position that the work offers.
Finally, one should ask for the reasons behind the appearance of this archaeological genre of media art.
It is easy to see that technological art - still more or less 'rootless' in the art word - has a need to investigate its own past. At the same interactive art already has its own history, going back in the 1960's and in discursive form (realised in manifestoes and representations in other artistic media, such as painting) even further, to the modernist and anti-modernist movements of the first part of the 20th century. The appearance of the archaeological genre is a sign of maturity, of growing sophistication and also of growing self-consciousness.
On the other hand, it seems to me a sign a growing anxiety about the role of technology, and interactive technology in particular. The artists have the most sensitive antennas to register this first. I don't think it is a coincidence that there are so many female artists among the 'media-archaeologists". Women's historical exclusion from technology (about which Christine Tamblyn spoke) and their simultaneous encapsulation or hybridisation with the machine (as telephone operators, typists 'automated' housewives etc.) on men's terms is enough to raise doubts about the blessings of interactive technology and even about the promised gender free zone of the cyberspace.
Interactivity has been propagated as a patent solution for almost any problem faced by the media culture. It is promises "freedom of choice", "a intimate relationship with the machine", and "free flight in cyberspace". Part of this is the tendency, which seems to amount to the mythization in the idea of a sharp break between "non-interactive" and alienating" technologies of the past and the "enabling" and "liberating" interactive technologies of the present. It is not uncommon to hear the phrase "the culture of interactivity", whatever that means. On the other hand, seeing a demonstration of the interactive Full Service Network recently installed by Time-Warner in Ontario, Florida makes at least a European suspicious. It seems that concept has been hi-jacked by corporate interests and used in the cable television to sell more of the same in a newly designed package.
One of the problems in the discourse around interactivity seems to be a failure to make a distinction between technology and cultural form that Raymond Williams wrote about in relation to the television in his classic Television - Technology and Cultural Form (1974). A certain technological invention get its "identity" when it's placed within an institutional context, the meaning of which is fixed by culturally and socially defined discourses. This "identity" may be different from its technological potential. As Williams points out, there is no pre-determined relationship between the television technology and broadcasting institution.
In the case of interactivity, many people seem to believe that the mere existence of an interactive technology is enough to justify the idea of an interactive man/machine relationship, even that of a culture. This is completely false. Interactive technology does not provide more than a potential, a frame of opportunities/These will be realised in specific social and industrial contexts.
The French critic Pierre Moeglin has found another way of putting this by emphasising, that a distinction should be made between "interactivity" and "interaction". "Interaction" is what happens when somebody uses an interactive machine, such as a videogame. Interactivity is a more abstract and general concept, implying the idea of cultural formation, or cultural charge. The proliferation of interactive gadgets does not automatically justify us to assume, that we would have entered something which could be called " a culture of interactivity." If it exists, we should ask what are its indispensable features.
The activity of the artists working in the archaeological mode seems to me extremely important. They maintain a constant conversation about the nature of interactivity, excavating its forgotten performs (foe example in Coin-op's, such as fortune telling machines) and emphasising the difference between technology and cultural forms. By investigating cyclically the traditions of the human - machine relationship they can probably end up formulating new applications. The also combat the mythization of interactivity is being used as another marketing formula, skilfully camouflaged behind the chrome facade of the brave new world of technoculture.