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Creative Ambivalence and 'Interactivity'
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To: opern-memesis@aec.at
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Subject: Creative Ambivalence and 'Interactivity'
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From: Mariano Maturana <sur@desk.nl>
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Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 17:48:35 +0100
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Organization: Desk.nl
an excerpt from a paper to be presented at the 1995 conference of the
Australian Council for Computers in Education, Perth, July 9-13, where
it's title is
Cyberfeminism
The world, the flesh, and the woman-machine relationship
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Zoe Sofoulis
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Western Sydney, Nepean
P.O. Box 10 Kingswood NSW 2747
email: z.sofoulis@uws.edu.au
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Creative Ambivalence and 'Interactivity'
Amidst the hype attached to computers and now multi-media throughout
the 80s and 90s, anything less than uncritically enthusiastic embrace
of new technologies is often interpreted psychologically as
'technofear', when arguably what is at issue is an ambiv alence, a
combination of positive interest in the particular technology coupled
with an ironic and critical perspective on the whole technological
trajectory it represents. Women artists in technological media
demonstrate that ambivalence and critical dis tance allow new
technologies to be creatively appropriated for purposes, projects and
meanings quite other than those for which they are designed, perhaps
quite other than the agendas followed by people who feel entirely at
home in these media.
A number of computer artists (especially men) have apparently been
happy to work within the machine's given parameters, generating
algorithm-based "electronic wallpaper" (as Virginia Barratt calls it)
to produce a virtually content-free art. By contrast, many women
artists are drawn to go against the grain of the technology, using
this supposedly clean and sterile equipment with its disembodied
light-writing in order to explore physicality, interiority, and
eroticism. Contrasting with masculinist cyberpu nk fantasies of
abandoning the body as mere "meat" and entering cyberspace as a purely
mental construct, investigations of "out of body experience" by women
artists are likely to involve meditation on perceptual and physical
experience (e.g. Isabelle D elmotte's detailed chronicles of epileptic
seizures; Jennifer Hall's "out of body" theatrical experiments with
marionettes sensitive to her own brainwaves). For some women artists
(e.g. Char Davies ) resisting the computers' own tendencies can mean
using them to create beautiful organic and natural forms and
reflections of inner spaces; for others (e.g. Linda Dement, VNS
Matrix) this can mean working to "put some guts into the machine", and
playing with more sublime and visceral images.
Linda Dement appropriates the "prized toy ... intended for a slick,
clean commercial world to make personal, bodily, feminine work"
(interview with Virginia Barratt, 1994). Her new interactive CD ROM
'Cyberflesh Girlmonster' (1995 Perspecta) includes fra gments of
written and spoken text accompanying animated images, some of them
violent, and many of them whimsically monstrous, comprised as they are
of grafted-together pieces of various women's bodies. Women
enthusiastically 'donated' partial images of th emselves to Linda
Dement's project, perversely enjoying the fetishistic fragmentation of
women's bodies common in media as it was pushed to absurd extremes.
Several women artists Virginia Barratt and I have interviewed (as part
of our work for a book on women electronic artists) express scepticism
about the "extractive" model of interactivity common in multimedia
applications involving point-and-click interfa ces for navigating
through sets of menus or hypertext linkages. Enthusiasts of this form
of interactivity often conflate its non-linearity with a 'democracy'
akin to consumer choice, where the 'citizen' has little more power
than a supermarket shopper: t hey are free to choose which aisle to
navigate first, but not what aisles are there; free to select but not
determine which products are displayed.
Perhaps because artists are by trade more concerned with inspiring
reflection on ambiguous meanings than with efficiently conveying fixed
quanta of information, they are aware of the limits of this kind of
interactivity. Linda Dement overtly flaunts these limits: while
viewers make some choice of paths through the works, they include
occasional reminders that the viewer is not in full control. As she
puts it: "My work ... isn't really interactive. I absolutely control
every single little change that happens in the work. " (Dement, 1994:
171)
Instead of massaging viewers' egos with illusions of choice and
control, some artists opt for displacing agency onto the environment
via installations that use sensors and robotic or quasi-robotic
technologies to generate environments that genuinely interact with
visitors. For example, a strong sense of interface but a weak sense of
visitor control is conveyed in the installation 'Mapping E-motion'
(1993/4) by Sarah Waterson. The work consists of a number of hanging
rectangular perspex plates on which are mounted latex casts of
different breasts which pulsate and emit electrical tones according to
different degrees and speeds of visitors' movements, as detected by
surveillance devices placed in the gallery. Like Dement's 'Cyberflesh
Girlmonster', 'Mapping E-motion' ironically plays with the
fragmentation of women's bodies into fetishised parts. More
particularly it refe rs to the idea of erotic arousal through
pheremones, and plays with the simultaneous possibility and
impossibility of using technology to simulate and/or simulate the
body's "internal landscape".
A critique of computer-based extractive interactivity is also made by
former West Australian artist Nola Farman, who describes the
pre-programmed choices of extractive interfaces as " a false
interactivity". She prefers interactive installations where the
artwork "isn't properly there until you go in and something happens."
Farman views her own environmental works as "exploded robots" where
events are precipitated by visitors to the installation. Besides
human-technology interaction, Farman also aims at p rovoking the
interactivity "triggered ... between viewer and viewer".
Farman's 'The Lift' (W.A. Art Gallery, 1992) consists of a cubic
lift-sized construction with automatic doors and other typical
components (e.g. floor number display, an emergency telephone). Images
are projected onto the fabric walls of the lift from thr ee separate
"control towers" located around the outside, one of which contains a
purpose-built computer system to control the sounds and images.
Projected images show a crowd of people in a lift, initially at normal
size, but progressively larger, so that "there's this real sense of
shrinkage of yourself as they get bigger ... it's quite spooky."
Visitors are then subjected to images and sounds exploring various
stages of phobia. 'The Lift' functions as an automated environment
which responds to human pr esence and blurs the visitor-environment
distinction by placing people within a lift whose walls are then
filled with images of other people in a lift. This is not a work that
massages the egos of its "wetware" components, but disturbs and
unsettles them. Counterbalancing its manipulative play with its human
inhabitants are the opportunities for social interactivity it affords:
people would talk about whether to get in or not, and talk about it
afterwards. Farman's idea is that "two people could collabo rate a bit
with each other" while the computer functions "as a third
collaborator, no more, no less, so you're not worshipping the human
and you're not worshipping the machine; you're actually functioning
together to produce effects".
This model of interactivity poses the computer as an agentic element
within an environment, not a fetishised environment in itself.
Likewise, the human is not celebrated as the agent who makes (or
appears to make) everything happen, but is a component of a
human-technology-world ensemble within a social world where
human-human interactivity is valued and subject to critical scrutiny.
Women artists' investigations of alternative models of interactivity
can provoke a more honest and self-reflexive perspective on extractive
interfaces. The above examples demonstrate that uncritical and
narcissistic fantasies of transcendence, control and choice are not
the only forms of human-technology-world interactions supported by
interactive technologies, for despite their built-in biases, these
tools can be used to simulaneouly critique new media while creatively
pushing their limits.
