'Much of today’s design derives its cultural value and meaning from “narratives of production.” How it was made and how the designer exploited new materials and processes drives everything. The stories told about many objects stop at the point the object actually comes into being. With our work, that’s exactly when the story begins. We’re far more interested in “narratives of consumption”: how objects enter people’s lives and the meanings that arise from their interactions with those objects. But as we are not interested in designing for how the world is today, that part of our work is highly speculative. And that’s where context enters, imagined contexts of use and interaction.' – Anthony Dunne It’s this last sentence that, for me, brings up one of the more notable characteristics of interactive installation art and of interactive computing in general: the notion of use, the context of usage, and how the context of that usage fits into the larger patterns of contemporary life. Most computing, interactive or otherwise, is meant to in some way fit more or less seamlessly into our pre-existing patterns of behavior, simply extending their possibilities and expanding their contexts. Interactive installation unlike many aesthetic computing practices, and indeed most art practices, has a great number of utilitarian characteristics: correlations between the architecture, design, function, and cybernetics that position it oddly, perhaps almost slightly outside of any particular realm of discourse. It’s occasionally quite difficult to speak in depth about interactive computing perhaps because of its utilitarian nature: it does not seem to exist comfortably in discourse or observation, but more in usage, in the shaping of space, patterning of life, or the defining of a task or action. These aren’t things that fit comfortably into many definitions of the aesthetic, of aesthetic discourse, of art and of artwork. While computing, aesthetic, interactive, or other can certainly draw from the aesthetic discourse, it also seems to exist in too great a multiplicity of other discourses and with a fundamental contextual utility that always seems to position it too closely to the ultimate ends of industrial design, architecture, or software.
[Marc Bohlen & JT Rinker / U.W.M. (The Universal Whistling Machine) / 2003-5] Utility isn’t something that demands much attention in more traditional concepts of art. Historically, common usage ends at the attribution of art: a Grecian urn that is recognized as an artistic object is no longer used as an urn, it’s used as an art object and its context is the discourse of anthropology and aesthetic history. The usage happens at a distinct distance and it seems that in many cases that distance is required, in that it allows for the critical distance, the lack of resemblance to other objects and actions; that is, in many ways, the ‘usage’ of the art object. This isn’t to say that utility never enters the aesthetic discourse, it does and from multiple locations with differing goals. One notable location of this is at the borders of art and design: 'The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art but it’s reasonableness, usefulness, and scale as a chair…A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.' – Donald Judd Another is at the borders of art and political action: 'Given the avant-gardiste intention to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life, it is logical to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient. It is no accident that that both Tzara’s instructions for the making of a Dadaist poem and and Breton’s for the writing of automatic texts have the character of recipes…the recipe is to be taken quite literally as suggesting a possible activity on the part of the recipient.” – Peter Bürger
[Ruari Glynn / Dancers / 2008] Yet the type of aesthetic utility that we often see in interactive computing is slightly more complex than changing the mode of conception or production for a pre-existing object or encouraging a spectator to become a participant in some process. Often we see works that seem to most resemble instruments, cyborgian extensions or sublimations of the body, playful or utopian systems, or socializing communicative games. An interesting precedent for understanding the multiplicity of relationships that interactive computing maintains might be more political participatory practices. Despite being very much a proposition that is based in the notion of the spectator, an audience and the performer rather than the dynamic of an interaction between a user and a system there is remains an interesting corollary that deserves some attention between the practices and critiques of writers like Grant Kester or Bruce Barber, artists like The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur, and the difficulty of reconciling interactive design practices and new media installation with more classical notions of aesthetic and the work of art.
'First, Littoral art is interdisciplinary. It operates "between" discourses (art and activism, for example) and between institutions (the gallery and the community center or the housing block). This is opposed to traditional art that operates within both the discursive presuppositions and the institutional sites of the "art world" and art audiences and that is, moreover, often even further defined by its identification with a specific art medium.' – Grant Kester Just as crucially though, between these two distinct modes of practice, there are crucial differences in the models of physicality, action, utility, and dialogue. The rough assumption of a spectator is that they, along with their fellow spectators, will share a common experience while witnessing a particular work. They’re bound together by verifiably similar accounts, a commonality of action, and a reasonable degree of similarity across the experience of the spectators. The rough assumption of a performer is that they will be an agent of or at the least aware of the different agents at work in the performance. For the user of an interactive system a different type of both performance and spectatorship takes place: the system, the partner or instrument with which the performer works is often external, faceless, and ambient. The system itself performs in multiple roles: providing agency of interaction, facilitation of feedback, location of spectacle. The simultaneous embodiment of the system through its observation of the users body and the disembodiment of the feedback that such a system creates a range of possibilities. Our physical potential and allow for a playing-with and exploration-of the capabilities of this extended embodiment and the possibilities of the collaboration, playing with, data mining, exploitation, and dis-location of our physical existences. What emerges again and again from these practices is the different accounts of embodiment and consciousness and the interplay of interactive systems between our awareness of ourselves and the systems that surround us.
'The experience of one’s body proper is thus given through the same material as is one’s experience of motility: namely, traces of body movement captured at or above a minimally sufficient temporal speed. Here, then, we encounter a body-in-code in completely in a completely literal sense, meaning a body image that is indiscernible from a technically generated body schema.' – Mark BH Hansen [Describing paper by Simon Penny about the CAVE environment] |
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