I’d like to begin this last post in our conversation with the video from the Exquisite Bodies exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, particularly because of the depiction of the inanimate or imaginary body as something for entertainment and as an interactive object. At around the one minute mark, you can observe curator Kate Forde demonstrate a beautiful anatomical model that one can “dissect” by lifting or folding down paper flaps, exploring the body interactively in an analogue fashion. While this example may seem utterly divorced from the conversation that we are having about contemporary notions of interactivity and digital media, I think it’s relevant. As simple as they are, the paper flaps are interactive and educational, and presumably everyone who came into contact with them knew how to use them.
Designer and researcher Julian Bleecker once created a list of the “Top 15 criteria that define interactive or new media art“, and one of these tongue-in-cheek criteria was “Your audience “interacts” by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines.” As hilarious and hyperbolic as his list is, it raises some serious issues with the genre, most notably, that when there is no clear call to action or way of developing a relationship with a work, audiences resort to “making bird calls” in an effort to elicit an evolution in the artwork they are viewing. A failure to provide clear protocols means that an experience meant to be about the work devolves into people asking each other, “is this thing on?”
From my point of view, I suppose that where interactivity can turn into play is at the point where the interaction design makes play possible. Earlier this year, I curated an exhibition entitled “The Aesthetics of Gaming” at Pace Digital Gallery in New York City. The exhibition presented two game environments: Avoid by Joe McKay (pictured above) and CuteXdoom II by Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier. The works address both the intertwining of games and stories and the aesthetics of artist-created games. But most importantly, I feel that the development of games by artists has something in common with the anatomical studies (both as entertainment and as serious study) in days gone by: the hand of the artist plays a significant role, and the dexterity of the artist and participants to visualize and construct reality in 3 dimensions determines the depth of an audience’s experience. These artists have had to investigate how games might work under the surface, as well as provide a compelling aesthetic surface that will draw players in.
It goes without saying that video games are part of a massive entertainment industry, and that several generations of people now know many conventions of game play in this context. While the complexity of game modification and design presents a unique challenge to artists, the conventions of game design can provide the cues that will prevent any “is this thing on?” moments. It also provides a consistent framework to work against — because audiences are familiar with gaming conventions, assumptions of how an experience is to be navigated or how a narrative will be resolved can be challenged. Like the paper flaps of yesterday, the game controllers and joysticks of today smooth the way towards insight into the guts of an artists’ message, whether an artist chooses to work with conventions, or against them.
I’d like to hear more of your thoughts, Michelle, on participation and on what media art demonstrates about participation that cannot be found elsewhere. As a curator, you will have a good perspective on this subject. As an artist, I often feel immersed in conceptual and technological aspects of production and artistic intention.
But first, I have a comment about Freiling’s use of the word ‘producer’. Without meaning to be anal, I will hair-split. The term ‘producer’ can suggest control. However, the relationship between the museum and the artist needs to be arms-length. The museum as a site of production does not suggest tension between the institution and the artist, but with the museum as a producer, the dynamic is not clear, at least to me.
My response to your question about media art and participation will emphasize sound and listening. Digital technologies impact sense perceptions and social change. Listening and media art can extend individual sensibilities to collectivity and interconnectivity. They give participants a sense of active involvement in many lives, set up conditions for different experiences of social space and social behaviour, and bridge our private and public worlds. These ideas are compatible with Freiling’s curatorial statement about the shifting function of the museum as a site of production and as a social space.
I’m currently reading Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. LaBelle identifies listening as an agent for shifting individuality into a larger field of experience. Listening breaks apart the “shell of the listener” blurring the finite borders of individuality toward a broader space of multiplicity. He quotes John Cage who in turn credits Marshall McLuhan with the recognition that new art and music implement processes that provide opportunities for perceptual shifts from “life done for us to life that we do for ourselves” (247). LaBelle completes this chapter of the book with the statement that these opportunities make us “increasingly and productively vulnerable.” This phrase has resonance for me.
Vulnerability is our humanity. Our future is uncertain. Technology is our surround. Do new media technologies assist us with facing our contemporary uncertainty in concrete terms? In altering our understanding of collectivity, do they also alter our actions? Does the social space of the museum extend beyond the museum or does the institution aestheticize vulnerability and uncertainty?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Microphones, 2008; courtesy the artist; © Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Continuing on from your points about collaboration and co-authorship, Ellen, I’d like to extend these points to an institutional framework. I was recently reading an interview on the SFMOMA’s website, about their recent exhibition, The Art of Participation. In the interview, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts says:
One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.
What I think is interesting about this exhibition, and this quote in particular is that Frieling (speaking from within the institution), acknowledges the importance of the institutional critique that artists can bring, and talks of blurring distinctions, when by definintion, the museum can’t take the blurring of distinctions to its limit. It would undo the raison d’etre of museums to really let go of its power to categorise and legitimise. However, parallel things grow up around these forces and become part of a cultural conversation that musueums must engage in. There is an obvious parallel in publishing, in that web-powered print on demand as well as blogs and wikis force a conversation about access to audiences and freedom of expression. This very experiment we are taking part in acknowledges the impact the web has had, and will feed back into print, which will extend the power of what we say here, but still encapsulate it in the context of an online conversation.
I wonder if these small measures, such as blurring distinctions between exhibition space and education space in a museum, or blurring distinctions between what is blogged and what is printed, add up to something more? What is the art of participation, and are there particular things media art can demonstrate about participation that aren’t demonstrated elsewhere?
The boundary between collaboration and co-authorship is blurred, and artistic disciplines differ in their uses and interpretations of the terms. However, the terms are distinct. Collaboration and co-authorship are strategies for production and participation that contest individualistic art experiences without denying either the individual’s engagement or the individual subject. They posit new connections with art as an object, a relational experience or a network. They also connect with gaming and play.
My graduate advisor, André Jodoin, insisted that collaboration started with the project’s point of conception, sort of like birth. Without the co-generation of the original concept as a shared process, the project was not a true collaboration. I take a softer approach to collaboration although I find the strictness of André’s interpretation useful and appealing in its clarity. For me, collaboration refers to projects and processes with shared resources and responsibility for production and realization of mutually defined goals.
Co-authorship relates to text, writing and composition using established structures with options for engagement and interaction. The structure functions as a set of parameters for participants, with options and choices for interpretation and invention. In my own work, I use the term co-authorship for projects which invite participants to modify existing scores. My reference is the original Fluxus notion of “do-it-yourself” which holds that “anyone can create work from any score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways than the original composer might have done.” Interpretation of the original text or composition passes authorship to the participant as a co-author.
The collective is a group of individual subjects. (Ideally) it endorses plurality and multiplicity. As a social aggregate, the collective is a socio-political entity that suggests society as a metaphor. Interaction among members of the collective may be enacted through collaborative and co-authoring actions.
Now that the idea of co-authorship has been mentioned, another question comes to mind. Is it useful to distinguish co-authorship from collaboration? Can we see co-authorship as similar to a few artists working collaboratively in a collective or is a different type of engagement implied?
But the above question can be addressed over the course of the conversation and I will take the liberty of editing this post (about a week later) to ask a more general question that might give us some geographical perspective. Ellen, having lived across Canada, how does Saskatchewan’s new media art compare to that of other Canadian centres you’ve lived in? Do people approach it differently here? Are people as aware of it? Perhaps Michelle can address something similar about Scotland and the UK. Are there some marked differences between Europe and Canada in that respect?
Co-authorship catalyzes the creative process through shared tasks as a collective effort. It suggests a more equitable approach to production. But as a practitioner, I’m aware of the short-comings of intention. Dagmara, you mentioned the Maiakovskii’s poem project and his proposal for people to complete it as a collective effort… and that no one did. Ultimately the project is recognized as Maiakovskii’s. Do you know whether participants would have been credited publicly as co-authors? My motive in asking this question is not flippant (even though it’s an anachronism). When co-authorship is integrated into a production-in-process, what are the strictures? (How) does it affect Authorship?
Responding to the questions about linearity and complexity in games is difficult. To be honest, I can speak directly only of Chess since I have not played Go, and I find Chess complex. Both games use binary structures with two players in competition and have goals of winning. Relations between the players are necessarily antagonistic (even if friendly). The games’ ends vary in terms of clarity or ambiguity. I agree with Michelle that ambiguity and non-deterministic outcomes are preferable. They require new perspectives, analysis and interpretation. This is also the potential for the art experience.
The initial responsibility of the artist is a conceptual, technical or aesthetic inquiry or line of investigation. Because of this, the art experience will likely be limited to a small audience. Ideally (and hypothetically) , the art experience functions at multiple levels and with diverse audiences. Higher levels of sophistication reduce the membership of the audience. Victoria sculptor Mowry Baden (whose kinaesthetic, task-oriented works require physical interaction and engagement resulting in heightened sensory perception) has suggested that the true audience for any artwork consists of about 6 people.
Let me deposit some questions linking co-authorship, sophistication and complexity to accessibility. Does co-authorship increase accessibility or is co-authorship a sophisticated stance in itself? I’ve suggested that co-authorship increases equitable distribution of authority. If co-authorship can achieve a more equitable distribution of power and authority, (how) does the art experience shift?
A few years ago, I was listening to a lecture by Ed Slopek wherein he was describing some characteristics of the game of chess, and in particular, the role chess played in a performance by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, entitled Reunion, that was performed in 1968 at Ryerson University (then Ryerson Polytechnic Institute). As part of this lecture that mostly concerned itself with chess, Slopek also mentioned the ancient game of go, and outlined numerous points about the game, its strategies, and finally the concept of “good shape“.
The game of go is simple: your aim is to use your game pieces to control more of the 19 x 19 game grid than your opponent. Players attempt to gain control and remove their opponent’s stones from the board by surrounding them. According to an issue of the British Go Journal, movements that are considered to have “good shape” have some of the following criteria:
- Maximise liberties
- Maximise eye-making potential
- Keep options open
- Influence as much of the board as possible
- Deny the opponent good shape.
In the initial questions Dagmara posted for us here, she asked how interactivity affects the viewer or the artist’s position in relation to the work. Interactivity in an artwork, when it allows a depth of engagement that goes beyond a simple binary, permits viewers to utilise strategies of a sophistication and ambiguity that are on par with game strategies that would result in “good shape”. Though if the game being played in an interactive artwork is about subtlety, I imagine I would always “win”: while computers are able to humble human masters in the game of chess, due to the sophistication of go, a computer programme is unlikely to ever surpass a human go master. As a partial answer to Dagmara’s question, I would assert that interactivity changes the relationship between viewer and artist, engaging them on a continuum between high-level and low-level interaction.
This leads to me a question I hope the other participants in this conversation will also address: what level of sophistication are we participants in art experiences seeking, and is the difference between the linearity of chess and the complexity of go a useful analogy for looking at this sophistication?
Ellen, thank you for your post. I’m very interested in when you say your current interest is in challenging the participant’s lack of sanctioned options to alter the installation. This is an interesting point since most “interactive” works happen within very preset guidelines where the participant’s movements and interactions are contained within a set of parameters. As you say, this sounds like some sort of social engineering and is often the case in gaming and art. Participation as co-authorship can lead to a very different results and puts into question the artist’s sole authorship. In the case of co-authorship I think of fan sites that are initiated by people who are in some way discontented with a television series and work together to write alternate plotlines. Similarly there are parallels with those who hack computer games in order to insert their own characters or to rewrite the story.
What these new forms of co-authorship have in common is media. New media has served to promote collaborative practice in a very spontaneous way. I was recently reading about Constructivism, a movement that had utopic aspirations of bringing art into life, and came upon a quote by Tatlin who said that the only thing people can do together “is sweep the street.” Similarly I read about the Constructivist poet Maiakovskii who published a poem called “150,000,000” and encouraged people to collectively finish writing it. No one ever did. I’m curious as to what realistically motivates people to contribute and what, like Maiakovskii’s poem, is left untouched. It’s an issue that caused me some anxiety when conceiving of the 2.0 project.
In terms of your own environments, do you find people willing to engage upon invitation and are there definite limits and trepidation to their engagement? Are there certain types of people that are more likely to engage, the local art community for example?
… and thank you for initiating this conversational project, Dagmara. It’s a great forum for exchange and discussion.
Interactivity is a buzzword of new media practices. My interpretation of the term is closer to ‘active engagement’. I am interested in setting up conditions for participation as (co)authoring and dialogue.
My recent projects are multi-user new media instruments that allow for manipulation of existing sound composition or the generation of text-image graphics using physical controllers as tactile devices. The projects are collaborations between the participant and the instrument or between participants. For me, collaboration is an act of negotiation. It relates to life as a metaphor.
As I reflect critically on my past production, my expectations and priorities shift. One difference is between ‘active’ or ‘passive’ attitudes and practices. My older installations are decentred multi-media environments that propose exploration. The visitor’s experience connects essentially with the mind or simply requires physical movement through a physical and space. Participants have no (sanctioned) options to alter the installation. I am now challenging that attitude within my own production.
My current focus is in constructed situations in which visitors can participate actively as collaborators or co-authors. (Alternately, they can be spectators or listeners.) My motive is to expand levels of engagement in and through art as dialogue. New media technologies facilitate this process in part through their user interfaces. Play is an integral element of engagement as a process of discovery. I am seriously curious about how people respond in the situations I’ve constructed. Their responses allow me to assess whether my intentions have been conveyed as well as the functionality of the interfaces. I don’t insist on a prescribed response. This would be social engineering or behaviourial conformity. My inquiry is creative co-authorship as agency.
First, I’d like to thank you all for participating. This is an exciting opportunity to close the huge distances separating everyone and talk about art and culture.
My interest in bringing the three of you together was based on the fact that you are all involved in new media art that incorporates notions of interactivity and play (whether that be performative or game-like). I am interested in interactivity and play because BlackFlash 2.0 was conceived under these very premises. I use the word “play” loosely to encompass the various meanings of the term, including recreational activities to performative acts to double-entendres. While “play” has always held a role in creative practice, it may have a unique and important function in a time of interactivity that includes the internet, collaborative practice and gaming as art.
Perhaps it is a useful place to start by talking about recent work or interests and the role interactivity and play within it. My own thoughts on the topic have included a few questions. Is there a possible critical function to play? How does interactivity affect your/the artist’s position in relation to the work? Has audience participation changed or affected the way you/artists work?
BlackFlash 2.0 is proud to present our first conversation with Michelle Kasprzak and Ellen Moffat. The conversation series brings artists and thinkers from across the country together to discuss new media art practice and culture. The conversation starts in April. Stay tuned…
