Like Kate, I dislike terms like “virtual,” “cyber,” or “interactive” since they are often used uncritically and tend to allude to a simple binary between digital and non-digital.
One thing that I think is productive – or at least a topic that I’m interested in – is complicating or critiquing utopianistic and oversimplified views of technology. Technological utopianism often overlooks the raw and beautiful complexity of mundane, everyday life.
For me, tactics for rethinking this include extending communication and representation technologies beyond their normal scope or range of use. This is a way we, in Baurillard’s terms, work over the illusion. When extended to their limits, media technologies can invert themselves, which I think is nicely articulated by McLuhan through his tetrads of media.
Towards the end of his life, Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric embarked on a project to update the 1964 book Understanding Media in response to critics’ requests to provide a solid basis for his drastic and metaphoric claims; the result was Laws of Media: The New Science (1989), published by Eric eight years after Marshall’s death. The book articulated that media technologies have the potential to change in four distinct ways, and constructed a poetic four-region model to envision their concept with characteristics of obsolescence, retrieval, enhancement, and reversal. The reversal, in McLuhan’s eyes, occurs when something is pushed to its limits.
The main point of relevance to this discussion on simulations is that when mediating technologies are pushed beyond their ordinary limits, they can reverse or flip in their intent or use. The McLuhan diagram gives me a visual graph to think about how projects simultaneously amplify, invert, revive, and subsume – they swirl around and don’t simply proceed in a straight line.
When a simulation is taken beyond its role as a safe fantasy and pushed to envelop and take over reality, it becomes perverted. Problematizing a binary virtual/physical view of the world, for example, can be done by taking virtuality to an extreme. In the process, beliefs are “perverted” (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Perverting Technological Correctness, Leonardo 29:1, 1996). By taking a belief or simulation too far, it stops being a comforting diversion and flips into an absurdity, an obsession or a dark dream.
I don’t envision my work as building an alternate social space, but see it as primarily exploring the interstitial space between ordinary life and simulations of it. In the case of the OutRun project, for example, it plays within a space where reality and dream are intentionally blended, confused and blurred: the video game becomes reality and reality becomes a video game. In some ways it’s intentionally trying to create an uncanny valley between the familiar and the almost-familiar (Masahiro Mori, 1970). The “virtual” has always been with us in different forms through history and is not something unique to digital technologies. However, the continued proliferation of digital media technologies has created a lot of interesting opportunities between everyday life and representations of it.
The work that we’re doing might be thought of as exploring an in-between space, or as I’ve heard Tim Durfee refer to it as a spandrel: an in-between space that has evolved into something new. I think that artists serve as good navigators and explorers of the in-between.
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.
