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Not a show about new technology, a show about

interaction
Beryl Graham

"Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge 1990.

Games are diverting trivia ... and also a means of learning. They are about destruction
and derision but also about creation; they are about the displacement of sex and
aggression, but also provide a safe(ish) means to explore and allow intense interaction.
Maybe all games are serious? Or, as Regina Cornwell explores later in this catalogue,
maybe all seriousness is being made a game of.

It seems to have been new technologies which have rekindled the debate about games
-- brain-boilingly violent video games, fantasy role-play chat-lines, 'virtual community'
discussion groups where escapists may romp whilst actual communities crumble outside
the bedroom door. This is not, however, a show about technology, it is a show about
interaction. Interaction did not, as some believe, spring fully-formed from the thigh of a
computer nerd, but has been in existence for quite some time:

"In'ter'ac'tive (in'tér ak'tiv) adj.

1. acting upon one another.
2. (of a computer or program) characterised by or allowing immediate
two-way communication between a source of information and a user, who
can initiate or respond to queries."
Webster's Electronic Dictionary, Random House 1993

Choose Definition 1 Choose Definition 2

This might include: Ah yes, 'Interactives', including video

Dogs fighting.
Walking around a kinetic sculpture and
thinking about it from different positions,
and maybe changing your mind.
Lighting a candle and having it light your
book, and set fire to your fringe.
games, bank cash machines, some 60s
computer art, rock music CDs where you
can mix your own tracks, cars that tell you
when your seatbelt is unfastened, gallery
information points, Internet access, and
'edutainment'. Can also be used to refer to
a range of media for artworks. Bestows
'Choice'.

Having a conversation.

What definition 2 hasn't quite managed to achieve yet is the 'having a conversation': Just
as you can't have a real conversation with a sculpture neither can you have a real
conversation with a computer-based interactive artwork, however cleverly programmed.1

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One can get pleasure from having imaginary conversations with either carved stones or
computers, but what you get in fact is a greater or lesser range of choices. These
'choices' are bitingly satirised by Diller + Scofidio's Indigestion, where the crude 'A, B
and C1s' categories of social groups used by marketing folk are played out in caricatured
binary choices of class and sexuality. We choose the two protagonists and then watch
them joust, flirt and consume -- trapped within their roles and the inflexible plot-line of
screen life.

Apart from 'choice', interactivity can in general offer much to an audience; most
obviously the chance to engage physically as well as mentally with an artwork. Perhaps
too much is made of this feature of interactivity, but we do all learn through our bodies as
well as our eyes and ears. In Ann Whitehurst's NetEscape we are offered the opportunity
to physically 'put ourselves in someone else's position'. We go on a reflective journey
along floor trails and into 'inhabited' spaces -- we can interact with those who are distant
(via a computer and Web site link) or, importantly, with those who are near (via human
interaction, or the textural pleasures of paper and cloth). The body, disabled or
otherwise, is challenged by Ann Whitehurst's quirky world view, but is also at the centre
of a much higher-tech work -- Osmose, the immersive environment of Char Davies and
team. In any VR (or 'Virtual Reality') 3D environment the body of the user is necessarily
at the centre of the universe -- users are 'immersed'. In Davies work the body is perhaps
even more central, as movement through the environment is controlled not by joystick or
spurious dataglove, but by the user's own breathing, monitored by a 'vest'. We are
certainly highly engaged physically in a 'sensational' experience, but are we necessarily
more engaged mentally? Davies has started to challenge the frenetic moral vacuum of
most VR 'games' with a landscape of shimmering aesthetic and perceptual impact,
which has stimulated both ecstatic reactions and hot debate concerning representations
of nature, or artists' access to technology.

Another potential pleasure offered by interactivity is that of 'control' -- control being on a

dangerously sliding scale which could also result in displeasure for an audience.
'Control', like 'choice' depends on degree -- is the artist giving a token degree of control
which is ultimately frustrating, or giving the audience full control, in which case what is
the artist there for? Bill Seaman's many years of work with video and interactive video,
have borne fruit so that he has now hit what is, perhaps, the happy medium of the artist
as 'skilful host', creating a visual pleasure dome such as Passage Sets wherein the
audience can experiment within a firm structure of sense.

If an artist is to play 'host' with a participative artwork, then some parties are small
intimate affairs, whilst some are merrier with more. Many interactive artworks are
designed exclusively for one person at a time, which presents a challenge when showing
interactive works in conventional gallery settings. However, works also exist where
multiple users actually enhance the works, for the audience can not only interact with
artworks, but with each other too. Toshio Iwai's Resonance of 4 is an elegant persuasion
in the benefits of collaboration and co-operation, where even a bashful British audience
can interact with strangers in a state of grace.

By their very nature, most interactive works are enhanced by (or even dependant upon)
what the audience brings to them. In Jim Campbell's Hallucination the audience brings
its own presence, acting out a part in a disturbing scenario where space and time make
sense in a video world, but in no other. As in Iwai's work, the audience can enhance the
work by 'acting' collectively as well as individually. In Ritsuko Taho's Zeromorphosis:
Swans and Pigeons, a literally growing work of art, the audience actually creates the
collective artwork itself. Without participants it would only exist in a minimal form. Her
work also illustrates an important question for interaction; can the hapticity, the getting
the hands dirty, the smells and feel of earth and money, the tactile labour of making be
separated from the mental interaction of thinking what to write, to say, or to contribute?
Can you have one without the other? Much of Taho's work involves workshops with

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community groups, where the making and the considering go hand in hand, creating a
much wider interactional space than just the gallery.

There is a question, after all, as to where the interaction takes place -- between the ears;
at the end of a finger; in the lungs; in the ether, or before the artwork even enters its
finished form? Harwood's Rehearsal of Memory is based on the delicate, fraught, and
difficult interaction between himself and those with whom he was working -- residents in
a high-security mental hospital. These skills of human interaction are definitely not
sprung from nerds, but have a long history in community-based arts and activism -- skills
often not valued, recorded, or represented in gallery collections. Those who thrill to the
democratic and participative potential of 'new technology' may be genuinely unaware of
the painstaking skill-base of actual democracy and participation. The struggle to create
art in non-elitist contexts straggles from Ruskin's Victorian dream to 80s Docklands
nightmare, yet visiting California recently I was proudly shown the edifying sight of 'the
invention of community art'. Again. Likewise the 70s British burgeoning of 'community
workshops/darkrooms' was another reinvention of a wheel whose plans have been lost.
In contrast, however, the plans of high technology are meticulously recorded, untouched
by coffee stains or grubby fingers. Their sharp smooth planes promise what Matthew
2
Fuller calls the 'white flight into cyberspace' , leaving behind the messy complexities of
those who might try to continue to resolve the words 'community' and 'art'. Add the word
'technology' and perhaps we are trying to resolve the unresolvable. In what contexts is
real participation/interaction possible? We are in an art gallery. Half a mile from where I
live, only 15 percent of households have a telephone line, never mind a superhighway.

Interactive artworks present a challenge to galleries and to the audience as well as to

curators. Gallery spaces tend to need works which have wider presence than a single
screen; works which make some sense in the duration of a gallery visit; works which
change pace and textural feel; works which might appeal to different characters, from the
extrovert to the lurker. This tends to rule out many works which are certainly interactive,
even those (such as many purely Internet-based artworks) which perhaps use new
technologies in the most highly interactive ways, but nevertheless may not necessarily
have an effective gallery presence.

When presented not in 'a new technology show' but in an exhibition alongside other
media, computer-based work tends to either shout down the other works due to press
attention of the Popular variety, or to be sneered at like a gauche teenager at a family
party by press attention of the Art variety. Either way, there is some way to go before the
work becomes widely intelligible, especially when considering media such as VR which
are only just becoming accessible to a handful of artists, bestowing upon each work the
burdens of huge expectations perhaps too weighty for such young artforms.

Much interactive computer-based artwork however, is no longer a new-born artform, to

be cooed over, but a rather awkward adolescent, with some unsentimental eyes such as
Regina Cornwell's being focused upon it. The adolescent is challenging its boundaries,
whilst itself being a " 'boundary-subject' that theorist Gloria Anzaldúa calls the Mestiza,
one who lives in the borderlands and is only partially recognised by each abutting
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society" . The teenager however does have forebears, including a body of theory
concerning video installation, just now perhaps coming of age after many years of
existence, as mainstream galleries accept artists such as Bill Viola without a 'new
technology' brouhaha. Video theory provides some useful structures with which to
analyse the work, in particular the position in which the audience is placed as Narcissus,
4
gaining pleasure from the magnification of their own actions . Video theorists were also
the first to point out the gap between promise and actuality in early interactive video --
"The current romance of interactivity promises such things as being a better or more
democratic art form and/or the art form of the future ... Yet interactive videodisks only
appear to eliminate the alienation of the artist and viewer present in most avant-garde

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art." Video theory, however, cannot fully cover the range of interactive tactics now
available, and current mainstream criticism doesn't appear to have got much beyond the
recognition of interactive computer-based art as amusing cultural artefact within
6
post-modern theory .

In many ways new interactive artworks put several cats amongst the critical pigeons --
catapulting back in time perhaps rather than forward: Regina Cornwell makes reference
to Duchamp and Breton (the Dadas of all cats amongst pigeons), but there are also
other historical references which go together like an umbrella and a sewing machine:
what happens when a piece like Osmose triggers a revival of 18th-century debates on
the Arcadian landscape? What happens when, departing from the tight postmodern
theory applied to most media art, it is suggested that this work should be viewed (like
50s abstract painting) as 'what you bring to it'? What happens when Arp's research on
chance meet computer-generated randomness? What happens when 70s debate on
British community art meets more current US 'art in the public interest' and questions
7
interaction and participation?

In selecting the works I wanted to challenge the audience -- to challenge them to be

critical about what kind of interaction they are engaging in, and to compare computer
interactions with other means of interaction, and with other histories. In doing so the
exhibition perhaps raises more problems than it answers, especially about the position of
interactive artworks within conventional gallery settings. Games, according to Ellen
Dissanayake, consist of "a repeated exchange of tensions and releases". What they
have in common with art is that "both involve imagination, surprise, non-predictability
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and self-reward, and are considered biologically non-functional."

I hope that this exhibition, in combining both no-tech and high-tech artworks, might mark
a step in interactive art by starting to get serious about our games, without seeking to
nail down too harshly the enjoyable 'splatter' of a still-developing set of media. May your
rewards not always be self-rewards, and your pleasures not always be biologically
non-functional. Have serious fun.

Footnotes (click on number to go back to place in the text)

1 Any interchange approximating a real extended conversation of words would demand

real artificial intelligence from a computer -- an attribute which, despite the hype, has yet
to be arrived at. For more on tests of Artificial Intelligence including the Turing Test see:
Benjamin Woolley, (1992). Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Oxford:
Blackwell.

2 Quote from a talk at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) Terminal Futures
conference Oct 1994. 'White flight' is a US term for white (read middle class) people
leaving inner cities and heading for the suburbs, leaving the centre to the disposessed,
or empty. It creates 'the doughnut effect'. Coming to a city near you soon? Matthew
Fuller is editor of Underground.

3 Alluquère Rosanne Stone (1991). "Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary
Stories about Cyberspace". In: Michael Benedikt (ed.) Cyberspace: First Steps.
Cambridge: MIT Press.

4 Rosalind Krauss (1978) discusses this aspect in "Video: The Aesthetics of

Narcissism". In: Gregory Battcock (ed.) New Artist's Video. New York: E.P. Dutton.

5 Ann-Sargent Wooster, (1991). "Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of

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Interactivity". In: Hall and Fifer (eds.), Illuminating Video. New York: Aperture.

6 A subject I expand upon in (1996) "Playing With Yourself: Pleasure and Interactive
Art", in Jon Dovey (ed.), Fractal Dreams. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

7 Arlene Raven, (1989). Art in the Public Interest. Ann Arbor: UMI research press.

8 Ellen Dissanayake, (1974). "A hypothesis of the evolution of art from play", Leonardo,
Vol.7 No.3. 211-217.

copyright 1996 Beryl Graham and Barbican Art Gallery. Do not reproduce without
permission.

Originally published in the book: Brown, Carol and Beryl Graham (Eds.) (1996)
Serious Games. London: Barbican Art Gallery/Tyne and Wear Museums. ISBN: 0
946372 35 7

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