Introduction

The legacy of Cartesian dualism inherent in linguistic theory deeply influences current views on the relation between natural language, computer code, and the physical world. However, the oversimplified distinction between mind and body falls short of capturing the complex interaction between the material and the immaterial. In this paper, we posit a hierarchy of codes to delineate a wide spectrum of continuous materiality. Our research suggests that diagrams in architecture provide a valuable analog for approaching computer code in emergent digital systems. After commenting on the ways that Cartesian dualism continues to haunt discussions of code, we turn our attention to diagrams and design morphology. Finally we notice the implications that a material understanding of code carries for further research on the relation between human cognition and digital code. Our discussion concludes by discussing several areas that we have projected for ongoing research.

In popular culture, computer code is usually given a role that transcends the physical world. In William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk fiction Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), the ultimate expression of layered codes is the omnipotent cyberspace, which represents an ethereal escape from the filthy, hopeless ‘meat’ world. It seems just a touch revealing that in Gibson’s world where the body can be artificially modified at will, cyberspace can only be accessed through that which remains untainted – the mind.

Gibson’s choice for the brain/mind as the ultimate interface to cyberspace is not accidental. It conforms to a long tradition of Cartesian dualism, whose origin may be traced back to Plato. In this tradition, metaphysical assumptions often separate the human capacity for language from the material world. Whether one considers Saussurean linguistics, or even Shannon’s writing on information theory, much of the work that attempts to relate language to the world seems to accommodate the ghost of Cartesian dualism.

With the advent of the digital computer, Cartesian dualism has become challenged by computer code. On the one hand, computer code, relying on a complex network of the imperceptible electro-magnetic shifts, is generally regarded as immaterial. On the other hand, researchers in tangible computing demonstrate that digital media exist at the very boundary of the physical and the digital (Ullmer and Ishii, 2000). The unsettling relation between computer codes and materiality, therefore illustrates that code is by no means a self-contained language, but rather should be understood as a dynamic system intertwined with the material world.

Contrary to the legacy of Cartesian dualism inherent in popular accounts of language, the relation between natural language, computer code, and the physical world provides a basis for delineating what we call continuous materiality, that is, a wide spectrum of materiality activated by a hierarchy of codes that moves from ‘lower’ machine code to ‘higher’ readable computer languages and to codes in general (structural, legislative, social, cultural, etc.). Each level of code engages natural language and the physical world in different ways, varying from the shifting voltage of computer circuits to our everyday activity. Altogether, the hierarchy of codes constructs a field of diverse materiality that is continuous and interconnected.

The Legacy of Cartesian Dualism

For many, computer code belongs to the immaterial side of the Cartesian dichotomy. Unlike its hardware counterpart, or for that matter other physical objects, computer code is not bounded to perceivable time and space. For many, computer code only reveals itself in the momentary flickering of the screen. As implied in Cartesian dualism, it appears as if the immaterial dictates the material. Kittler observes a similar phenomenon in the very root of digital computers – the universal Turing machine, with its ability to imitate any other machine (Kittler, 2006). The abstract mathematical machine declares that ‘the eventual differences between hardware implementations do not count anymore [and that] the so-called Church-Turing hypothesis in its strongest or physical form is tantamount to declaring nature itself a universal Turing machine’. However, this spirit versus matter dichotomy ignores the complex exchange between software and the material world including hardware. Kittler’s article draws attention to the hardware because the boundary of software is always affected by the limitation of hardware. By using examples of different types of code, we argue that code is inseparable from the material world and manifests its participation in what we refer to as continuous materiality.

Computer Code and the Specter of Cartesian Dualism

Traces of the Cartesian ghost can be easily identified in places where computer codes are used. Artificial intelligence (AI) research, especially in its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, set its foundation on the Cartesian model. Often referred to by contemporary AI researchers as Good Old Fashion AI (GOFAI), this inferential paradigm of AI was built on the premise that thinking is essentially a process of immaterial symbol manipulation. For this reason, it was believed that intelligence could be simulated in computers. In effect, by drawing distinctions between an ‘internal’ mental process and ‘external’ activities in the world, the whole field of GOFAI rests on a combination of enlightenment rationalism and Cartesian dualism (Mateas, 2002; Agre, 1997; Brooks, 1991; Dreyfus, 1992). The enthusiastic attempts to teach the computer to play chess perfectly exemplify the emphasis on abstract symbol manipulation at the price of neglecting the surrounding physical world. Such an imbalance contributed to the failure of many AI projects and eventually the ‘AI winter’ in the late 1980s.

Computer code also brings romantic notions of immateriality to the aesthetics of digital art. Software art, for instance, uses codes as an expressive medium. Arguably, the code serves a more important role than the final images that it generates. Hence the aesthetics of the genre emphasizes the conceptual level of the piece more than the perceivable properties of the artifact. It is not accidental that many software art works are based on mathematically inspired algorithms. Their often geometric output lends itself to a math-like immaterial aesthetics of abstraction, precision and elegance. Software artists sometimes trace their heritage to conceptual art, another art movement that refuses a material-based aesthetics. The idea or concept and its (sometimes mental) execution are the central element of conceptual art pieces. For example, an influential conceptual art piece, La Monte Young’s Compositions 1960, only consists of one line of instruction: ‘draw a straight line and follow it’.

Fortunately, significant effort has been directed towards linking the physical and digital world. In the 1990s, a new paradigm of AI called the Interactionist AI was established by leading researchers such as Rodney Brooks. Compared to GOFAI, the new paradigm paid much closer attention to interacting with the physical world than to modeling and formalizing it symbolically. Meanwhile, Tangible Computer researchers demonstrated that the tangible user interface, and digital media in general, exist at the very boundary of the physical and the digital (Ullmer and Ishii, 2000). Essentially, the claim they make is very similar to Kittler’s – namely that code can never be separated completely from the hardware/interface that makes it possible for humans to author, perceive and interact with code.

Computer Code, Natural Language and Materiality

Natural language has struggled with its relation to the physical world for a very long time. In her latest book My Mother Was a Computer: digital subjects and literary texts, N. Katherine Hayles criticizes the dominant western position found in the study of literary texts (Hayles, 2005). Again and again Platonic, antirealist positions assert themselves for they ‘focus almost exclusively on linguistic codes, a focus that allows them to leave the document as a physical artifact out of consideration’ (Hayles, 2005: 96). Text, as Hayles points out, is more than merely linguistic code. For example, in a website devoted to William Blake, the editors tried their best to preserve the physical characteristics of a text, including page size, typeface, margin, etc. because of their strong belief that materiality potentially affects meaning: ‘The editors make canny use of the computer’s simulation powers to render the screen display as much like the printed book as possible. They provide a calibration applet that lets users set screen resolution so the original page dimensions can be reproduced. They include a graphical help section that uses illustrations of pages to indicate the site’s functionalities and capabilities’ (Hayles, 2005: 90).

Besides being an interesting alternative to the immaterial reading of the text, the Blake Archive Project more importantly invites us to ponder whether our understanding of materiality is confined within a physical-based understanding of materiality. The lessons from literary study are relevant here. Hayles argues that our understanding of materiality, in the transition from print to electronic text, needs to be expanded beyond mere physicality to accommodate the new praxis brought about by digital technologies. She proposes that ‘[t]he materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies. Materiality thus marks a junction between physical reality and human intention’ (2005: 103). The ‘material’ argument made by Hayles has implications that extend far beyond the recovery of materiality understood within textual criticism. It asks that just as literary scholars have given attention to the physical transmission of texts, they now are learning to give attention to their digital transmission as well. The interaction of codes and symbolic systems recognizes the role of semiotic theory but in a way that emphasizes the critical importance of movement across different codes. Together our work anticipates a new comparative study of codes and their integration.

Consideration of the materiality of computer code must be considered together with their connection to natural language. We would like to use AI as a departure point for this discussion. AI researcher and critic Agre pointed out that much of the public and philosophical debate regarding AI was surrounded by the seemingly fundamental question of ‘can machines think?’ (Agre, 1997). Yet, that said, the actual practice in the field was hardly dependent on the answer to such questions. In day to day research, what really matters is the effort to build computer systems whose operations can be narrated using intentional vocabularies, such as reasoning, planning, learning and strategizing. These key AI terms, however, are simultaneously vague and formal. The meaning of planning, for instance, when used to describe the behavior of a system, depends partially upon the practitioner’s sense of the vernacular meaning of the word. On the other hand, it is only possible to ascribe the term to system behavior if the term is formally defined in regard to mathematical entities or computational structures and processes. It is precisely what we may think of as the ‘hermeneutical circle of AI’ that allows the AI narratives to be built, simultaneously revealing that computer code cannot exist without connection to natural language and to the materiality of the world.

A similar conclusion is reached by another AI researcher Michael Mateas (2002), who identifies two inseparable elements of any AI system – a code machine and a rhetorical machine. In his framework, the code machine of an AI system lends itself to the actual ‘uninterpreted’ computation and the complex causal flows, whereas the rhetorical machine provides both programmers and audiences discursive strategies to interpret the complex computation and definitions of progress within the system: ‘The rhetorical strategies used to narrate the operation of an AI system vary depending on the technical approach, precisely because these interpretative strategies are inextricably part of the approach. Every system is doubled, consisting of both a computational and rhetorical machine. Doubled machines can be understood as the interaction of (at least) two sign systems, the sign system of the code, and a sign system used to interpret and talk about the code’ (Mateas, 2002). With the discursive elements provided by the rhetorical machine, it becomes possible to attribute intelligence to an AI system. Both Agre’s analysis of the ambiguous AI key terms and Mateas’s double machine may be applied to computer codes in general. Even the simplest command to write a line on the screen contains such natural language vocabularies as ‘print’ which was and remains heavily associated with the experience of the physical world. In other words, computer code and its rhetorical context are heavily related to natural language and our embodied experience of the physical world.

So far, we have noted cases in which Cartesian dualism fails to capture the intricate interaction between the material and the immaterial. The complex relationship among natural language, artificial computer code and the physical world opens the door to the delineation of a continuous materiality, activated by a hierarchy of codes from ‘lower’ machine code to ‘higher’ level computer languages and to codes in general (legislative, structural, social, etc.) Each level of code engages natural language and the physical world in different ways, varying from the shifting voltage of computer circuits to our daily activity. When considered together, a hierarchy of codes constructs a field of diverse materiality that is continuous and interconnected. In the next section, we look at the use of diagrams in architecture to reveals the ways in which a hierarchy of codes is embedded in a spectrum of materiality.

Diagrams and the Hierarchy of Codes

Considering how much work has gone into the study of diagrams in architecture, the place of diagrams within architectural theory and practice still remains somewhat allusive. After all, what relation do they have to sketches, plans, construction or building codes? Or is it not so much the single diagram but the linkages that they engender that mark the genealogical nature of diagrams? As visual containers of a hierarchy of codes, diagrams negotiate the space between the semiotic system and the physical world in a similar way to computer codes. Diagrams engage not simply a horizon of understanding but a terrain in which structures literally appear in the world. If we are to think about diagrams closely, we must do more than simply mark their presence. Instead we should register their cognitive significance as they direct work and establish networks of relationships between multiple symbolic fields. Diagrams are important, and indeed so much so, that rather than drifting within a hermeneutical setting they should be approached as vehicles for accessing a hierarchy of codes within a material setting. In effect, schools of architecture as well as computer science might become more recognized as laboratories for exploring material cognition and its bearing on the ways we approach technology. The question of diagrams in technology is important for as genealogical structures they can reveal the theoretical grammars and social codes used to enforce them. From a sociological perspective, diagrams might be thought of as comprising the circuit system of networks. The layered hierarchy of codes may also be demonstrated in the ways that diagrams are used within design morphology in architectural practice. Here diagrams are not fixed but transient moments in an emergent material practice.

Diagrams and Cognition

The ways in which diagrams manifest meaning is in ample evidence in the daily practice of architecture even though the graphic diagrammatic operations through which architecture is taught and thought are often pushed to the margins of its history. Our scientific conception of space just as our architectural formulation of space is thoroughly mediated by diagrams. A broad distinction can be made between ephemeral and professional applications. Doodling on a napkin is in a category separate from the diagrams of textbook traditions. Even here, however, it is not possible to make a rigorous distinction. Casual or formal, any diagram instantiates a set of codes – whether the Euclidean laws of geometry or fire codes regulating building structures. Diagrams hardly stand as isolated figures but are placed within a narrative setting. Along with the layers of code they incorporate, they become – or are intended to become – part of a structured argument. We may think of architecture as a process of building logical modalities that entail the representation of diagrammatic space. Diagrams thus offer the thinking space that connects to the physical world in various ways – either the earliest stages of design or, in the retrospective clarification of design aims that become crystallized at the later stages of design, or even after the completion of the building.

From the vantage point of phenomenology or cognitive science, diagrams have an optical foundation because they suggest the ways in which connections are made within a visual field. It is their optical foundation that also affirms their haptic role as recorders of operations such as drawing, tracing or plotting. But we may also identify a linguistic orientation in which the visual field is shaped from the vantage point of grammatical or lexical structures. Diagrams may mark a way to follow the body into language and even more a way to follow language into the spatial experience of the body. Historically, it is possible to relate the dissemination of the idea of diagram to optical geometry. It is quite appropriate to think of diagrams as being constituent features in the process of perception analyzed by Locke or as the instrumental figures that Hume describes in the evolution of the thought process (Locke, 1959).

Diagrams are phenomenological agents within the cognitive process and work as elemental mental constructions that enable us to hypothesize about the world. Multiple valences surround the word diagram or diagramma in Greek. The root verb of diagramma means not simply something which is marked out by lines, a figure, form, or plan, but also carries a connotation of marking or crossing out. In contemporary Greek the verb diagrapho, [noun diagraphe] means to write someone off. The verb may also be used to describe the movement of planets in the sense in which their movement may be thought of as ‘inscribed’ in the heavens or ‘reinscribed’ in subsequent orbits. In such a setting, the word diagramma suggests planetary trajectories that ‘write over’ themselves in each orbit. The word is also used to mark the transitory figures written on a wax tablet with a stylus. Here the word diagramma literally suggests that diagrams emerge from diagrams. The definition of diagram as well as its etymology is useful because it reminds us that diagrams are part of an evolving cognitive continuum.

Diagrams and Emergence

Diagrams point toward the technologies of emergence which can be enacted in the world. We need to think of technology as a continuous set of interactions with signs that become increasingly reified. The diagram is an important mark within the genealogies of sign systems. The point we would make is that technology should be regarded not as a jump from an idea to an artifact but as a complex process of increasingly complex sign systems. One way to enter this zone is to approach diagrams as vehicles that register a process of becoming.

Emergence is a concept that describes unexpected discoveries, emergent phenomena, or global behavior rising from the conjunction of local behavior or local conditions (Wilson and Frank, 1999: 964). Drawn from AI and biological theory, emergence describes non-deterministic, self-organizing phenomena that arise from local interaction between low-level units within a system. The design practice is less an isolated set of steps than a phenomenological assembly of code. When regarded together, such an assemblage compiles an emergent process (Poon and Maher, 1997). What is of utmost importance is that the ways emergence has been incorporated by creative design calls attention to the limitations of linear, formalist models of design. More precisely, the artificial application of the concept of emergence to architecture, reminds us that a connection between design cognition and the organization of living systems is absolutely crucial. Rather than abandoning an idea of emergence, we would like to argue that instead of modeling emergence through linear genetic algorithms, we seek its force through a theory of self-organization.

Diagrams are central to a theory of emergence. Our point is not the naïve argument that a single rational continuum of diagrams moves from idea to structure but that the relationship of imagination, shape-logic and building is one that is repeatedly negotiated through diagrams accompanied by speech. From a philosophical vantage point, there is not a single rational continuum (Descartes) but an infinite number of possible connections (Leibniz). Diagrams not only participate in building design but mark the regulation of building construction. But no matter how formulated they are, they can always be written over marking a moment of change. What is important is that diagrams don’t work by themselves. They constitute what we may think of as diagrammatic genealogies that participate in the material construction of a building. They also constitute a time line which orders the ganglia of construction. What is also interesting is that the design process continues into the construction phase. The collection of diagrams then becomes not simply an archive but a genealogy of building construction. What once described where to place electrical outlets becomes a diagram that helps in locating an electrical outlet. Diagrams participate in the shift from construction to maintenance. This is not insignificant but represents diagram as vital component that stages moments in the construction process. Where the design stage authorizes multiple narrative tangents, the construction stage works to integrate diagrams into a common narrative. There are multiple practical levels in which diagrams participate in an emergent material practice.

Diagrams and Computer Codes

The iterative use of diagrams within architectural design and construction coincides with the iterative use of code in digital practice. Here diagrams reveal an instrumentality that permits them to move from being agents that negotiate space to be instruments that manipulate space. The capacity of diagrams both to work as heuristic vehicles in the process of design and to dictate how something is to be constructed reinforces the diagrammatic continuum within architecture theory and practice.

From the vantage point of semiotics, diagrams mark a locus where there is a continuous set of exchanges between signifier and signified – a bundling of systems of signification – and where the structure becomes a sign or referent in its own right and where its existence does not depend on the word as signifier. Diagrams establish networks of relationships between multiple symbolic fields. Computer code, particularly when it is approached within an evolving spectrum of code, also works to connect multiple symbolic fields. The comparison may be expanded. Both the diagram and code may be viewed as governed by rules. However both may be approached as vehicles for discovery and invention. Obviously, both diagrams and code are rule-bound. However, both may be used to break rules when they are placed in another context. But far more than simply the logical setting in which they are placed, we would like to emphasize that they both function as mediators to the material world. It is their role in material mediation that is worth looking at more closely. Rather than rendering such a role invisible, we would ask what it means to call attention to materiality. As we noticed in our earlier reference to Hayles, we must ask questions that do more than call attention to a digital textuality.

Computer code as well as diagrams may be viewed as either rule-bound or rule-breaking. The disruption associated with each is hardly a mystical process but an act of projection or even translation. Both diagram and code mark moments of stability and disruption. Such disruption, however, does not mean the absence of rules but rather the movement to another stage of development. Within code practice, the discovery of a new syntactical order may mark such a development. In both the case of diagram and code, one is hardly engaged simply in the creation of a new order. Instead, the new order challenges a new set of translations.

Integration and the Hierarchy of Codes

Architecture provides a laboratory for integrating a hierarchy of codes into a continuous materiality. From the moment that a design begins, it undergoes a process through which codes, aesthetic, structural, civil and social are incorporated and materialized. Even a roughest sketch embodies the aesthetic codes that influence the spatial volumetric and visual design decisions made by the architect. As building continues to be further materialized as more detailed drafts, physical models, CAD drawings, construction drawings and eventually the physical structure, codes at all levels are mingled in a process that is material and continuous. Such continuous materiality covers a wide spectrum includes the modestly materialized concept, the 3D rendering of the structure in the AutoCAD software, and the fully constructed building. A hierarchy of codes manifests itself even through the most mundane object in the building. A power outlet on the wall, for example, speaks to many layers of code. The electrical voltage running through it and its connection to other electrical systems in the building are regulated by electrical, safety and regional codes. Additionally, its spatial location obeys social codes, and its material and color are chosen based on aesthetic and economic codes.

Strategies for Approaching the Material Integration of Code

Evolutionary design has constituted an important component in design research in the last decade. Its application comprises the use of various techniques of evolutionary computation or artificial intelligence to generate design solutions (Mitchell, 1996: 205). Overall, methodology consists in the use of algorithms to increase and optimize the design-solution space. The approach – based on what is known as the neo Darwinist model – combines ideas from genetic theory from Mendel and evolution theory from Darwin to explain processes of natural evolution (Frazer, 1995: 128). By using genetic algorithms and neural networks, evolutionary design integrates the idea of genetic coding with the definition of an artifact’s structure (Holland, 1998: 58; Stiny, 1980). Shape grammar has been used to analyze and to describe designs, and to produce variations based on the same grammar (Stiny, 1994). Underlying the rules are transformations that permit one shape to be part of another.

But evolutionary design models seldom give attention to an evolving idea of code itself. Instead, these models identify an evolutionary process that relies on a metaphor of development. The work of Edelman postulates a far more literal application of neo-Darwinism to the evolution of the brain and finally to consciousness itself (Edelman, 2006). Edelman’s work is important because it posits an important expectation. Even though the brain is not a computer, its electro-chemical complexity inevitably becomes analyzed through the application of heuristic codes. The biological and so-called artificial codes do not have a one to one identity for the important reason that one is infinitely more complex than the other. At the same time, however, the biological and artificial codes are conceived as belonging to a material spectrum that we have referred to as continuous materiality. Edelman’s work may be mapped in relation to Varela and Maturana. In contrast to Edelman’s biological empiricism that focuses attention on neurophysiology (with the assumption that such a neural-physiology has universal applicability) Varela and Maturana stress the importance of approaching cognition as distributed.

The theory of autopoiesis, proposed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1970, argues that a living system embodies a continuous process of self-organization and emergence (Maturana, 1980). According to Maturana and Varela, living systems are self-producing systems. In contrast to assumptions that viewed living systems as generators of something different from themselves, autopoiesis approached systems as simultaneously producers and products. Since an autopoietic system is organized as a network of processes of production that ultimately produce the system itself, they could claim that cognition was intimately linked to biological phenomena. Acting as a network of processes, the autopoietic system bears two distinct consequences. In the first, organization is understood as a network of production that makes the system possible; in the second, a particular structure constitutes a distinguishable component in the topology of the network (Thacker, 2004). Overall, organization determines the identity of a system, whereas structure determines how its parts are physically articulated. Organization identifies a system and corresponds to its general configuration. Structure shows the way parts interconnect.

Varela and Maturana have provided ground for approaching the constitution of design through cognition that is distributed or socially situated rather than dissecting the condition of one artifact in order to seek its replication through genetic code or grammar manipulation. It is through such a process that we may locate the hierarchy of code and continuous materiality. The hierarchy of codes rendered visible through digital media has an ontological status that may accurately be described as continuous materiality. A theory of continuous materiality bears consequences for Cartesian dualism but also for our understanding of the ways in which ‘writing’ has become transformed and expanded within digital media to include new ontologies of building and making.

The biological model proposed by Edelman and Varela and Maturana carry important consequences for computer code. By stressing the impossibility of making a direct correspondence between the brain and the computer, they recognize the ways in which code is part of a material process. Code cannot be isolated but participates in a complex interaction with other codes that are both biological and technological. Finally, they propose a means for asking if the generation of code that is tested by the human community is not a fundamental element of human identity. Contrary to Cartesian traditions that would situate the impulse to code in metaphysics, they locate code in the evolution of material condition.

Morphology of Computer Code

Our previous discussion has shown some of the ways diagrams provide access to design morphology and also establishes a basis for asking whether we may also speak of a morphology of code. There is ample reason to consider a morphology of code. Such a morphology, however, must not assume or posit the presence of a single-master code. Instead there are multiple codes that continue to interact and alter each other. It would appear that narrative forms themselves are examples of the morphological change of codes. The argument made by Mark Turner and others regarding conceptual blending describes the experience of multiple interacting codes (Fauconnier and Turner, 2003). Such integration then becomes manifest in narrative forms (stories) and to their evolving forms. But here we must also recognize that we use hierarchy to describe simple relationships. Beyond the computer, the linearity indicated by hierarchy may be replaced by an idea of non-linear integration. Hierarchy pertains not to a rigid command-control model but to a layered understanding of codes that describes continuous interaction.

The challenge of continuous materiality

Maturana and Varela provided an important point of departure for approaching self-organizing systems. But Edelman and others have extended this work through neural-physiology that seeks to integrate codes with biological structures. Just as there is a material continuum between biological processes with the individual, there is a continuum that involves the human community. We are at a point where it is possible to remove mysticism and ‘spookiness’ from these relations as a default condition or challenged to comprehend that the impulse to the metaphysical is inherent in the spectrum of materiality and the interaction of codes.

As a biologically grounded viewpoint, continuous materiality attests to a material connection between our mental activity and the world in which we live. The material connection may be intuited but, at a fundamental level, it becomes comprehended through the codes that humans have created. While codes change – and may be said to be evolutionary themselves – they are the material manifestation of human self-reflexivity that must be understood within a community. Individual codes, of course, are continually projected and subjectively tested. Finally, however, it is the function of code to be shared and tested. It is not far fetched to think that the making and testing of code marks the way that we attest to our common humanity. The Kantian a priori of space and time are not only posited as a ground for shared experience but manifest our interaction with code. Codes are patterns or sequences discovered or invented by humans to provide access to natural phenomena. They include logical codes but also include chemical chains or evolving interactions. The notion of continuous materiality posits a coherent, albeit complex, relation-connection between the human body, brain, and nature. Continuous materiality becomes understood as a continuum that includes mental experiences associated with consciousness.

The emphasis that we have given to the materiality of code and to the place of code in a material continuum allows us to make several comments about the status of digital artifacts. The integration of material code with design morphology offers multiple examples of the ways ‘making and building’ occur within settings of digital technology. By referring to ‘building and making’, we have in mind the ways in which working with digital technology can be accompanied by the sense that one has made or constructed something that has a presence that extends beyond its virtual presence on the computer screen. While such experiences may be associated with the manipulation of visual images on the computer screen, such experience by no means should be limited to vision. The broadly shared experience of ‘building or making’ something that is virtual rather than real – say of making a digital model of building rather than a physical model – has broad implications. Although the computer continues to be celebrated as a writing medium, there is a broad recognition that computer have inaugurated an era that is increasingly reliant on shaping visual information. The new iconicity enabled by computers may also be associated with a corresponding emphasize in orality. It would seem that the experience of ‘making and building’ within digital environments must be closely related to the emergence of new ontological experience. Digital media has surrounded us with new ontologies of building and making that require new conceptual phenomenologies. If we approach digital technology only through romantic notions of immateriality or of some ethereal half-life or isolated in between state removed or ever at a distance from the ‘real world’, we will continue to ascribe to a simplistic realism that bogs down in neo-Cartesian distinctions that create an illusion of separateness. We require a critical vocabulary that allows us to comprehend the ways in which we inhabit a continuum of codes. Inherent in the multiple codes through which we mediate our experience is an expectation that it will be possible to move quickly from one to the other. Indeed, it is increasingly the very objective of education to build settings where students may develop agility for code-switching.

The new ontologies of building and making bear an active rather than passive force. From the vantage point of hermeneutics, the very idea of interpretation becomes transformed from a passive response to an active engagement in making something in the space of a potentially unlimited number of screens. Rather than translating a code into another code for human reception, interpretation itself becomes an act of intervention. We may even wonder at the ways in which the passive hermeneutic analysis of late twentieth-century literary theory has shifted toward an active hermeneutic of digital technology. If we wish may even think of reader-response theory as a practice that emphasized the active importance of the reader in the constitution of the text. In the schema we are describing, the reader does not reassemble a text but instead works toward the constitution of objects. The ways digital media intensifies the experience of invention has been commented on by many theorists. For example, Barbara Stafford has argued with precision that the active force inherent in the ways we work with digital media requires a significant adjustment in the ways we integrate word and image. More specifically she has argued most recently for a more articulate cognitive practice to account for the ways in which we negotiate meaning through visualization (Stafford, 2007). Stafford’s argument resonates with the shift toward materiality observed in N. Katherine Hayles’s argument noted above. Both observe that the texture of discourse has changed in a material sense that is profound. For both Stafford and Hayles text no longer carries the assumption of something written in natural language or presented through iconic tradition.

Conclusion

We have used the term continuous materiality as a means exploring the materiality of computer code. We have done so because it reminds us that computer code is never isolated but always interacts with other codes. Considered together such codes – a hierarchy of codes – constitute an evolutionary spectrum. We have also noticed that a hierarchy of codes may be usefully compared to diagrams. In addition, we have suggested that just as diagrams provide a valuable means for approaching design morphology in architecture, they offer a means of posing questions about a morphology of code. Finally, we have observed that a morphology of code may be situated in the biological and neural-physiological work of Edelman, Varela and Maturana. In a paper where much has been suggested about evolving processes within a material continuum, it is appropriate to conclude by recognize the degree to which this paper itself manifests itself a continuum of ongoing development. An important way to attest to the evolving nature of our thinking may be to recognize several questions that continue to occupy our own evolving work.

Of course, the entire question of the ontology of digital objects can be considered more extensively. What is striking is the way in which such research could draw on an evolving understanding of the technological process. Rather than making a radical distinction between making virtual digital artifacts and so-called real objects in the world, it is reasonable to approach each within a process of design. Once again architecture provides an important laboratory for such research. The development of multiple generations of CAD assisted design has registered stages in the design process that otherwise might be regarded as part of inspiration. Let us be very clear. While inspiration may well exist a material understanding of design morphology may help in defining more precise how the designer works within such an evolving process of design. Inspiration may be an abbreviated way of describing the complex interaction of material codes.

The omnipresence of digital technology challenges us not to mystify technology or ideas of code. On the contrary, the emergence of these new technologies over the past decades must not be met with ignorance of code and its essential presence. Rather than isolating code and rendering it invisible, computer code should be approached as part of an evolving network of interrelated codes. Such engagement, involving the active exploration of the relation between neurophysiology and code is facilitated by an idea of continuous materiality.

Acknowledgments

The term ‘continuous materiality’ was suggested by discussion with our colleague Sha Xin Wei (Concordia University). We also recognize the contributions of our colleague Eduardo Lyon from the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology to the discussion of architecture and design. An earlier paper by K. Knoespel and E. Lyon provided valuable orientation for this paper.
Authors’ Biographies

Kenneth J. Knoespel is McEver Professor of Engineering and the Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech and Chair of the School of Literature, Communication. In addition to recent work on cognition and visual practice in mathematics and architecture, he has worked on changing visual practices of interpretation within the natural and human sciences. He recently edited a collection of essays on Diagrams and the Anthropology of Space. In addition to his work for the Graduate Program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, he has regularly taught a graduate seminar in the College of Architecture with his colleague John Peponis devoted to “The Spatial Construction of Meaning.” Work from their seminar has been presented in Greece, Italy, France, England, and Denmark. In Sweden and Russia, he has worked closely with the University of Uppsala, The Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers Institute of Technology, Blekinge University, the European University of St. Petersburg, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is currently working on a project concerned with cities and landscape of the Baltic Sea.

Jichen Zhu is a PhD student in the Digital Media program in School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab, with a focus on Expressive Artificial Intelligence. Jichen is interested in understanding computational technologies, AI in particular, from a social and cultural perspective, and exploring the expressive and subjective use of digital media. She holds a Master’s degree in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Architecture from McGill University, Canada.

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Introduction

Retro games. Simultaneously with the console and computer games becoming increasingly impressive both visually and in their dramatics, the old, simple Super Mario Bros, Pacmans and Donkey Kongs have become hits. In the rush hour buses, teenagers roll their Rubik’s cube – the one and only.
Sanna Leskinen, ‘Mikä mahtaa olla in?’ (‘What would be in?’), Yhteishyvä 3/2006.

At the end of the year 2005 the Finnish commercial TV channel MTV3 freshened their appearance. The owl logo of the company, which has been in use for a long time, bended again into new shapes. The owl lived on as a animated figure, who offers services and, particularly, as a stylized eye in the channel sign logos. The sign themes marking the beginnings and endings of commercial breaks place the owl eye into new, culturally recognizable situations, which try to achieve comedy and inventiveness. The owl eye is not just an eye anymore, but appears on screen as a figure varying its forms and roles (see Figure 1).

The new owl animations of the MTV3 commercial breaks have, for example, been associated with seasonal festivals and sports, but we can also find indications of the gaming culture. In one of the first commercial break signs a Pong game, a sort of electric ping pong, in which pixel rackets bounce a virtual ball, was being played. Later in the spring of 2006, the logo chased pills reminiscent of the coin up machines of the Namco company and the videogame character Pac-Man from the early 1980s.

Figure 1. MTV3 commercial break emblem, referring to Pac-Man, 2006.

Even though both themes have been drawn away from the original, many of us can recognize their intermedial reference to 1970’s and 1980’s game classics.[1] Images and sounds from the central features of Pac-Man and Pong have sort of eaten their way into our retina and eardrums. This has taken place due to the fact that they are both among the most recycled games from one device to another. Pong became familiar in the early 1970s arcade games and the late 1970s TV games that spread into households.

The importance of Pong has been acknowledged in research and in (semi-)popular literature. In Joystick Nation, which praises the history of games, J.C. Hertz (1997: 14) names the earliest gaming eras as ‘The Pre-Pong Era’ (–1972), and ‘The Pong Era’ (1972–1977), which signifies when the game in question grows to symbolize a whole era of electronic gaming and appears as a central element in the critical period of the gaming culture. Pac-Man, on the other hand, is mentioned in many works concerning the history of electronic gaming as an early personalized videogame character, followed later by characters such as Donkey Kong, Mario and Lara Croft. According to some texts, Pac-Man attracted an increasing number of female gamers into gaming and was conducive to the birth of a whole new game type, the maze. At the beginning of the 1980s Pac-Man spread from arcade halls into home computers, became popular on various consumer goods from back-packs to pillow cases, and was referred to in magazine articles, television shows and pop music hits (Herz, 1997; Malliet and de Meyer, 2005; Kent, 2001) (See also Figures 2, 3, and 8).

In no time the yellow Pac-Man character and icon became a sign for the aesthetic digital style of a particular period. It still remains as such, as it appears continuously in new game products and popular culture, e.g. in music and cartoons. According to a study which included a survey concerning the computer memories of Finnish people, it is Pac-Man that stands out as one of the most familiar and best-remembered old games among over 30–year-olds (Aaltonen, 2004).

The examples above show how the cultural history of games is present even today. They reveal how the cultural history of games is bending into new shapes and how this thematic recycling is used to gain commercial benefits. Therefore, I argue in this paper that these examples in gaming prove three things: 1) digital culture as a whole is evolving and maturing, 2) one future trend in gaming and digital culture is recycling the past, and 3) for these reasons digital culture as an academic discipline should become even more conscious of aspects of the cultural heritage of technology. In this paper I analyze different aspects of retrogaming in the historical context, looking for answers to the following interconnected questions: Does the change in the computer user groups and gamers explain why retrogaming has become more popular, or why retrogaming as a cultural phenomenon has expanded? Has retrogaming had an influence on the contents of games and the appreciation of gaming? What sorts of different hobbies are associated with retrogaming? How has the increasing interest in retrogaming been used, then, for financial gain? Finally, I discuss how familiarity and nostalgic interest in older technology is incorporated into technological change and innovation.

The Cultures of History Within Gaming

Pac-Man and Pong bring out some features of the gaming culture within the cultures of history. The cultures of history mean the ways of producing and using artifacts, images and information concerning the past. Cultures of history are a kind of modern culture, which takes form from the ways of encountering the past, from traditions, events and the meanings given to the past (Koselleck, 1985; Salmi, 2004; Sivula and Suominen, 2004).

Cultural historian Hannu Salmi (2004) distinguishes five ways or means by which the past is among us in the present-day. The past appears as memory, experience, customs, artifacts and commodities. As for the cultures of history within the games, the past is present in a person’s own memories of playing, and, among other things, in the collective memory represented on the Internet and on-line discussion forums. The experience of the history of culture is present, for example, when we play both familiar and new games: we take advantage of our earlier gaming experiences in new gaming situations, because we have learned to recognize the logic, rules, plots and actions associated with the games. Our earlier gaming experiences have taught us to act in a certain way when playing. On the other hand, our earlier experiences have an influence on how we return to familiar games or how we choose new games to play. At this point we can already talk about the customs of the cultures of history in gaming. The customs include the conventionalized habits and routines to play either alone or together, and the tendency to return over and over again to play old games, especially computer games from the 80s (so-called retrogaming), or to purchase familiar games for new gaming devices such as Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox360. The artifacts connected with the cultural history of games are, for instance, the famous and somehow special game devices and games such as the first coin-up games or home consoles, now presented in museums and private collections. The line between the artifacts and commodities becomes less clear when old devices and game software are bought and sold at Internet auction sites. Various music videos, works of art, books and new editions and revisions of old game products (for instance being bought in online shops for the new generation consoles such as Nintendo Wii and Xbox360) – in some degree commercials as well – are also commodities of the cultures of history (Sivula and Suominen, 2004).

Figure 2. Pac-Man softie toy top of Atari ST512 computer. Photo taken in 2007 by Jaakko Suominen.

The past culture of games, in its many forms, is very central in gaming culture today. James Newman (2004) also draws attention to this fact in his recently published textbook on digital gaming. In a chapter on future gaming Newman mentions three modern trends in gaming: mobile games, on-line games and retrogaming. Thus, a strong rising trend in future gaming in different situations and platforms is the re-use of the old. Newman refers to retrogaming at two levels: firstly, retrogaming means present-day gaming with the genuine, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s game devices and applications. Secondly, it means the use of emulators in playing the games. On the other hand, Petri Saarikoski (2004: 254), who has studied the history of computer hobbyist cultures in Finland, defines retrogaming somewhat more broadly as a general term for subcultures that appreciate old computer games. This phenomenon includes collecting old games and game devices as well as their active playing. Both scholars see retrogaming as a form of gaming culture that is partly marginal but which is emerging to become more common. Typically the current retrogaming refers particularly to the usage of game devices that were used before personal computers (common since the early 1990’s).

According to Newman, retrogaming has, among other things, been advertised as a return to pure, genuine or authentic gaming, and based on Newman’s interpretation one can come to a conclusion: that the idea of retrogaming is a situation in which everything superfluous has been eliminated. We have witnessed a return to the origins, where pleasure and playability are attained with simple facts and where the use of capacity is maximized. This idea has been crystallized, for instance, in a fragment of a review by JP Tiira in the Finnish Pelit-magazine (1992): ‘When we were kids and (Commodore) sixty-four was dynamite, numerous role-playing games were packed into the memory of the old warhorse (…), the secret lay under the cover: the games had that something, which created the genuine feeling of search and adventure, in spite of its usually quite simple graphics’ (Saarikoski, 2004).

The word retro, which originates from Latin, refers to a return, a comeback, or something repetitive. Therefore retrogaming hints usually – but not always – at returning, whether it means the consumer’s return or retrogression to childhood, or an intention to (re-)achieve something pure or preferable. It means, most likely, both seeking and yearning for an acquainted set of rules and familiar fictional worlds (Juul, 2006).

As a phenomenon, retrogaming is, however, more complicated than a particular modern trend or a return to something, and the aim of this paper is to widen the interpretations of other scholars concerning the meaning of retrogaming. In the next chapter, I will begin with a critical transcription of retrogaming by examining questions of gamers’ ages in relation to their interest in older games and gaming devices.

Middle-Aged Juveniles – Is The Maturation Of Gamers An Explanation For Retrogaming Fashion?

Statistics Finland published a new leisure survey in 2005 which included the consumption of rock music among the middle-aged. Rock, initially a youth culture, has aged with its performers as well as with its consumers. While in 1981 only some 10 percent of 35–44-year-old Finns declared that they listened to rock music, by 2002 this figure rose to 70 percent (Ekholm, 2005). Increasingly, the older age groups also collect records and are more likely to go to rock concerts or play an instrument. Old artists and music records are still popular along with the new ones.

One can find a parallel between rock music and digital games as forms of popular culture. Similar middle-ageing can be seen in digital gaming culture, which is probably one reason for the continuous interest towards older gaming products. A good number of those who started to play digital games in the 1980s have not, or at least not entirely, given up on playing games at an older age. According to many statistics, especially the ones introduced by the representatives of the gaming industry, the average age of computer and other digital gamers is on the rise. In 2003 the average age of gamers, according to the organization representing the game manufacturers of the USA (Entertainment Software Association, ESA), was 28 years, and over 40 percent of the gamers were women. According to the same organization, over 35-year-olds are the most eager age group to play PC games and people under 35 years favor console games most strongly. In Japan, adult gaming may be even more common, especially in age groups under 35 years. In Finland, the situation is probably similar to that of the United States and Japan, even though the national and regional differences should not be overlooked and any generalizations of the situation should not be done without accurate data. According to the Statistics Finland leisure survey in 2002, a little over 60 percent of 15–34-year-old people used the computer to play games, some 30 percent played with game devices (i.e. game consoles), and about 20 percent often played with a computer or a game machine (Melkas, 2005). Particularly during the past ten years, the devices used in digital gaming have been established as an essential part of Finnish households.

The previous statistics should be studied critically. As the game researcher Markku Eskelinen (2005) states in his report concerning the game industry, observations about the expansion of the field of gamers can be applied to the game industry itself. In Eskelinen’s opinion, the statistical argument regarding the equality between the sexes and across generations fits nicely with the ideal self-image of the game industry. In particular, the statistics presented by various special-interest groups of the game industry do not exactly inform us about how gamers differ from each other (Eskelinen, 2005). For example, according to many independent studies, young boys spend significantly more time playing games and talking about them than young girls do (Suoninen, 2002; Melkas, 2005). Age and the level of education are also important factors in gaming. According to Statistics Finland, in the age group of 15–34 among the higher educated people there are many who do not play at all (Melkas, 2005). Moreover, according to some studies, it still seems that parents play digital games very little either alone or with their children. According to Laura Ermi et al., there is still a gaming gap between parents and children, which has an influence on the attitudes of parents. A gamer adult may even be seen as a threat, being someone who breaks certain limits and forgets his/hers position as an authority (Ermi et al, 2005; Ermi and Mäyrä, 2003).

Figure 3. The new Pac-Man for PSP handheld console Photo taken in 2006 by Jaakko Suominen.

Some interest groups and actors, however, strongly promote the idea of the maturity of gaming. Markku Eskelinen (2005) claims that the gaming industry uses such arguments for statistics and calculation, which justify the image of a big and significant line of industry. Also, according to Eskelinen, it is in the interests of the game industry to appear as a socially responsible servant of the needs of the whole family, in a context where the effects and contents of games still raise suspicions in many households. Eskelinen (2005) questions the ‘commonly articulated wish or supposedly observed trend, according to which the contents of games “mature” as the gamers grow older’.

Therefore, it is important to separate the ‘maturing’ of the contents from the possible middle-ageing of gamers. Media culture – also represented by digital games – comprises a certain infantilism, childishness or juvenility that may even have become stronger recently. In his book Mediatajun paluu (Return of Media Sense), Jukka Sihvonen (2004: 17) argues that media culture uses the idea of juvenility to promote production, nourishment and renewal. Sihvonen states, without making any evaluations, that in the heart of media culture there is an individual, defined by ‘boredom, restlessness and egocentricism’. Sihvonen (2004, 114–115) makes yet another point: if viewed from the perspective of their usage, games appear mostly as an instinctive entertainment, and a form of being together based on the drive to compete. Thus, they show the ideological principal of juvenility in media culture (Sihvonen, 2004: 114-115.

Nostalgia In Product-Making

We can also use another word of foreign origin in relation to retrogaming – nostalgia. In gaming cultures it refers to a kind of yearning for earlier gaming situations or games. One can ask, by elaborating upon Jesper Juul’s ideas of gaming, in which sense the yearning focuses on learned rules or fictional worlds constructed in earlier gaming situations, or both together (Juul, 2006).

The word nostalgia is based on a Greek word referring to the agony of home-coming. The meaning of the word nostalgia has varied in the course of centuries and it has been used, among other things, to refer to different physical and psychic disorders caused by moving somewhere else from the original home area. In its present meaning, nostalgia is not usually defined on clinical grounds. Melancholy and even actual ‘basking’ in the past is associated with nostalgic reminiscences.

In addition to the individual psychological level, the term contains a strong collective – if not even collectivising – dimension (Korkiakangas, 1999; Sallinen, 2004; Koivunen, 2001). In media culture, longing for something old is a mutual event when it refers to such old moments, situations and experiences, which have been shared with friends and family, or even with the nation or ‘the whole world’. Nostalgia has been seen as an explanation to the success of certain kinds of media presentations, such as historical documentaries and fiction series on television, and as a trend in modern culture. A scholar of media studies, Anu Koivunen critiques the above-mentioned explanation for nostalgia, for which it is common, among other things, to include an individual or a single event in greater changes or critical periods in world order or community, or in the differences between generations. These differences are connected, for instance, with people moving to towns from the countryside or the structural changes in consumption or in working life (2001: 224-245).

Whether it is a trend or not, the desire for nostalgic basking can be satisfied with various consumer goods. Markku Eskelinen mentions the recent products of Japanese game companies, ‘which with the aid of quite clever pastiche and a slightly increased degree of difficulty attract those parents who play games with their children and who have played similar games already in the 80s’ (Eskelinen, 2005). Thus, scholars refer to a certain consumeristic-simulational product-making of nostalgia, which emerged and strengthened with the rest of the consumer society in the 1960s. The goal of product makers is not solely to benefit from an existing nostalgic relationship of some kind, but also to train towards a nostalgic attitude (Koivunen, 2001). Nostalgia is rendered a tool of consumption, the repetition and simulation of earlier experiences being the aim of nostalgic product-making.

As far as games are concerned, and also otherwise, the product-making of nostalgia does not only mean the making of new editions of Pac-mans, Pongs and Super Marios, with extras and digital remastering, as is widely the case with the digitalization of records, movies and television series. Digital cultural production is often, but not solely, about adding extras, giving additional value and making new versions. Although nostalgic sensibility might be the central factor that makes a product more attractive, it is possible to view nostalgia as a much wider phenomenon than retrogaming (Sivula and Suominen, 2004). According to Koivunen, nostalgia is not an explanation but a question, which ‘concerns objects, forms, meanings as well as effects’ (2001). So, we can wonder what kinds of forms nostalgia takes, how it changes and is renewed, to which products it is targeted, how it is being used in making new products within gaming cultures, and who the product makers are.

Gaming Nostalgia in Music Videos

Even in a superficial observation of the gaming culture(s) we crash into a jungle or a complex web of forms and targets of nostalgia. Nowadays, the retro phenomenon associated with nostalgia can, in the first place, be seen as a kind of an aesthetic repetition style of media culture, which refers strongly to the audiovisual styles of the 1980s, and game types and classic game icons such as Pac-man, Pong, Tetris and Mario in particular. These overlapping aesthetic repetition styles are visible in new game products and websites such as the Habbo Hotel (http://www.habbohotel.fi) (See figure 6.) and Aapeli (http://www.aapeli.com), as well as in game literature and academic studies, pop videos, graphic signs of TV channels and audiovisual representations of digital (dance) music. In this section I will make a preliminary analysis of several few music videos with a retrogaming theme.

Figure 4. Rock’n Roll High School video by Teddybears STHLM.

Besides the songs themselves, the retro aesthetics is revealed and highlighted particularly with the aid of record cover art and music videos, with the artists using retrogaming themes in varying ways. References to older games is a fashion in popular videos (especially popularized around the year 2000), but it also holds potential for a more critical or ironical evaluation of the gaming culture itself. In music videos, retrogaming themes are also used to promote some political issues. (For more complete list of retrogaming music videos and TV commercials, see my web-page, http://www.tuug.fi/~jaakko/tutkimus/retro-game-videos.php).

Examples of retro aesthetics in music videos include: Junior Senior’s ‘Move Your Feet’, where viewers can identify elements of the colour scheme, speed and images of 8-bit computers (e.g. Commodore 64), or the graphic adventure games for PC by Sierra Online from both sides of the mid-80s; or the video ‘Rock’n Roll High School’ by Teddybears STHLM (see Figure 4) which refers more strongly to the somewhat later game aesthetics of the 16-bit Commodore Amiga. It is also essential, however, how different people divergently place and identify the references of origin through their own experiences; a single origin, be it a certain game or a computer, is not necessarily to be found.

Press Play On Tape (see Figure 5), on the other hand, whose name comes from the tape drive starting command shown on the Commodore 64 computer screen, matches confessions of computer love and clashes of boybands in their video ‘Comic Bakery’ (larger than Pop Boyband mix). The clichés have been picked especially from the performances of the Backstreet Boys, but also from other boybands. The result is an intentionally comical pastiche, where the delicate theme of teenage love has been twisted; instead of a girl, the object of emotions is a computer. The video also parodies the use of the auto tuning – the singing-voice converter effect, which became familiar in the performances of Cher, Pet Shop Boys, Daft Punk and various other artists.

The piece from Press Play On Tape is an arrangement of the music for a known 1980s Commodore game, Comic Bakery (composed by Martin Galway). On the video, there is a fragment where the artists are wandering in the atmosphere of a 1980s karate game, ‘Way of the Exploding Fist’. Supposedly, this video has not been widely distributed in music channels, unlike the videos mentioned before, some of which have even been awarded. According to the homepage of the Danish band, the video had its premiere in a local pub and has since gained attention in Commodore 64 forums (see http://www.remix64.com/tune_137100.html).

Figure 5. Press Play on Tape: “Comic Bakery”.

How can the examples above, and the Press Play On Tape video in particular, be analyzed? It is possible to categorize the latter video as a manifestation of fan culture, which highlights the juvenility mentioned above. Jukka Sihvonen (2004, 174–175) cites the seven theses of juvenility presented by Henry Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers (1992), which seem to be applied to many forms of the consumption and performance of retro culture. Jenkins’ theses, based on the study of Star Trek devotees, are ironic and meant to describe the general view of the social limitations of juvenile fans. Sihvonen notes, that according to Jenkins’ theses, a typical fan is devoted to ‘(a) mindless consumption, (b) cherishing worthless knowledge, (c) idealizing trashy culture and (d) worshipping his/hers idol without having a life. This kind of lack of one’s own experiences makes the fan (e) “feminine” or even asexual (f) an emotionally and intellectually handicapped human being, who has (g) perpetual difficulties in separating reality from fiction’ (Sihvonen, 2004; Jenkins, 1992). The Press Play On Tape video could well be presented as such a product, a mindless consumption and a waste of time, which represents the emotional, sexual and intellectual juvenility and alienation of its makers.

Thereafter, however, Sihvonen enters a dialogue between the previous statements and the counter-characterisations made by Jenkins at the end of his book, which aims to refute a stereotypical view of fanhood. According to Jenkins and Sihvonen ‘being a fan requires special (a) forms of receiving and usage, (b) means and equipment of critical and interpreting action, (c) principals of activism that is founded upon consumption and (d) reproduction of traditions and customs. All these put together mean that fanhood concentrated on a particular phenomenon forms (e) a unique, alternative social community” (Sihvonen, 2004; Jenkins, 1992). Indeed, the Press Play On Tape video is actually directed to a certain alternative audience, which reacts to the very many forms and products of media culture with criticism and new interpretations. Moreover, the video exemplifies the potential of spontaneous production, performing and distribution of media.

The pop video examples mentioned inform us about a sensitive and versatile relationship with old digital games. Various references to the world of older games and also different ways of narration have been well used in the videos. Although the forms in which the digital game relationship becomes apparent could be criticized, the videos tell particularly about the potential to renew customs and tradition. That ability is not limited to a making of retrogaming music and music videos. In many cases, the question is not so much about seeing and seeking commercial potentiality, but about media producers and certain groups of consumers sharing the gaming experience (or a part of it), and reworking it by using the resources of nostalgia. As Henry Jenkins argues, the fan community does not clearly separate artists from consumers. All fans are potential writers or other kinds of artists, whose talents just need to be noticed, nourished and introduced. Even the most unassuming works enrich the cultural heritage of a wider fan community (Jenkins, 1992). Fans (or devotees of the 80s micro computer cultures in this case) form a social community, outside which the works also have their value, for a common subjective empirical ground is not necessarily needed between the producers and the audience. The 1980s style for other generations, older and younger, is familiar as a fashionable repetition style in particular. In addition to a subculture, retrogaming thus becomes part of the mainstream of popular culture.

Games, devices, watches, clothes…

Figure 6. Habbo Hotel’s Snow ball fight advertisement 19th January 2007: http://www.habbo.fi/games

The aesthetics of retrogaming can also act as an inside joke or a source of inspiration. This seems especially to be the case with the popular virtual environment of the Habbo Hotel. Mikael Johnson (2006) has observed how in research interviews some of the designers of the Habbo Hotel-environment have made references to Commodore 64 games as their central source of inspiration. The interviewed persons have stated that the Habbo Hotel looks retro compared to other web environments (Johnson, 2006). The Habbo Hotel users are young, and for them the 1980’s digital graphics and game perspective do not primarily work through nostalgia. It rather offers a clear, easy and attractively different game environment, without remedial and intermedial references to earlier game aesthetics. The designers, on the other hand, seem to share a nostalgic attraction to the 1980’s game aesthetics, whose isometric perspective originates among others from Knight Lore (1984) for Sinclair Spectrum, Head Over Heels (1987) for Commodore 64 and other devices, and from other similar games (see: http://www.mameworld.net/retroview/spectrum/knight_loreuser.htm and phttp://linkchecker.stacken.kth.se/c64/06top.html).

Those consumer goods, which are marketed with the aid of earlier games or as their actual copies, have a different commercial tone. As a long-term computer hobbyist working with digital culture, I am also personally a splendid target for these kind of products. In addition to a DigDug -t-shirt and an Atari Centipede-watch by Fossil, I have in my collection a Plug & Play TV game by Jakks Pacific, which contains five coin-up game classics. This product has many versions, which have all proved commercially successful. Many companies have followed the example of Jakks Pacific. Edge, a central publication in the field of gaming, took notice of this in their October 2005 issue (see Figure 7); Edge introduced dozens of game products, which have sold millions of copies worldwide in places out of the ordinary, such as discount stores. Anson Sawby, marketing director of Jakks who was interviewed by Edge, refers particularly to the middle-ageing of the gamers behind the marketing potential: ‘The market was initially fuelled by people in their 30s or 40s or even 50s… They grew up playing games, but aren’t prepared to splash out on a PlayStation’ (Edge, October 2005). Gamers miss old, well-known games and are not necessarily prepared to adopt new, more complex games. From the previous utterance one could also derive an interpretation that old games suit older gamers better, also in their use of time. Gaming fits the fragmentary, momentary and hectic lifestyle of the information and mobile society in which, as suggested by Jukka Sihvonen and other researchers, there is just not enough time to concentrate on gaming over a long period.

Figure 7. Plug’n Play retro devices presented in Edge Magazine October 2005.

The previous examples show that a whole new line of the game industry, which uses a notable marketing segment of the gaming nostalgia in its products, has been born. This line of industry includes new enterprises, but also those (such as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) who have been involved longer and have taken retro products into their product-making. And, time after time, there is always something to recycle; after the 1970s and 1980s, the early 1990s products will be targeted.

On the other hand, working on and recycling gaming culture themes based on amateur work, which is not primarily about commercial benefit but also about respect to and maintenance of older gaming culture, should be acknowledged. In this case, the idea is not about testing the limits of the marketing potential, but about subjective cultural production and being a ‘true amateur’.

Figure 8. French gaming stamps. 2006.

Will to Preserve

According to the Edge, some of the retro game products have been commercialised based on device or programme adaptations made by computer amateurs. Actually, the role of active amateurs or hobbyists in preserving and renewing the retro culture is quite central. Petri Saarikoski has noted that the nostalgia of gaming culture began in the late 1980s, right after the hobbyist computer magazines started to write about the ‘death’ of 8-bit home computers (e.g. Commodore 64, Spectravideo 328, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair Spectrum) (Saarikoski, 2001). It is noteworthy, that at the same time game journalism was also established, and it produced a discourse of the cultural heritage of digital gaming. Game critics showed their expertise by linking the new games along the cultural continuum of the games and, among other things, by comparing these games to earlier ones.

The feeling of disappearance and loss of old games brought about a cherishing old gaming culture, and Saarikoski sees this even as an effort by certain amateur groups to separate themselves from the mainstream of amateur work which concentrates on success (Saarikoski, 2001; 2004). The older game types and styles had already been recycled earlier, and the nostalgization of the idealistic early stages of computer hobbyism had begun. Steven Levy (1984), for example, in his well-known book Hackers – Heroes of Computer Revolution, claimed that enthusiastic computer amateurs were enthroned as heroes of the computer revolution. Levy also divided hackers into generations, whose central developing trends at the turning points had been the disappearance of idealism and commercialisation. Besides the idealisation of hackers, the late 1980’s games recycled elements and game types from the 1970s (Saarikoski, 2001).

More recently, there have been at least three of four forms of preserving and performing electronic gaming culture: websites, hardware and software collections, exhibitions and historical works. We observe the different forms of preserving particularly via the Internet. There are several sites devoted to old games, containing game histories, timelines, interviews, technical descriptions, downloadable emulator adaptations, pictures and other material. There, amateurs also present their collections of games in a kind of virtual exhibition. Similarly, collecting game products has become apparent in e-mail posting lists, forums and on-line marketplaces (e.g. ebay.com, huuto.net).

Conclusion: Nostalgic Discourse And The Appropriation Of ‘New’ Media Technology

Although ‘nostalgic attitude’ is used for different sorts of commercial purposes, the nostalgic discourse of electronic gaming contains a lot of (self-)critical and (self-)ironic forms of action. It is not just a way of talking, but at the same time both a uniting and separating form of action, a practice interlaced with digital technology.

The nostalgic discourse of electronic gaming can also usefully be compared to the nostalgic discourses of other media technologies; it can now be observed that the nostalgic discourse is not necessarily associated with a particular media or decade. Anu Koivunen, for example, has characterized television as a memory machine, whereby referring to the reminiscence of the past that has continued for decades in televisual media.

According to Koivunen, nostalgic television series are not examples of a certain post-modern phase, but instead a particular ‘ontological feature’ in the essence of television. In the first place, Koivunen refers to the content of TV programmes, but this ontological feature can also be seen in the design of television sets. Central in at least some models has been an association with something familiar and traditional; furniture, materials or devices that are already familiar from earlier times. This issue could be analysed within a framework, which Andrew Blake (2002) in his analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon, has named retrolutionarity [24]. According to Blake, retrolutionarity means production of the materials of the future with the methods of the past.

Instead of television, the Internet seems to be a kind of a central processing unit of the memory machine in today’s retrogaming. In addition to recollection narration, the Internet also makes many other forms of nostalgia possible. A gamers personal work and their consequent ‘inside’ position are central in this kind of action. However, they are not necessary in a nostalgic experience, although Sihvonen (2004: 13) emphasizes the relationship between the personal work and media, particularly when media is considered as a phenomenon.

Articulating some of Koivunen’s ideas, and after presenting a number of examples in this paper, I want to conclude that retrogaming can not simply be described as a phenomenon of some particular phase or as an explanation of the middle-ageing of gaming culture. The nostalgic discourse associated with electronic gaming is rather a resource, which is introduced whenever needed; it is used in time and space in various ways depending on the usage point. Nostalgic discourse can be used to stand out (sub-, counter- and alternative cultures) or to be identified with. The means of standing out and the objects of identification are various as well. Retrogaming thus does not refer only to gaming, but for example to listening and producing music, to clothing or, say, to graphical design. Possibly in the future the 1980s world of electronic games will again become a more marginal hobby, to be replaced by some other more modern forms of retrogaming.

Retrogaming (action, practise) and gaming nostalgia (the mode of recollection and recollection discourse itself) are a central part of a more general culture of technology and the cultural adaptation of technology. In many cases the making-nostalgic of a technological device, adaptation or form of action begins right after its introduction, or immediately after design has been launched. Actually, the making-nostalgic – or at least some sort of romanticization – begins even at an earlier stage, when the user considers a novel product in relation to the older one. Highlighting technological renewal and revolution can be seen as a bipolar contrast to nostalgic discourse. Both discourses have their reverse side, and their fears: the fear of revolutionary discourse is technical retrogression and depression; the fear of nostalgic discourse is perhaps the difficulty to control change.

In practice, the stages introduced above overlap. It seems that when new technological innovations are introduced, the change and their effects are softened with a sort of rhetoric or discourse of safety: the revolution and coming of the novelties is under control. Different kinds of nostalgic elements are used in representing the revolution (Suominen, 2000; Suominen, 2003). The above-mentioned term, retrolutionary, refers to the same phenomenon, in which there is an effort to control the threat and possibilities of newness by binding them with pleasing experiences of familiarity and related emotions. The new and the old are in constant dialogue in both technological use and discussion (see figure 9). Therefore, (the cultures of) history is a new trend in digital culture and gaming – and at the same time, it is not new.

Figure 9. The Nintendo Wii console is a good example of combining new and old gaming cultures. The Nintendo Wii Classic Controller pad is targeted for the players who purchase old Nintendo and Sega console games via the Internet and play them with the Wii.

A Swedish historian Peter Aronsson (2005: 13) describes the cultures of history (historiekultur in Swedish) as sources, artefacts, rituals and habits which provide obvious ways to form links between the past, the present and the future. With the uses of history or practising history (historiebruk) Aronsson refers to how bytes or elements of the cultures of history are activated to form particular meaningful practise-oriented entities. The uses of history create meaning, legitimate and ‘handle’ change. The consciousness of history (historiemedvetande) is one’s conception of the nexus of the past, the present and the future. Therefore, in the use or practise of history the cultures of history are stages for the formation of historical consciousness (Aronsson, 2005). In this paper, I have tried to articulate the different forms of the cultures, the uses and the conceptions of history within digital gaming, as a way to show the wide range and importance of this phenomenon. The paper can potentially be used as a base for more empirical or theoretical and focused analyses of the cultures of history in digital gaming. For example, an analysis could make more detailed observations, studying the sources or interviewing gamers and game designers in particular contexts where retrospection appears to be an essential part of the current (and future) gaming culture.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Salla-Riikka Vesterlund for major parts of English translation of my text and to Erik Rosendahl for some corrections (errors, however, are made by me personally). Many thanks to Anna Sivula, Petri Saarikoski and Riikka Turtiainen for comments on this paper, and special thanks to Tanja Sihvonen for the French gaming stamps.

Author’s Biography

Jaakko Suominen is Doctor of Philosophy, Acting Professor of Digital Culture and Director of the School of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Suominen is an author of
two monographs on the cultural history of computing. He has co‑edited five academic books and written about 40 articles. In his studies Suominen has concentrated on the cultural history of information technology and the history of media and technology. Lately, Suominen has released a weblog book (in Finnish, http://jaasuo.wordpress.com/tietokoneen‑takapuoli/) focusing on several cultural historical aspects of digitalisation such as retro‑gaming, history of computer love and remediation. Suominen works in a multi‑disciplinary academic community at the Pori University Consortium, which consists of units of five different universities. Suominen has led many co‑operative projects with companies as well as with municipal bodies and non‑profit organizations on different aspects of digital culture. Email: jaakko.suominen at utu.fi. Web: http://www.tuug.fi/~jaakko/

Note

[1] Intermediality means an interaction between two or more media, which can be realized in both the level of media performances and their production. Juha Herkman (2005) divides intermediality in three components: the introduction of other media technologies (e.g. the use of television in a movie), the introduction of persons known from a certain media (e.g. interviews with TV persons in magazines) and the search for synergy in production (e.g. displaying the same news in different media or, say, marketing several products together).] Also, one can call this phenomenon remediation, which means process of refashioning older or familiar media forms (Bolter and Grusin, 2000).
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Introduction

Je suis l’espace où je suis
I am the space where I am.

-Noël Arnaud, L’Etat d’ebauche

In the opening pages of her classic essay, A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf describes being blocked from entering the “turf” of the University in Oxbridge by an administrative gate-keeper.

Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. … His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me’ (Woolf, 1929).

This scene invokes the ways in which women have been systematically barred from the digital playground, both as players and as creators of play space. To a large extent, the video game industry in the U.S. remains dominated by a boys-only ethos that harkens back to the gender-biased practices in the British academia of Woolf’s day.[1] Games that are female-friendly are often couched in derogatory or dismissive terms: The Sims (Maxis, 2000) is ‘not really a game’; casual games are not counted as ‘real’ games by many in the industry.[2] The result is that certain types of games, game mechanics, play patterns, and, as we’ll see, particular types of game spaces have tended to dominate the field of games.

Although this paper discusses the ways in which digital game spaces have been strongly gendered towards male constructions of space and play, this does not necessarily mean we advocate creating exclusively female (or ‘pink’) games. As Woolf points out in her essay, the solution is not simply to create a distinctly feminine voice (although this is one potential angle of approach), but rather to promote the cultivation of an ‘androgynous mind’, which, she suggests, is already possessed by male authors of great note throughout history (she cites Shakespeare as an example). We propose drawing from a number of cultural practices, literary sources, and existing games in order to pave the way for a playground that is more open to female players. Thus we promote not only the definition of new feminine game spaces, but also encourage designers to think in terms of ‘androgynous space’ that engages all aspects of all persons: a space into which women and girls are invited and welcomed, but in which men and boys can also enjoy more diverse and nuanced forms of play than are typically available to them.

The Production of Space

Gendering Game Space

The concept of space itself is not a simple one, and it is not possible to do it justice here. Space may be described by its physical dimensions, or by its mathematical, material, or geographic properties. It may also be understood as a social practice or psychological phenomenon, as in the work of Situationist Henri Lefebrvre (1991). The ways in which humans understand and represent space are social constructions that serves as a barometer of a particular culture and time. At different points in history, and within different contexts, space and its representations have proceeded from varying cultural ideals — from the 15th century paintings in which size of objects was used to denote importance, not relative position in a landscape, to the secret mathematics of vision that instructed the creation of perspective in Renaissance art and architecture. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, one of the rationales for colonialism was that the natives were ‘not using’ the land. Other representations of navigable space include cartographic traditions such as Mercator projections, which distorted the relative size of the continents in order to fit the entire globe on a cylinder, and modern GPS coordinate systems. In 1946, Buckminster Fuller created the ‘dymaxion map’, or ‘Fuller Projection’, an icosahedral globe that represented the continents at true scale. Representations of space often reveal the priorities and perceptions of the prevailing culture at the time. Both Pearce (1997) and Konzack (2006) have noted a spatial transition in video games. In contrast with earlier more abstract forms of expression in digital games, there is tendency within the game industry today to focus on the production of ‘realistic’ representations of space — detailed, three-dimensional models of what Lefebvre would call ‘lived space’, or what Soja terms ‘Firstspace’ (1996). But whose lived space? Game space, due in part to the constraints of the computer, and in part to the way in which 3D technologies have been developed, is overwhelmingly Western, Cartesian and male.

The success of 3D computer modeling within the film industry as a means of bringing fantasy to life seems to have also resulted in a fixation on ‘realistic’ representation within the game industry. However it must be acknowledged that this fixation on realism — especially in the representation of game space — is somewhat different than the concept of actual lived space. Espen Aarseth, echoing Janet Murray’s previous work, has claimed, ‘the defining element in computer games is spatiality’, however, he says it is ‘the difference between the spatial representation and real space’ that makes gameplay rules possible. In describing a topology of game spaces, ranging from textual, two-dimensional, isometric, three-dimensional, etc., he concludes that in their careful planning as playable game spaces, they are in fact, not realistic at all, but allegorical, ‘figurative comments on the impossibility of representing real space’ (Aarseth, 1998).

Aarseth’s description of how game spaces ignore real-world constraints, using teleporters and distributing resources across the terrain to make gameplay fair, is not as interesting as his unintentional focus on what is done in game landscapes themselves, i.e. the ‘unreality’ of these landscapes is not only due to their order and balance, but also to their inherent usefulness for a certain type of gameplay — generally battle. As Aarseth (1998) says, ‘Every game of Myth (Bungie Studios, 1997) is a fight for position in the landscape … the units will go and do as ordered (with a simple click on the unit and then a click on the position or enemy to be taken) but when the chaos of battle erupts, efficient control is no longer possible, and much therefore depends on how well the player has taken advantage of formation, landscape variation and knowledge of enemy positions’.

Dangerous and Contested Spaces

Aarseth’s description of a landscape designed for battle is typical of many digital game spaces, and speaks to a predominantly male concern that space is potentially dangerous and always contested. In order to better understand the specifics of this gendering of game space, it is useful to analyze in more detail the prevailing characteristics of these environments. Looking back to the abstract battlefields of games like chess or Go, or to today’s real-time strategy (RTS) or ‘God Games’ like the Age of Empires (Ensemble Studios, 1997) and Civilization series (Micropose Software, 1992), it is clear these games define space primarily by its ability to be captured or held by players. Core mechanics revolve around intellectual problem-solving and resource management with the main objective being to amass armies, expand territories, control resources, and dominate the play space of the game.

Turn-of-the-Century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman characterizes the contrast between male and female relations to space:

The basic feminine impulse is to gather, to put together, to construct; the basic masculine impulse is to scatter, to disseminate, to destroy. It seems to give pleasure to a man to bang something and drive it from him; the harder he hits it and the farther it goes the better pleased he is (Gilman, 1911).

She also points out the ‘universal dominance of the projectile’ in male sport, epitomized in digital games by the contested space of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. The core game mechanic of a typical first-person shooter can be seen as a cross between a carnival shooting gallery with moving targets, cops and robbers, and in the case of team-based games such as Counter-Strike (Le and Cliff, 1999) or Halo 2 (Bungie Studios, 2004), what might be described as ‘tag on steroids’. These games conceive of moving through space in a distinctly masculine fashion, in terms of both its role in the game experience, and the narrative milieu in which they take place. They epitomize what Judith Butler would call ‘disciplinary regimes’ that through repetitive performance construct both gender and gendered space (Butler, 1990). Their game mechanics value particular skills: mastery of quick reflexes and an ability to solve complex spatial rotation problems in real time. These are the hallmarks of the FPS, skills which cognitive research suggests, by and large, tend to favor males (Terlecki and Newcombe, 2005).

In contrast to the narrative maze described by Murray, in which a story unfolds through a process of spatial navigation (Murray, 1997), the FPS maze is envisioned as an obstacle course around and through which tactical maneuvers take place. The ‘story’ is often incidental to the game mechanic, providing merely a motivation, back-story and mis-en-scene for what is otherwise a fairly generic activity. In these games hiding places, vistas, avenues of escape and dead-ends combine with strategic decisions about weaponry to create a particular type of tactical pleasure. While these pleasures can appeal to both males and females, it is clear that they are geared to the former audience (apropos Gillman). And, when the theme or story overlay is added, we see an even stronger orientation to male domains.

Thematically, these games revolve around narratives of warfare, anti-terrorism, invading aliens, zombies, science fiction, combat with robots, etc. Aesthetically, their settings tend to be highly rectilinear, typically manmade spaces, often the bruised and embattled remains of an urban environment, warehouse, office building, space ship, space colony, or high tech laboratory gone horribly wrong. They are typically constructed of hard materials: cinder block, metal grid work, HVAC infrastructure, with heavily mechanical components, reinforced by the sound effects of footsteps echoing on metal or concrete floors. They are often bleak, militaristic, post apocalyptic or futuristic. Spaces are dimly lit and color palettes are dark and monochromatic. Consider the sharp contrast between the color palette of Half-Life (Valve Software, 1998) or Doom (id Software, 1993) and that of a game such as Animal Crossing (Nintendo EAD, 2002). In the former, exterior scenes are rare, and if included, tend to take place in battlefields, deserts, decimated landscapes or contested areas of urban blight. If, as Duchenaut et al (2004) suggest, games provide the digital equivalent of a ‘Third Place’ outside of home and work (Oldenburg, 1989) what kinds of ‘Third Places’ are we creating with these landscape of destruction? As Bachelard states, in The Poetics of Space:

It is also a terrible trait of men that they should be incapable of understanding the forces of the universe intuitively, otherwise that in terms of psychology of wrath (Bachelard, 1964, 1958).

It is interesting to contrast these scenarios with Gilman’s Utopian vision of Herland, a novel in which women form the dominate culture in a society free of war, poverty and even garbage (Gilman, 1979, 1915).

Levels and Secrets

Another common trait of male-gendered game spaces is their organizational structures. The majority of digital games are presented in a series of ‘levels’ which escalate in difficulty, barring those who cannot master the skills and secrets of the game are barred from advancing. Like a skyscraper, the indomitable symbol of the business hierarchy, or the strict chain of command in the military, games are positioned to ‘keep out’ those who have not passed the tests of earlier levels. Progression and advancement are possible only through ‘beating’ these levels, ‘conquering’ their secrets in a highly linear fashion. And secrets themselves are framed as tasks or challenges, which often hold access to even more exclusive spaces. Only by knowing exactly where the entrance to a secret level is, can the players prove themselves worthy of entering. What is found inside these secret spaces are rewards that are sometimes humorous, sometimes offensive, and sometimes reinforce an insider’s knowledge of the game. Examples of these secret levels and places can be found in the early Atari game Adventure (Robinett, 1980), with its infamous Easter egg room displaying programmer Warren Robinett’s forbidden credit, to a secret ‘glitch’ that became known as ‘Minus World’ in Super Mario Bros (Nintendo, 1985), insider joke levels such as level 31 in Doom II, which borrowed enemies from id Software’s earlier game Wolfenstein 3D (Muse Software, 1981), or the infamous secret ‘Hot Coffee’ scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which, when unlocked, enabled a sex ‘minigame’ between the main character and his girlfriend.

Knowing how and where to access these secrets is the province of ‘real gamers’ and while these male fantasies of progressing through power acquisition, tactical mastery, secret knowledge or geographic domination can and are certainly enjoyable for women to play, they are not necessarily ‘indigenous’ to the ways in which women and girls experience space, especially in the context of play. Just as Virginia Woolf argued that women need an indigenous voice of their own, women also need the opportunity to explore and manifest their own indigenous fantasy play space.

Girls in Boyland

Historically, in the non-digital playground, girls have been spatially constrained in their play activities. The ‘roaming radius’ study done in the U.S. in 1960s by John Newson and Elizabeth Newson (1968) demonstrated that in the playground, boys are typically allowed to roam further than girls. Follow-up studies in the 1970s found that a typical ten- to twelve-year old boy was allowed to travel a distance of 2,452 yards, while girls of the same age might only travel 959 yards (Margolis and Fisher, 2001). It was not until 1972 with Title IX, over 50 years after women’s suffrage, that girls were allowed equal access to the sports field in schools. Encoded in these constraints are implicit stereotyped anxieties about the vulnerabilities of girls: on the one hand, they are weaker and more fragile than boys; on the other, they may fall prey to sexual predators.

Reactions to such constraints often call for inclusiveness — girls must be ‘allowed’ to play in boys’ spaces, by boys’ rules, in order to master them and increase their ability to compete more efficiently in a male-dominated world. In From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, Henry Jenkins proposes:

We need to open up more space for girls to join–or play alongside–the traditional boy culture down by the river, in the old vacant lot, within the bamboo forest. Girls need to learn how to explore ‘unsafe’ and ‘unfriendly’ spaces, and to experience the ‘complete freedom of movement’ promised by the boys’ games, if not all the time, then at least some of the time, to help them develop the self-confidence and competitiveness demanded of professional women. They also need to learn how, in the words of a contemporary bestseller, to ‘run with the wolves’ and not just follow the butterflies. Girls need to be able to play games where Barbie gets to kick some butt (Jenkins, 1998).

There are many facets to the notion of ‘Barbie kicking butt’. On the surface, the concept could be epitomized by Lara Croft, the busty adventuress who takes on male game space in hot pants, a tight tank top and a holster. Early on, Lara’s creators insisted that centering on a strong female character in Tomb Raider (Core Design, 1996) would translate into strong appeal to women and girls. But this noble intention did not materialize: Lara Croft, like many other female game characters, is a male fantasy of Barbie kicking butt. Similarly, in games like Virtua Fighter (SEGA-AM2 Co, 1995) and Tekken (Namco, 1995), sexy female characters don what author Pearce has dubbed ‘kombat lingerie’ to engage in what might otherwise be considered traditionally male activities. In the end, these may be merely examples of what Simone de Beauvoir (1952) would characterize as the woman as ‘other’ inhabiting a ‘masculine universe’ in a male-defined role.

Whether or not these environments are empowering to women is debatable: putting a female character into a male game space, particularly one that caters more to male fantasies of female empowerment than those of actual females, seems only to make matters worse. Indeed, these female objects of male fantasy not only fail to resonate with many women players, but alienate them still further. As T.L. Taylor’s research shows, many women play the over-sexualized, underdressed avatars in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) in spite of their design, and would prefer to have a less excessively endowed character if given the choice (Taylor, 2003). In the long run, Lara and her butt-kicking buddies have failed where Barbie has succeeded. Perhaps its appeal (or lack thereof) lies not in the representation of character but the gendered nature of the space itself. Perhaps butt-kicking is not what many girls and women have in mind as a form of empowerment through play.[3]

Feminine Conceptions of Space

Literary Models for Regendering Game Space

Following Woolf’s lead, we have identified some literary and game traditions that offer rich conceptions of space from a female perspective. In these spaces, female characters figure predominately, if not solely, and the ways in which they interact with the space, as well as the character of the spaces themselves, can be looked at as models for a more feminine conception of space. Indeed, many late 19th and early 20th Century male authors had a better grasp of feminine space than today’s game designers. Classic children’s literature, such as Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), The Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900), The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis, 1950), The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1909), and Mary Poppins (Travers, 1934), among others, offer a cast of female heroines who open portals to and explore magical, alternative, sometimes highly treacherous mythical and imaginary worlds that often provide an allegory for inner-space. These women are brave, curious, adventuresome, and smart, solving complex problems to arrive at their destinations, which invariably turn out to be some inner state of transformation.

Again we can invoke Bachelard (1964), who speaks of

…[attributing] grace to curves, and, no doubt, inflexibility to straight lines? Why is it worse for us to say that an angle is cold and a curve warm? That the curve welcomes us and the oversharp angle rejects us? That the angle is masculine and the curve feminine? A modicum of quality changes everything. The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain.

Secret Places

Secrecy is, like the game spaces described above, a large part of classic children’s literature, and specifically literature focusing on female characters. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, for instance, has been a perennial tome of girlhood for decades and tells of how orphan Mary Lennox and her invalid cousin, Colin, find a long-neglected secret garden, a place to grow and heal, both physically and psychologically, through cultivating a natural environment. In the musical stage performance based on the book, Mary echoes Woolf’s insistence that to write a woman must have a room of her own:

I need a place where I can hide,
Where no one sees my life inside,
Where I can make my plans, and write them down
So I can read them.

A place where I can bid my heart be still
And it will mind me.
A place where I can go when I am lost,
And there I’ll find me
(Norman and Simon, 1993)

The affinity with nature, a common theme, is central to Purple Moon’s Secret Paths series (Purple Moon Software, 1996-1998), in which girls explored various landscapes and then met in a secret tree house to share stories. Like the psychologically safe space offered by Burnett’s Secret Garden, the secret tree house of the Purple Moon game was framed not in terms of mastery and exclusivity, like the hidden game levels described above, but rather in terms of growth, bonding, intimacy, privacy and narratives. This female-framed secrecy presents a very different set of play mechanics and design possibilities. In Remembrance and the Design of Place, architecture professor Frances Downing says of secret spaces:

A secret place always has aspects of a ‘removed’ existence, being a place that, physically or mentally, it is created for retreat, intimacy, enclosure, screening, and protection. These often are places of power and control that cannot be known or invaded by ‘outside’ forces (Downing, 2000).

In enumerating the many domains of the experience of space from accounts of male and female architects, Downing points out the notion of the unfinished places that invite contribution from the inhabitant: secret, ancestral, places of self, sensate places, places of desire, comfort, region, vicarious, gregarious and abstract. Of secret spaces she says: ‘Built forms of this domain often were places that were unfinished — attics, root cellars, or under the stairs. Often their unfinished nature provided a sense of ownership through an ability to complete the place with one’s presence. Closets and large furniture also were important in this category’. These alternative universes cry out for player agency, for players to not only be transformed by, but also to transform the space as part of the play experience and, as we will see, they are also often the transitional point into another type of imaginative space, which we will discuss next.

Enchanted Worlds

Even before J.R.R. Tolkien presented the definitive fantasy world that set the stage for numerous digital games, girls in literature had the power to open portals into alternative universes. The late 19th and early 20th Centuries hosted a parade of what would now be called ‘tween’ girls venturing forth into the uncharted territory of inner space: Alice ventured down the rabbit hole and into the inner space of the looking glass; Dorothy rode a gust of wind to a magical land; Lucy lead the way into a vast alternative, allegorical universe.

Dorothy and Alice provide an interesting juxtaposition of girls in gamespace. They are similar in many ways, and yet their motivations and passages are quite different. Dorothy, longing for adventure and escape from the mundane of the domestic, is swept away against her will on a gust of wind. She commits a seemingly heroic act by accident, by landing inadvertently on the Wicked Witch of the East. Her nurturing and generous personality makes her the unwitting leader of a motley crew of displaced ‘persons’ (not necessarily people). The ‘yellow brick road’ becomes Dorothy’s avenue, quite literally, for adventure. In the words of George Sand: ‘What is more beautiful than a road?’ (Sand, 1845). Yet adventure notwithstanding, the outcome of Dorothy’s travails is the realization that, indeed, the domestic space has all she needs.

Alice, suffering equally from tween girl ennui, is much more pro-active about her adventures. Rather than merely wishing herself into an enchanted world, she actively seeks it out. The following passage from the delightful 1923 digest of children’s literature, Boys and Girls of Bookland, provides insight not only into Alice’s universal appeal, but also into her modus operandi:

Alice, you must know, was an adventurous young person, much more so than the heroines of the ordinary fairy tales, for when they wandered away from home it was generally because they were forced to do so, while Alice deliberately made up her mind to travel, and Did It! (sic) (Smith, 1923).

Alice’s adventures take her through a variety of transformations in scale, another aspect of space; she grows and shrinks (an allegory for growing up) and even swims through a pool of her own tears. It is also worth noting that Alice was a ‘gamer’ of sorts: both of her excursions took her into worlds that revolved around a central game: cards, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), and chess in Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, 1871). Thus Alice’s imaginary worlds are also very explicitly ‘game worlds’ in a way that perhaps the others mentioned here are not.[4]

Note that three of these four adventures originate via portals to parallel universes that are situated in domestic space. As Bachelard points out: ‘the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’ (1964, 1958). Thus the domestic becomes a portal into imaginary worlds. Furthermore, he points out the evocative nature of drawers, chests and wardrobes — secret enclosures that are meant to be opened, and which recur throughout the literature of this genre. The wardrobe, the mirror are portals into the imagination for the inquisitive girl adventurer. ‘For to great dreamers of corners and holes, nothing is ever empty’ (Bachelard, 1964).

Although domestic space can be a site of play and pleasure, (as described in the following section), it can also connote stifling captivity for women, as in Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman, 1997, 1892), in which a woman is confined in a deteriorating room by a loving yet paternalistically controlling husband. She is also discouraged from writing, because it exacerbates her ‘hysteria’, thus the room also represents the repression of her inner life, and consequential descent into madness. Conversely, for Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (and of one’s own making) also means the space (and time) in which to daydream; it is ‘room to move’, room to amble, wander and let the imagination run wild (Woolf, 1929). Alice’s adventures are literally explained away as dreams. In Narnia, Lucy leads a group of adventurous children into a world of spiritual allegory through a wardrobe, one of the domestic realm’s secret containers that are ‘meant to be opened’ (Bachelard, 1964, 1958). Both Dorothy and Alice inhabit dream worlds to which their imaginations give rise. Lucy and the children of Narnia also inhabit a dream world, but one which is deeply serious and allegorical. None of these make-believe worlds is a matter of ‘following butterflies’ but challenges each young woman in complex ways and with complex characters and relationships as they navigate through the terrain of imagination.

Enchanted worlds are a rich terrain for game space. In the history of computer games, we see inklings of this in the original Myst (Cyan Worlds, 2003). The long-standing best-selling CD-ROM and its antecedents greatly expanded the female audience of digital entertainment. Rich in content and story, Myst transported players to imaginary worlds, and exploited the ‘portal’ concept described above, using books as the magic entrée into parallel universes. While the early Myst games revolve primarily around male characters, Myst Online: Uru (2007) (their multiplayer online sequel) features Yeesha, a female protagonist engaged in a conflict around the enslavement of a secret race held captive in the dungeons of an underground city. Yeesha is a kind of freedom fighter within the imaginary world. The gameplay, as with all Myst games, revolves around complex puzzles, unraveling narrative riddles and labyrinthine plot twists, with a core game mechanic of discovery. Uru is unique among MMOGs in that it is a purely cooperative game with no points, no levels, no combat and no competition. The combination has appeal across genders and ages, but has a particularly strong draw to older gamers and women. The Myst games take this notion of enchanted worlds to a high art form, and, like some of their literary predecessors, explore the allegorical and sublime aspects of the genre, rather than focusing on conquest or territorial conflict within them. Other game worlds that follow this trajectory include the Zelda series (Nintendo, 1986), Ico (Sony, 2001), and Shadow of the Colossus (Sony, 2005), each of which present worlds filled with wonder and magic, as well as terror and danger. Notably, each also enmeshes the exploration of space with the rescue of a princess.

Domestic Spaces

Lived domestic space itself is also another important site of play and exploration often portrayed in children’s literature. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Alcott, 1900) is arguably the definitive work in this genre, depicting and embodying a transitional space between girlhood and womanhood. Here the ‘little women’ are in-transit from one mode to another. The ‘attic’, like Mary’s garden, serves as a kind of girls-only clubhouse in which the sisters can engage in all manner of make-believe and collective daydreaming. This unique scenario is made possible by the absence of men, whose disappearance from the domestic scene during the Civil War creates a uniquely female-centric environment in the home. Only the boy Laurie and the old man, his grandfather, speak to any male presence in this female-centric story. Even when the men return in the second half of the book, they play a secondary role, though their presence certainly represents a tectonic shift in the household. Heroine Jo evokes Woolf’s image of Jane Austen, sitting in the family parlor room quietly writing her grand novels amidst the hustle and bustle of a busy household (Woolf, 1929).

Woolf considers Austen’s a uniquely female voice. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 1813) centers on the doings of the women in the Bennet family, although their actions revolve almost entirely around the males, who, while dominating the power structures, seem to recede into the background in terms of personality and charisma. Even Darcy, the romantic focal point of the lead character, is a quiet, brooding and frankly not very interesting individual. The women in the story may come off at times as petty and materialistic, but they are certainly more dynamic than the majority of the men. The core mechanic, of the narrative, if one can call it that, is the elaborate machinations around relationships of gender and power.

Unlike literature, where domestic space has been front and center, especially in the form of the novel, it has been largely absent from gaming. Janet Murray points out the Holodeck milestone of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Janeway’s Lucy Davenport, an open ended narrative of domestic life that looks more like a 19th Century novel than the violent conflicts preferred by the male crew members (Murray, 1997). Domestic space has been explored by a number of women game researchers, including Mary Flanagan and Maia Engeli, both of whom have used the context of ‘art’ to address this oversight (Flanagan, 2003; Engeli, 2000; Engeli, 2005). As Bachelard points out, domestic space has always been and continues to be a strongly female domain; while men inhabit domestic space, it is women who create it: ‘In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside, and they know little or nothing of the “wax” of civilization’ (Bachelard, 1964).

The Sims, more than any other game, answers Bachelard’s question: ‘…how can housework be made into a creative activity?’ The Sims was both radical and baffling to some for its preoccupation with the mundane, domestic life of ordinary characters. It in a sense inverted the classic game formula, stepping away from the action of the battlefield or the adventures of the fantastical. Designer Will Wright, no doubt one of the more androgynous minds in the game industry, is very conscious of the metaphors operating in his games. He describes his original ‘sim’ game, Sim City (Maxis, 1989), as having the obvious metaphor of ‘a model railroad come to life’, but the mechanic is more that of a garden (Pearce, 2002). As Bachelard (1964) so eloquently states:

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

Miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical freshness; it allows us to be world conscious at slight risk. And how restful this exercise on a dominated world can be!

According to designer Will Wright, while The Sims can be equated with a dollhouse — a miniature household complete with miniature problems and relationships — the game mechanic is in actuality more complex, depending on individual play styles. Often, he says, players start in one mode and veer off in a different direction. For some, the game mechanic feels more like juggling, trying to balance a variety of tasks. For others, it’s more of a construction activity, with a focus on building or modifying the home. Still others have adopted the game as a kind of virtual sound stage in which to create stories (Pearce, 2002). This echoes what co-author Morie called ‘re-active worlds’, which she predicted would prevail in the future of VR (Morie, 1992).

Narrative Spaces

Myst, Zelda, and Shadow of the Colossus all take place in spaces that convey a story. Early research into games and gender (Pearce, 1997; Laurel, 2001), found that women and girls resonate with games that have storylines and character development, and they might even stray from the game’s goals to explore a secondary plotline. These are what Pearce has called ‘narrative environments’ and Flanagan terms ‘navigable narratives’. Similar to the labyrinth described by Murray (1997), they utilize techniques of spatial storytelling to convey aspects of the narrative. Players discover, uncover and reveal the plot elements as they progress through the game. Thus rather than a terrain of contested territory, the game becomes a space imbued with story and mystery to be discovered and uncovered.

Constructing and Cultivating Space

Doll Houses and Gardens

The Sims also falls into the category of what one might call constructing or cultivating space. This engages the garden metaphor, as well as the notion of players creating or building the game as they play it. Players also use The Sims to create their own stories, and its skinning tools to create their own characters and objects. A more primitive precedent to this was Little Computer People (Activision, 1985), a Commodore 64 dollhouse simulation. We can see the convergence of the fantasy environment with constructivist play is the asynchronous multiplayer console game Animal Crossing (Nintendo EAD, 2002). In this game, players live, work, play and are part of a community that grows and changes from day to day, season to season. Once the initial training has taken place, players are free to do as they wish: catching insects, fishing, picking fruit, gathering nuts, collecting sea shells, digging for fossils or composing a new town song. Players can sell items they catch or find for ‘bells’ (the Animal Crossing currency) or, if the player has a degree of community spirit, they may choose to donate items to the Museum for the enjoyment of all. The Museum will accept one of each unique item — one of each type of fish, each type of insect, each painting, etc. While some types of fish, for example, are prevalent in the game’s waters, others can only be caught at a certain time of day (or night) or at a certain season of the year. Players dedicated to creating a Museum showcasing all the varieties of fish or insects in the Animal Crossing world must work at it diligently, for no other reason than community pride, as items donated to the Museum bring no material gain to the player. This altruistic feature is particularly interesting, as it taps into a theme often seen in the children’s literature referenced above. Like Little Women’s Amy painting miniatures to sell at a charity event, Mary’s dedication to cultivating her ‘little bit of earth’ and sharing it with Colin in The Secret Garden, or Oz’s Dorothy’s nurturing her ragtag crew, the pride of accomplishment and being part of a community that is grateful for the fruit of one’s labor are key pleasures embedded in the game space and its play mechanics.

The garden concept can also be seen in the console game Okami (Clover Studio Co, 2006). Here players take the role of a wolf Goddess to bring back to life the bleak landscape of a cursed land. Throughout the game, the Goddess bonds with the denizens of the world, sows seeds of good will by giving them food and gifts, leaves a trail of flowers in her path, and brings dead things to life with a Japanese sumi-e brush, with which she can also vanquish evil spirits in battle. With its spiritual themes, deep connection to the natural world, and constructivist gameplay, Okami provides another model for alternative, regendered game space. We see these themes re-emerge throughout both Japanese game space, as in the Zelda series, and anime, such as the films of Miyazaki.

Constructing Community Space

This form of additive or constructivist gameplay represents an emerging and growing direction in video games, and one that seems to resonate with female players, both children and adults. In games like Animal Crossing and The Sims, players actually contribute to building the world. We also see a predominance of female players, particularly the supposedly elusive adult woman, in multiplayer virtual worlds such as There.com (There, Inc., 2003) and Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003), where the pleasure of play is categorically linked to creative mastery. In The Sims, the number one character ‘skin’ is Britney Spears, created by numerous tween fans of the performer. Environments like There.com and Second Life provide adults with numerous opportunities for creativity, merging fantasy with constructivist play. It is also clear that the game designers have explicitly targeted female players. In both virtual worlds, fashion is a prevalent form of player productivity, dominated by female players as both consumers and creators. Architecture and design contribute to the construction of the world itself, with women being among the most recognized designers in both virtual worlds. These sorts of creative engagements are particularly appealing when they take place in a social context; while women may be less motivated to work with 3D graphics software for its own sake, doing so in a context of social agency seems to provide the extra motivation needed to develop a wide range of technical and creative skills that might otherwise go untapped (Pearce, 2006).

Social Spaces: Women and MMOGs

One genre where we see growing participation from women, although they still represent less than 20% of the typical gaming population, is massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) (Yee, 2003; Seay et al, 2004). T.L. Taylor, one of the few scholars writing about women’s play preferences in this area, points out that a key pleasure for women is exploration. She cites a study by Schott and Horrell, who found that ‘Although…girl gamers…avoided competitive play, they did find a similar engagement with exploration suggesting that “respondents were focused around the freedom that RPGs (role-playing games) gave to exploration of its virtual environment for the accumulation of symbols that possess general life enhancing qualities”’ (Schott, 2000). It should be noted that while exploration is a prevalent feature of MMOGs, it usually produces a fraction of the ‘experience points’ of combat activities, suggesting that what is a high-value play pattern for women is of less value to game designers. Socializing, also of high value among women, is seldom scored and sometimes inadvertently penalized. Further, Taylor points out that in virtual worlds women have a unique status in that they are in no more physical danger than their male counterparts, which would not be the case for a similar situation in real life (Taylor, 2003).

Bearing in mind that role-playing MMOGs have many appealing factors for women, one has to wonder why they are not more popular with female players? In spite of their inclusiveness, there are other implicit and explicit demarcations that bar women from the playground, and can sometimes take the form of blatant player discrimination. Avatar representation is one: women often grudgingly accept the representations they are offered (Taylor, 2003; Pearce, 2006). Another is mechanics, which disproportionately reward combat activities; another may be the linear achievement model of success. There may also be social factors involved. Players in female avatars (whether male or female) frequently report sexual harassment. In a study by Pearce of Baby Boomer Gamers, one female Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions, 2002) player recalled being told ‘this game is not for girls,” spurring her to join an ‘Older Gamers’ guild, where she found she was treated with respect (Pearce, 2006a).

Pearce’s research with players of the Myst-based MMOG Uru revealed a number of relevant findings. Fifty percent of the study subjects were female (an extremely rare ratio for any game study), and players ranged in age from the teens to the seventies. Pearce did not find any major distinction between male and female play styles, but it was clear that cooperative exploration and puzzle solving were the characteristic preferences of this community. They were less interested in competition and most were by and large disinterested in games that entailed killing or combat. One interesting quality of this group was the ways in which they “read” the space; because they were tuned to the Myst style of navigation and puzzle solving, they were always looking for secrets, clues and story threads. The architectural structures created by these players in There.com, for instance, usually included hidden rooms that required some problem solving to access (Pearce, 2006). These players saw games and virtual worlds not as realms to be conquered, nor as tactical battlefields. Rather, they saw them as scenic, social environments where one could, as Lisbeth Klastrup puts it, ‘joyfully dwell in the virtual world’.

Virtual Reality as Regendered Play Space

Drawing from Precedents in VR

One area where we can explore more gender-balanced approaches to constructing spatial gaming experiences is in the field of virtual reality (VR). While VR is considered by some to be passé, supplanted to a certain extent by the ubiquitous rise of screen-based gaming, the medium has a rich continuing history of artistic experimentation. Due in part to the creative potential of full sensory immersion, as well as the research and artistic frameworks in which it is developed, it is not surprising that a significant number of early influential virtual reality projects were created by women. Unfettered by commercial conventions, women have been able to freely explore and construct a wide range of digital spaces that, while seldom ‘games’, both exemplify and inspire the imaginative potential of game space. As Marie-Laure Ryan has pointed out, ‘The virtual is an inexhaustible resource’ (Ryan, 2001).

What makes these places — these inhabitable digital spheres in full three dimensions — different than the game spaces discussed thus far? Hélène Cixous and other poststructuralist feminists studied how gender was created and/or destabilized within the structure of the medium, with particular focus on writing (Cixous, 1981). If we expand these ideas to the realm of Virtual Environments, we start to see interesting patterns that begin to stabilize a feminist perspective of creation. While hundreds of Virtual Environments have been built since VR’s heyday in the early 1990s, most of those that emerged from male-dominated laboratories were rationally built architectural spaces. In contrast, those made by women (primarily women artists who have gained access to the equipment) interpret the medium from completely different viewpoints, and provide some insights into potential future directions for regendering game space. In this section, we describe selected works that exemplify these differences.

Narrative/Performative Space

Co-author Pearce developed a VR theme park experience that placed players in teams for an underwater adventure to save the Loch Ness Monster’s eggs (Pearce, 1994). This attraction was specifically designed to appeal to diverse ages and particularly to women, based on the theme parks industry’s model of targeting diverse audiences and marketing to female heads of households. Combining a scenic underwater fantasy environment, team-based cooperative and competitive play, a treasure hunt/exploratory game mechanic, and prehistoric monsters, resulted in a game that appealed across a broad spectrum of player types.

Figure 1. Virtual Adventures, designed by Celia Pearce for Iwerks Entertainment and Evans & Sutherland in 1993.

Another key example is Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s PLACEHOLDER (Laurel et al, 1994), which sought to use digital space as a means to inscribe landscape with a sense of spirituality and narrative. Drawing from local landscapes and native lore around the around the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada (where the piece was developed), they placed players in the roles of animals who could explore landscapes, listen to and leave their own stories behind. A highly evocative piece focusing on embodiment and relationship to nature, PLACEHOLDER aimed to create a radically different experience of virtual reality than we see in some of the games described earlier. Laurel was also building ideas presented in her influential book, Computers as Theater (Laurel, 1991), in which she introduces the idea of computers creating a ritual and performative space not unlike the traditional role of theater.

Emotional Space

Co-author Morie has worked primarily with the emotional space afforded by virtual environments (Morie et al, 2005). Her VR work Virtopia created with Mike Goslin in the early 1990s was a series of diverse experiences to which a participant traveled by plunging into brightly colored pools at oases sprinkled about a vast virtual desert (Morie and Goslin, 1992-1994). Each world provided a space that evoked a particular emotion: for example, angst in the case of ‘Fang City’ and nostalgia in ‘The Conversation Room’. Her most recent work, The Memory Stairs (Morie, 2004-present) explores the psychic space of memories and the deeply hidden emotions associated with them.

Figure 2. Laurel and Strickland’s Placeholder allowed players to add voice annotations to a virtual world.

(Images used with permission from the artists.)

Figure 3. Jacquelyn Ford Morie’s Memory Stairs

(Images used with permission from the artist.)

Rita Addison’s Detour: Brain Deconstruction Ahead (1995a) is an example of ‘empathic VR’. In this installation, created with Marcus Thieubaux, David Zeltzer, and Dave Swoboda at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago, photographer Addison documented the sensory damage she sustained as a result of a brain injury. The piece was designed to convey an emotional experience that Addison found impossible to describe with words (1995). She subsequently created similar works to help family members of stroke victims better understand what their loved ones were experiencing.

Figure 4. Rita Addison’s CAVE-based Detour: Brain Deconstruction Ahead was hailed as the first ‘empathic’ VR.

(Images used with permission from the artist.)

Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) is a unique exploration of personal psychic and emotional space. Davies sought to shift the focus from action and agency to presence and immersion, or what she terms “immersence.” “Immersents” were placed into a sublime relationship with an abstract environment that blended naturalistic forms with highly technological representation and textual poetry. There was no overt goal and using a head-mounted display and sensors, players navigated in a fashion modeled after SCUBA diving, inhaling to rise, exhaling to sink and leaning from side to side to navigate. This is a radically different relationship to space than games such as Doom, which are focused on tactical agency and strategic exploitation of spatial constraints. Visitors to this environment described falling into a meditative state (McRobert, 2006).

Figure 5. Char Davies’s Osmose used a SCUBA diving metaphor as the interface to navigate a sublime spiritual space. (Images used with permission.)

Procedural Space

The work of Artificial Life (A-Life) artists Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau prefigured some of what we have begun to see with recent more “procedurally” oriented approaches to space. The Nintendo DS Game Electroplankton (Nintendo, 2006), for instance, has some resemblance to their A-Volve (Sommerer, 1994), a VR installation in which players created their own creatures and encouraged them interact in a pool of actual water. Sommerer and Mignonneau have also created an installation where various plants sprout where you stand, and another in which moths are made to follow a player-controlled flashlight. These spaces follow the ‘garden’ model described earlier, where the player is engaged in the cultivation of natural spaces and creatures. Other examples include Rebecca Allen’s Bush Soul Nos. 1-3 (Allen, 1997-1999), in which players enter into dynamic relationships with virtual creatures, and Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley’s TechnoSphere (Prophet and Selley, 1995). We anticipate that we will see the emergence of this type of space with the upcoming game Spore (Maxis, 2000), in which players create and nurture their own evolving organisms in a 3D world.

Conclusion

The construction of space in the mainstream videogame industry has evolved primarily around male models of space and agency. In this paper, we identify a direction for a new poetics of game space that is more inclusionary and gender balanced, and advocate, after Woolf, for an androgynous mind of game design. Drawing from classic literature, as well as contemporary practices of VR art, we have provided illustrations of the rich diversity of inclusionary game space possibilities. Although they represent only a handful of examples, these experiments in alternative space all possess a quality decidedly lacking in many video games: a sense of wonder, a sense of the sublime, a sense of awe. Players seek to experience a sense of wonder within a magical world, a key pleasure of the literary forms described above. We encourage the exploration of these and other unique spaces in game design and game culture, towards more egalitarian and expanded domains for play where everyone can feel included, inspired, enlivened and entertained.

Authors’ Biographies

Jacquelyn Ford Morie is a Senior Researcher at the university of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (http://www.ict.usc.edu). Her research includes fully immersive multi‑sensory virtual environments as well as new mobile
technologies used in the service of training and education. She is a member and co‑founder of the game collective Ludica and is a visiting lecturer in game design at the Unversity of California, Los Angeles. Morie holds masters degrees in both Fine Arts and Computer Science, and was awarded her PhD in 2007 for her Immersive Environment research from
the SMARTLab at the University of East London.
Links: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~Emorie, http://www.ict.usc.edu/, http://www.ludica.org.uk/

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and co‑Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab where she does design research in new genres of gameplay. Prior to joining the USC faculty, she was a professional game designer for fifteen years; her textbook on the design process Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games is in use at game programs worldwide. Tracy’s recent credits include faculty advisor for the award‑winning student games Cloud and flOw and game designer for The Night Journey, a unique game/art project with media artist Bill Viola.
Links: http://www.tracyfullerton.com/, http://interactive.usc.edu, http://www.ludica.org.uk/

Celia Pearce, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. Previously she helped launch gaming and media arts initiatives at University of California Irvine and University of Southern California. Prior to entering academia, she was a designer interactive attractions, exhibitions and games. Her game designs include the award‑winning attraction Virtual Adventures (for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. She is has authored numerous papers and book chapters, as well as The Interactive
Book (Macmillan 1997) and Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds (scheduled for publication by MIT in 2009.) She is also Festival Chair for IndieCade and co‑founder of Ludica, a women’s game collective. Links: http://www.cpandfriends.com, http://egl.gatech.edu, http://egg.lcc.gatech.edu, http://www.ludica.org.uk

Notes

[1] A number of studies, including the IGDA report on industry demographics in the U.S. (http://www.igda.org/diversity/report.php) and Li Haines’ 2004 report Why are there so few women in games? for Manchester: Media Training Northwest.
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[2] The schism between ‘real’ games and games played primarily by women can be seen in the fact that the premier online game database Moby Games only accepts entries for games published on disk or available as full downloadable packages. No web-only games, such as those created in Flash or Shockwave, are included in their knowledge-base. Moby also has no reference to any of the titles from Purple Moon.
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[3] That said, there are certain contexts in which women and girls can and do derive pleasure from competing on equal terms in male space. The Frag Dolls, for instance, a professional women’s gaming team initiated by developer Ubisoft, are champions at games such as Splinter Cell (2002). And Grrlgamer.com is a web site devoted to female players where female-targeted reviews weigh equally between more ‘hardcore’ (read: male-centered) games and those that might traditionally be thought of us more female-friendly, such as casual game Diner Dash or Pet Pals: Animal Doctor.
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[4] American McGee’s Alice (Rogue Entertainment, 2000) is a re-imagining of the classic story using the mechanics of a first-person shooter game. In this cynical version of the adventure, Alice is traumatized and institutionalized before returning to a much-changed Wonderland where she battles through gnome-ridden tunnels and boojum-guarded strongholds armed with a rusty ‘vorpal blade’ (from the original Jabberwocky) and razor-sharp playing cards. In this more male-oriented game design, the imaginative word play and puzzling incongruity of the original ‘game world’ of Wonderland is replaced with direct conflict and dangerous environments.
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Introduction

The intersection of art and technology is not new, yet the context and history of this interchange have largely been ignored, though it extends back hundreds, even thousands of years. For most of that time the arts exerted a strong influence on technological and scientific invention and discovery; it is only recently that the arts have depended quite so heavily on technology to lead the way (Goldberg, 2001).

Art and science are both cultural activities (Wilson, 2003). The push for a new interplay between them has come both from artists trying to access new technologies and researchers desiring additional creative insights into modern innovation.

Access to sciences techniques or technology, in order to critique or use them aesthetically, is restricted in many ways. It is not as simple as buying ‘off the shelf’ paints as used by the traditional arts. There are real barriers to getting access to these new creative spaces because of the technologies’ complexity.

As a scientist, I had easy access to life science technology, but when I chose a career path outside of medical life science research, that ceased. Fortuitously, it was at this time that I encountered artists and technologists collaborating through the Converge symposium and exhibition in 2002. It was at this Adelaide conference that I first heard and saw Tissue Culture and Art’s (TC&A) work. The exhibited piece Pigs Wing was a living sculpture. It was the first time I had seen a tissue culture lab in a gallery. The installation consisted of degradable polymers seeded with pig cartilage cells. These sculptures were small, less than an inch high, and were growing inside a rotating incubator within the bespoke lab. TC&A also exhibited previously grown ‘wings’ as gold coated artefacts. The wings grown were angel, bird and bat representing the good, the known, and evil respectively. In this way TC&A interrogated the utopian medical future. This was inspirational and I travelled to Perth Biennale of Electronic Art to see more related works and artists. Here I saw TC&A’s semi-living Worry Dolls. These tiny dolls were made out of degradable polymers and surgical sutures that had been seeded with endothelial (skin), muscle and osteoblast (bone) cells. As the cells grew, the polymer degraded. The outcome of this trip were ideas for works I wanted to explore in a life science laboratory, however access (economic, intellectual and regulatory) was suddenly the overriding problem. For this reason, I have been intensely interested in how artists address this problem in different fields.

Ingenuity is required to solve the pressing problem of access for contemporary artists. Access can be broken into three separate albeit interrelated aspects (Table 1):

Access

How it restricts access

Example

Economic

Does the artist have the means to buy it?

Expensive technology
e.g. rapid prototyping

Intellectual

Does the artist have the right to use it?

Patented technology
e.g. cell markers

Regulatory

Does the artist have regulatory approval to use it?

Restricted technology
e.g. stem cells

Table 1. Types of access

The problem of economic access is hardly new. For painters working up to the invention of oil paints in 1856 the problem was access to colour (Finlay, 2003), both the pigment and the techniques for making them into a paint. Certain colours in the 1600s were so costly and scarce that only rich patrons could afford to buy them for their artists. For example, ultramarine, a pigment made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, cost 100 florins per pound in 1508 (Finlay, 2003: 318). This scarcity may be the reason that the Virgin Mary robe is unpainted in Michelangelo’s the entombment as only ultramarine was deemed worthy of her in Renaissance Italy (2003: 310). As a pigment, it is still expensive today at £2500 per pound, however there are inexpensive oil paint equivalents. A recent example of the expense of technology is the cost of rapid prototyping for Ken Rinaldo’s and Matt Howard’s Auto Telematic Spider Bots (Marshal, 2006). Rapid prototyping of the components in the spider bots would have run to US $50 000. The piece was only possible because of the gifting of material and time on their machines by the rapid prototyping company, Laser Reproductions. As it was, the artists’ needs exceeded the capacity of the equipment. This necessitated a rethink in terms of what parts could be created using more traditional fabrication techniques (Ken Rinaldo, personal commmunication).

The products of innovation that artists wish to access are often protected by trade secrets or patents. A patent is a right granted for any device, substance, method or process which is new, inventive and useful (ipaustralia.gov.au). Patents allow a limited window (up to 20 years) where the originator may exploit the financial rewards of their invention. This is not intended to stifle creativity, as patents that are granted are also published. The main type is a utility patent which covers novel processes and products. For example, Apple might have patents on the iPod navigation wheel (product) and buy a licence from another company to use their patent to make the silicon chips (process). Most technology (e.g. the polymerase chain reaction technology (PCR), commonly used to replicate DNA) is tied heavily into patents with licensing that proscribes the ways a product may be used. When a researcher buys a PCR kit, they are buying a licence to use it. The machine used to carry out the PCR likewise will be licensed and covered by patents. These licences stipulate that it is for non-commercial research. A commercial licence for diagnostics costs more (e.g. see the Extended PCR License Information at http://www.abgene.com/Static_Pages.asp?page=33).

When the inventor perceives that a process can’t be patented, trade secrets are used, the most familiar example being the secret coca cola ingredient. Trade secrets allow a monopoly to be maintained, as there is no publication of the process. In medieval times pigments and their origin was often a closely guarded trade secret. Artistic guilds held the secrets on how to produce paints, pigments, and painting surfaces. Artist guilds were organizations that controlled the flow of knowledge by training trusted apprentices. Gradually the know-how to make paints moved from the artist to the ‘colour men’, professionals with knowledge of the formulation of colours (Finlay, 2003: 16). Artists no longer had to deal with the messiness of pigment grinding and making, giving them more time to work. However this speed came at a cost; artists no longer understood the technology underlying painting. Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt despaired at this state of affairs in 1880 (Hunt, 1880). This paper was a call to arms for artists to understand their media. In a similar way, over a hundred years later, electronic artist Stephen Wilson makes the same call to understand modern technology underlying the arts. In his introduction to Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, he describes finding out about how radio works as part of his arts practice (Wilson, 2003: xxiii). A modern example of trade secrets in life science may be the specific method of disaggregating and purifying a particular cell type from an organ or a new process for making silicon chips.

Regulatory access to technology is one of the additional layers of difficulty that comes with working with living systems. In bioart these include the amount of regulation and infrastructure required to satisfy governments’ desire for control, security and risk management. The act of sacrificing an animal for the sake of art is controversial, although every day it is done for food and scientific research. In Australia, experiments carried out in universities involving animals are reviewed by an internal ethics board. They use the ‘NHMRC Australian code of practice for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes’ as their guide to determine whether ethics clearance should be granted (Australian Code of Practice). This is to satisfy the condition that the experiment is necessary, involves the minimum number of animals, and has a clear benefit to society. This places artists in a difficult position. Artists must satisfy the same committee, although it is much harder to prove a clear benefit to society unless there is a clear scientific outcome as well. In Australia experiments involving the use or creation of genetic manipulated organisms must satisfy an institutional biosafety committee. This allows the evaluation of the experiment into the categories: a) exempt; b) a notifiable low risk dealing (NLRD); c) a dealing requiring a license from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator. Projects falling into the NLRD classification require a lab built to a minimum containment level to reduce the risk of spread of biological materials in order to comply with the Gene Technology Act 2000 (Office of Research Integrity, ANU). Non-regulated or non-institutional use of micro-organisms, even the relatively safe ones in the exempt category can be equated with bioterrorism. This is apparent in the arrest of Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble in the United States as a suspected bioterrorist because of cultured bacteria being found at his house (Sholette, 2005) although these are used to teach biology in high schools.

Where are some of these new technologies coming from? Broadly, advances are in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and materials sciences. Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale made famous by physicist Richard Feynman (1960); biotechnology is the manipulation of living processes, in order to generate therapeutic products, new organisms and remediate contaminated environments; robotics is the generation of artificial autonomous entities for purposes ranging from manufacturing to the military to human welfare; materials science provides some of the oldest examples of technology, with epochs of civilisation defined by the uses of materials (i.e. the bronze, silver and iron ages). It can be said that we are entering the carbon age, with advances in carbon nanotubes predicted to have wide application. Although these areas of technology are quite different, a single project in either science or art may use technology from multiple fields. For example, whole organ culture requires an artificial scaffold made of polymers (materials science), created using microfabrication for an artificial vascular system, which entails knowledge of fluid dynamics on the cellular level and life science techniques to succeed.

Significant collaborations between engineers and artists such began in the late 1960s. Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) founded by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in 1966, produced a large body of over 500 works (Kluver, 2000: 72). It became clear that achieving ongoing artist-engineer relationships would require a concerted effort to develop the necessary physical and social conditions. E.A.T. saw itself as a catalyst for stimulating this involvement of industry and technology with the arts (Kluver, 2000). Although successful in opening a dialogue between artist and scientist-engineer, however, it did not address the role of artists in research, which later endeavours such as Xerox Parc did (Wilson, 2003).

This paper is my investigation into how artists currently access technology and offers some predictions as to what may happen in the future. It also covers my personal journey from scientist to artist. During this time I have had opportunities to work closely with and observe at first hand the art organisations at the forefront of the hybrid arts. I draw on interviews with and observations of Blast Theory, SymbioticA Research Group and FoAM. These groups have been selected for the central role research has in their practice and the various modes of access to technology they utilise.

Organisations, Collaborations, Works

Blast Theory and I like Frank in Adelaide

‘I like Frank in Adelaide’ 2004

Blast Theory was approached by the Thinkers in Residence Project of Adelaide (see internode.on.net). This residency for three months had a broad brief including a survey of Adelaide’s strengths and weaknesses in the New Media arts, to liaise with key policymakers in the education, IT and government to promote New Media. Additionally they had the opportunity to create and perform I Like Frank in Adelaide. As part of the development of I Like Frank in Adelaide, five art practitioners (myself included) had the opportunity to collaborate with Blast Theory/Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) in its creation and execution.

I like Frank was the first 3G phone mixed reality game. Through their partners MNet, Blast Theory were granted exclusive access to the prototype 3G network, which was required in order to use of video calling as part of the experience. Earlier works such as Can you See Me Now and Unkle Roy all Around utilised PDAs and WiFi networks:

The second half of the residency involved developing and staging I Like Frank In Adelaide, a public performance based upon 3G technologies. This extended a previous work, Uncle Roy All Around You, building a relationship between street and online players as they journeyed through Adelaide and an online virtual model of Adelaide, exploring the themes of loss, memory and the crossing of boundaries (amutualfriend.co.uk).

Street players moved though a journey narrated by Frank’s unnamed friend, following mobile phone screen clues and assisted by online gamers to find postcards hidden in the city. The street player could respond to questions from online players with a yes or no. In the final sequence, the player was directed into ‘futureland’ via a video call from Frank. In futureland (a leafy alcove in the middle of four unoccupied business tower blocks), the street player was asked to read out the question on their postcard and answer it. These questions, such as ‘who makes you feel safe?’, were open ended, ambiguous and involved players explaining their own connection with others. The player writes down a response on the postcard and leaves it there, and the postcard was then sent to the online player that assisted the street player (Flintham et al, 2007). I Like Frank is based upon the ideas of interaction and software as developed in Unkle Roy all Around and Can You See Me Now. It also built on the use of colour maps as a way to design the game narrative, requiring the player to map literate. The game used self-reporting as the locative mechanism rather than a separate global positioning (GPS) receiver, and players also explored the surrounding game by self-reporting a little ahead of themselves. In a comparison of GPS and self reporting, Blast Theory/MRL has shown that self reporting was as reliable as GPS in mixed reality games (Benford et al, 2004), and moreover, GPS receivers have line of sight problems in the urban environment.

Developing for the mobile phone brought a number of limitations that were not present when developing for PDA devices. The phone has limited memory, and no touch screen. Additionally when using java to program the phone there was limited access to the phones intrinsic functions such as video calling and voice calling. Whilst as a performance it was successful, it was unsuccessful in becoming a model for a scalable mixed reality game because of the human and technical resources required. This performance was experienced by less than 100 people and required a team of 12 people to develop and run it. The backend required constant supervision, whilst on the street runners supervised street players from a distance, ready to assist should the phone crash or network go down. For further discussion about these issues see the ‘A Mutual Friend’ (amutualfriend.co.uk) website. This site details Nick Tandavanitj’s research into mixed reality gaming and outlines novel ideas for getting around these problems in new mixed reality works.

Blast Theory

Blast Theory are an UK based interactive art and performance group. Started in 1991 by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, the group, now a team of seven, is based in Brighton, UK (blastheory.co.uk). In the early 1990s Blast Theory saw dance clubs as a new cultural space, and wanted to explore that such spaces through dance and theatre (‘More about Blast Theory’, 2007). Using the clubs themselves as art galleries Blast Theory placed art in a fluid and less controlled arena with a new audience.

Their earlier works Can You See Me Now and Unkle Roy all Around are mixed reality pieces. i.e. they occur both on the street and in a virtual space within the computer. In Can You See Me Now, online players are ‘chased’ by street players/actors using PDAs and GPS navigation. In Unkle Roy all Around online players and street players collaborate to find Uncle Roy’s office before being invited to make a year long commitment to a total stranger. This last idea of commitment to a stranger runs throughout Blast Theory’s work, where connections are sought between players, and between the player and a long absent friend, and an implicit challenge to trust in another.

Blast Theory are involved in mixed reality gaming as a social activity, as a performative event, and as a spectacle. The group’s work explores interactivity and the relationship between real and virtual space (mixed reality) with a particular focus on the social and political aspects of technology. Access to a network is required to mediate a lot of their artworks, as they are interested in using the Device (their terminology) the handset, headset, PDAs and networks to create novel ways of interaction through messages as text, video and audio.

Blast Theory’s collaborators

The main collaborator of Blast Theory is the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University (mrl.nott.uk.au). Matt Adams from Blast Theory met the head of MRL, Steve Benford, when Blast Theory was undertaking a research and development residency at Nottingham University in 1997. During this residency, Blast Theory developed a system to project video on falling water for their piece Desert Rain. The head of MRL recognized in their art work similar ideas to that which he was exploring in his research into traversable interfaces (screens that you step through in order to enter a virtual world). They entered into a dialog: “It took about 18 months to bridge the gaps in process and vocabulary between the two organisations” (‘More about Blast Theory’, 2007). Since then, MRL has assisted with the technical needs of Blast Theory’s projects Can You See Me Now? and Unkle Roy All Around. Martin Flintham, Jan Humble, Ian Taylor and Steve Benford from MRL assisted Blast Theory with I Like Frank in Adelaide, providing essential feedback on gameplay issues, programming the phones and software for the game, and maintaining/troubleshooting the system during gameplay.

For their part, MRL are a research organisation interested in the ethnography of human and machine mediated human interaction. They describe themselves as ‘a dedicated studio facility where computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, engineers, architects and artists collaborate to explore the potential of ubiquitous, mobile and mixed reality technologies to shape everyday life’ (mrl.nott.ac.uk). Blast Theory’s mixed reality pieces produce a wealth of data that can be analysed in order to study human interactions with technology and each other. In some ways Blast Theory’s projects can be seen simultaneously as an art work and an ethnological experiment, and MRL can use these works as an independent zone of research.

This collaboration is mutually beneficial to both parties involved; Blast Theory gains technological support (subsequently allowing them to overcome economic, intellectual and regulatory access issues) and MRL gain invaluable and unique data from them. It is also instrumental in getting out of the lab and into the real world. The elegant truth is that the knowledge that MRL gains can be incorporated into further games to enable a better user experience. Blast Theory benefits from this partnership, with in-kind donations of expertise, technology and time. Additionally, co-authoring of papers in peer reviewed journals gives their works academic status.

Furthermore, through this robust partnership a powerful multi-skilled organisation with artistic, technical and ethnological expertise has been created which has attracted major blue chip companies such as Sony, and strengthened their applications for the EU funded ‘Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming (IPerG)’ (mrl.nott.ac.uk) and contributions to the Equator Project.

For I like Frank in Adelaide, M-Net (IPerG, 2007) provided access to the prototype 3G network, Internode, the web/internet for the game servers, and the Thinkers in Residence commissioned the work (M-Net, 2007). Additional support For I Like Frank in Adelaide came from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) and Arts Council of England (ACE) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Equator project.
Transient Reality Generators (TRG)

Transient reality generators (TRG) (FoAM)

TRG is a project that builds upon the two previous immersive installations/responsive environments: TGarden and txOom. TGarden is a responsive Play Space whose visitors shape the media environment through movement and gesture. txOom is embodied as a wearable fabric, which transmits signals from movement to the environment. All three projects are concerned with the ‘irreal’ in new media art. The conceptual framework within which the artists develop their concepts and designs is ‘simulation of physics and physicality of simulation’. FoAM through this work is reality mixing, making visible and tactile the underlying electro-magnetic, and gravitational forces through interactive environments. Their concept of the ‘irreal’ is the physical manifestation of following a philosophy to the end, of making reality thin and allowing an experience of large and small scales. This immersive environment seeks to give the participant a visceral experience, the environment evolving based upon interaction between the participants. Rather than an art work, it seeks to become an art world and a new social space.

The TRG environment was designed to give the impression of a merging of physical and virtual worlds. It was intended to be robust enough to work almost continuously for several weeks, affordable (i.e. within a limited budget), and to be understandable, modifiable, or extendable enough to be used by others. The hardware was based on similar setups from FoAMs previous installations: computers (mac and linux boxes), firewire cameras, sound system, video projectors, and sensors. Software was open source/free software (FLOSS) with the programmer Stephen Pickles writing the graphics output software, using these publicly available libraries and tools. The majority of the work was in getting the various components to mesh. Sound was created using supercollider (also FLOSS) with sensor analysis, networking and video tracking software FoAM had developed for previous works. (Nik Gaffney, personal communication). TRGs rationale, design ideas, implementation, and progress can be seen in FoAM’s wiki ‘libarynth’ (Project TRG, 2007). It is a milestone in FoAMs research, with the next instantiation, the guild for reality integrators (gRIG), building upon this body of knowledge.

FoAM

The Foundation of Affordable Mysticism (FoAM) was set up at Starlab (a Brussels blue sky research organization), directed by Maja Kuzmanovic. Following the dissolution of Starlab in 2001, she, Lina Kusaite, Guy van Belle and Nik Gafney set up FoAM as an independent organization in Brussels, Belgium (FoAM newsletter, 2003). The second workspace in Amsterdam, Netherlands, provides an additional space to create work, run workshops and seminars: ‘FoAM provides a legal and financial framework for approximately 20 artists and scientists (the number changes based on project sizes) to establish partnerships with public and private research institutions, cultural organisations, educational structures and businesses, while remaining an enticing experimental territory’ (Communique, italics added). Moreover, ‘FoAM is a workspace for a multitude of professions interested in interdisciplinary cultural, aesthetic and political experiments’ (Communique).

FoAM are more interested in making spaces for play than traditional static ‘works of art’. They explore new and old cultural experiences (such as food/art/story telling), tangible and intangible aesthetic experiences.They create mixed reality artwork and installations with mathematical concepts embodied in physical play (txOom/Tgarden/TRG), or ecological concepts communicated through social settings (GroWorld). GroWorld, for example, is a research project to counter the ‘rapid decrease of diversity in the social, biological and cultural habitats’ (GroWorld, 2007). In order to realize their vision they seek out collaborators and technologies. One of their current inquiries is into ways of making open source collaborative art.

FoAM received funding for TRG from the Culture 2000 Programme of the European Commission and the Flemish Ministry of Culture.

FoAMs Collaborations for TRG

FoAM collaborates with Times Up! Located in Linz, Austria, but the latter don’t provide FoAM with the technology. Their collaboration is based upon exchanging knowledge, based on their relative strengths. Times Up! provides to FoAM knowledge on pneumatics and mechanical engineering, maths (mainly in practical issues, sometimes theoretical), digital physics and media dynamics. FoAM in return provides knowledge on materials research, performance studies and storytelling, real time audiovisual systems and movement studies. (Maja Kuzmanovic, personal communication).

In order to access technolgy, FoAM develop and scavenge quite a few things themselves (in collaboration with free-lance scientists and engineers). They also set up European projects, where they team up with other organisations and universities who have complementary skills, and with whom they can work on developing something specifically for their productions. Nevertheless, FoAM chooses to not attach themselves to a university or an industrial research lab. They prefer instead to remain independent and therefore ideally equal partners with the scientists. They offer, among other things, the testing of their prototypes, access to the public and a consultation on these new applications. FoAMs collaborations are of course not all about access to technology, but also access to different perspectives, and more minds. In these contexts, FoAM has contacts and information exchanges with the MRLab in Singapore, Free University of Brussels, University of Leuven, TU Delft, Philips, Concordia, Sony, and the BBC.

SymbioticA and Multi-Electrode Array Art (Meart)

MEART

MEART – The Semi Living Artist is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new biological technologies (MEART, 2007). This project builds on the Fish and Chips project which SymbioticA Research Group exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival, themed ‘Takeover’, in 2001. This artwork consisted of goldfish neural slices growing over a computer chip. Nerve potentials from the goldfish neurons controlled both the robot arm that drew, and a sound piece. The feedback loop was the output from the sound piece being fed back to the neurons through electrode stimulation. MEART is a logical extension of Fish and Chips, however as the artwork no longer involved fish or growing cells on silicon, a name change was required. It is an ongoing project, having been exhibited multiple times (Ben-Ayr, personal communication).

The MEART art work itself is also constantly evolving. In its physical form, MEART is a culture of rat nerve cells growing on a Multiple Electrode Array of 61 electrodes (MEA – an advanced two way interface to/from the neurons), a robotic arm that draws based upon inputs from the rat nerve cells and a network to transmit the information between the two parts. The neural culture resides in the Potter lab in Atlanta, USA, with the rest of the artwork being portable. In the Black Square project, for example, the input was comprised of a simple square of black representing the pixel, and MEART was ‘commissioned’ to draw from this simplified input. Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti (Ulturafuturo Group) facilitated the Black Square exhibition of MEART in ART Digital 2004, the first Russian biennale for contemporary arts. The ultrafuturo group have a serious interest in rights for artificial intelligences. This group provided a conceptual space for MEART to explore, that of the black square, from Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground (1918). This abstract work can be understood in relation to future developments in space travel and cryonics at the turn of the 20th century. It was an example of supremacist art, concerned with transcendence and leaving the earth (McRae, 2007). In the current era the black square was represented by the pixel. In effect, here MEART is ‘contemplating’ the past to its future; it is one of the futures foreseen by Malevich.

As the culture evolves, connections between the neurons form and degrade. Importantly, there is a feedback loop where electrical stimuli may be applied to the nerve culture, these based upon inputs such as a digitised photo of a person. This feedback loop affects the connections between the neurons. An emergent property of this system is learning. As an artwork, it is complex and living and requires constant tending; the neuron culture itself is unstable and may die. When this happens a new culture is swapped in and the piece starts again with a naïve neural culture (McRae, 2007).

Working with rat tissue brought up an additional layer of complexity, as the regulations controlling mammalian experimentation is much more stringent that fish experimentation. SymbioticA needed regulatory approval in order to make this work:

SymbioticA’s research projects have to apply to the same ethics committees as scientific projects involving the use of living material. When MEART first applied to the ethics committee at the University of Western Australia for approval to create a semi-living entity, the committee concluded by disqualifying itself from making a decision because the chairman felt that the committee was not equipped to make such a decision concerning the use of cells for artistic rather than scientific purposes (McRae, 2007).

The application was granted by the vice chancellor with the proviso that the project had a greater science component.

SymbioticA Research Group

SymbioticA Research Group is an independent artist run studio within the Human Anatomy department of the University of Western Australia. It was established in 2000 by cell biologist Professor Miranda Grounds, neuroscientist Professor Stuart Bunt and artist Oron Catts:

Research projects within SymbioticA are dedicated to artistic inquiry into new knowledge and technology with a strong interest in the life sciences. SymbioticA has resident researchers and students undertaking projects that explore and develop the links between the arts and a range of research areas such as neuroscience, plant biology, anatomy and human biology, tissue engineering, physics, bio-engineering, museology, anthropology, molecular biology, microscopy, animal welfare and ethics (‘Research at SymbioticA’).

SymbioticA provides a space for critiquing biotechnology through aesthetic and physical bioart. It hosts the Tissue Culture and Art project responsible for Pig Wings, semi-living Worry Dolls, Stelarcs 1/4 Ear and the Fish and Chips project responsible for the creation of MEART – the semi living artist. Additionally, it provides a place where artists may learn about wet biology techniques and develop new collaborations and work.

SymbioticA Research Group’s collaborators for MEART

SymbioticA has members from a wide range of fields, however, in order to support their work they may travel further afield. For example, to advance the technology behind Fish and Chips Guy Ben-Ayr approached Dr Steve Potter (Potter lab, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA). A few weeks before ARS Electronica 2001 (the premier of Fish and Chips) he found papers that were written by Dr Potter about embodiment of neurons and his attempt to build an animat (Demarse et al, 2001). Dr Steve Potter is a leader in the field of ‘in vitro learning’.

Ben-Ayr identified the synergy with the Potter lab; it was obvious to him that one of the main issues with MEART would be the feedback loop, and Potter had developed an advanced two way interface to/from the neurons (MEA), a very expensive technology that SymbioticA did not have. While ‘Fish and Chips was chaotic’ (a proof of concept), MEART is based on solid science yet still explores ethical and philosophical questions to do with the semi living artist. Ben-Ayr was impressed to see that Potter approached the same issues as SymbioticA did from a different angle – a scientific one: ‘After ARS Electronica I sent him an e-mail with pictures about Fish and Chips telling him what SymbioticA did in ARS Electronica’ (Guy Ben-Ayr, personal communication). Potter replied stating his interest in their project. During a trip to Australia, Potter presented a lecture to SymbioticA on his work with rat nerve cell cultures. He was studying their interaction with virtual 3D environments and in particular was looking for a way of giving his cultures a physical embodiment, and learnt that the SymbioticA Research Group were seeking future collaborations to produce MEART or semi-living artists.

Through the Potter Lab, the SymbioticA Research Group was granted access to Multiple Electrode Arrays and the rat neuronal cell cultures in order to make MEART a reality, although access to the Potter lab technology has not changed the artistic intent of the piece. Rather it made the piece more solid, based on scientific research. While the work still explores the same questions and realities, the increased complexity of the rat neuron cultures and accuracy of the feedback loop makes the piece more exciting than Fish and Chips, since a wider range of entity-behaviour can now be envisioned. Additionally, as a result of the collaboration, MEART now touches on the artificial life issues of behaviour, embodiment and agency. In this case, collaboration means more than just access to technology; it means access to additional bodies of knowledge and viewpoints.

Methods of Access

To address the problem of access to technologies, artists employ a number of strategies (Table 2).

Access

Solutions

Economic

Grants
Sponsorship
In kind donations
Alternative ways of evoking the technology

Intellectual

Granted licence
Residencies Workshops
Open Source

Regulatory

Approval
Different organism

Table 2. Solutions to access.

There are significant crossovers in the various solutions and often it is not possible to separate the relative components. However, many countries have recognised the importance of supporting the creative and innovative dialogue between artists and scientists. For example, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, of the Tissue Culture and Art group (which went on to establish SymbioticA), received a grant from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council of the Arts, enabling a one year residency/fellowship at the Harvard Medical School where they learned about organ fabrication techniques (‘Fish-bird’, 2003). This learning period was crucial to their further works.

In Australia, the Australia Council of the Arts and Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) have been supporting the placement of artists within science or cultural institutions through the Synapse and artist in residence programs. The participating organisations include the Australian Broadcasting Commission, SymbioticA, and various divisions of the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO). The Australian Research Council through an industry linkage grants system supports art and science collaborations. e.g. Mari Velonaki’s development of the installation FISH–BIRD CIRCLE B–MOVEMENT C with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics received an ARC Linkage grant of $AU 240 000 spread over four years (Gere, 2006). This is still a small budget, but indicates a willingness to support collaborative research.

The Wellcome Trust does a similar job in the UK, funding artists and collaborative research. The Wellcome trust support collaborations through its sciart grants. These grants are specifically for ‘projects aimed to stimulate fresh thinking and debate in both disciplines, and to reach and engage with diverse audiences on the social, ethical and cultural issues that surround contemporary biomedical science’ (Wellcome Trust).

NESTA (the national endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) also supports innovation by initiating programmes to support and foster collaboration. NESTA has recently initiated research into the role of the arts in innovation: ‘It’s clear that the UK’s vibrant arts and creative scene has a far broader impact than simply cultural – it underpins our creative economy. However, very little analysis has been done to evaluate this broader contribution’ (NESTA).

Artist groups that position themselves in a certain field may, because of their profile, attract sponsors. Works are then commissioned such as Blast Theory’s I Like Frank in Adelaide. However, this sponsorship is often not matched with sufficient funding or support, as can be seen in the technical issues that Blast Theory/MRL needed to surmount in order to provide an enjoyable user experience for I like Frank in Adelaide.

Groups like FoAM, on the other hand, often create their own material in conjunction with freelance scientists and engineers:

We often use the metaphor of scavenging – sometimes we manage to get our hands on the cutting edge technology, but more often we learn what the technology does and assemble a kind of ‘cargo-cult’ version of it – that is cheaper, possible to make in your kitchen/bathroom/garage, incorporates both off the shelf and custom developed components (Maja Kuzmanovic, FoAM, personal communication).

The ‘cargo cult’ metaphor is based upon the folklore of islanders in the Pacific observing planes landing and disgorging goods on the next island. They wished to get the goods too, and reasoned wrongly that by making a clearing/runway themselves, the planes would land there. However, in the case of the arts, I believe that the ‘planes’ often land by chance. In SymbioticA Research Group’s case with MEART, they encountered Potter who was developing advanced technology that could be used in their artwork, and the seriousness of their application and familiarity with his work meant that he was willing to collaborate.

Even when access is granted, Legget (2004) points out that there can be pitfalls. Nigel Helyer worked with Lake Technology in 1999 and was instrumental in them patenting the technology being developed: ‘The tangible outcomes have been of considerable value to Lake, but because the intricacies of patent law (as distinct from copyright) were new to Helyer and the Australia Council, financial returns to the artist have been less than satisfactory (Legget, 2004). Heyler could not exhibit his artwork Sonic Landscapes at ConVerge as Lake Technology had sold the patent to another company. This is the disadvantage of basing artworks on a proprietary technology; the access to technology is removed because of economic reasons and the legal ability to exhibit it is lost.

Regulatory access may delay the project. The process of obtaining the necessary permission takes time (many months), and means that even relatively simple works are delayed. In some cases, changing the organism or location of the work may result in less stringent regulations. Technology and software based upon open source does not have this disadvantage. Additionally, open source software is created and improved by a team of developers that are used to collaborating. When the source code is available, for example, the software that FoAM uses for its installations can to be tailored to the installation.

Conclusions

The case studies above show three different types of art organisations and how they obtain the technology they require. All use collaboration as a means to overcoming the difficulties of access. However, the type of collaboration varies from distinct partnerships to fluid knowledge exchange. The technology the artist uses need not be hi-tech in order to attract collaborators, just embody a similar paradigm to the technology that they ultimately wish to access.

FoAM is an organisation which works on an independent basis with technology organisations, seeking new ways of gaining access to smart/responsive materials that will enhance the experience of their installations. Their emulation of new technology allows them to sidestep the issue of access. In a ‘cargo cult’ fashion, they work on the assumption that they have access to all the technology they require; technology ‘finds a way’ to their door. Moreover, the cargo cult of art also works to attract researchers, and facilitates new ways of collaborating.

Blast Theory is an organization that has a strong synergistic relationship with the university-based research lab MRL. Principally, they are concerned with creating a humanistic interactive performance while their partner MRL utilises the game as a social experiment. They seek to concentrate on social interaction in the game, disseminating the narrative of their performances without the excessive human intervention required for running I like Frank in Adelaide.

SymbioticA Research Group are an independent art studio based in a medical research unit at the University of Western Australia. This enables them to attract collaborators from the science community and also provides a place where artists can learn the techniques of the life sciences. MEART, the work of the SymbioticA Research Group, explores the idea of a disembodied artificial artist and provides the Potter lab with a novel environment for their cell cultures. This group have continually debated upon a future where their semi-living entities will live outside the confines of the lab, and view this possibility with ambivalence and trepidation. They seek to test the hypothesis of a ‘victimless utopia’ within the life sciences. Thus far, the unsuccessful experiments of victimless steak and leather, by TC&A, demonstrate that there is no reality of a ‘victimless utopia’.

Access to technology becomes easier over time as proprietary platforms become commercial; gradually the technology (e.g. computers, the internet, digital photography, GPS, grafted plants) becomes readily available. Other technology is destined to remain esoteric: the particle accelerators of modern times, electron scanning microscopes, atomic force microscopes, medical scanning equipment. Yet even this specialist domain is not inaccessible for the most tenacious artists.

Currently, there is a push from both hobbyists and institutions to continue development of open source biology. With the completion of the Human Genome Project and other sequence projects, large DNA and protein data sets are available to all. This is still a relatively new arena for the artist/amateur and is giving rise to a movement called ‘biohacking’ which seeks to bring biology to the backyard shed. This erases some of the problems of access for artists, though of course issues relating to regulation remain. Artist Phil Ross is quoted by Sacha Pohflepp at the two-day workshop about art and biotechnology at ISEA/Zero One as suggesting that ‘a reasonably high-level biotechnology lab can be set up for $US 3000’ (Pohflepp). This technology is both available and affordable. These borderline cases are interesting, particularly life science techniques where a new era of hobbyists, craftspeople, artists and technologists will coexist. Broadening the base of people interested and involved in the life sciences is essential to increasing the publics’ engagement with this technology.

The expiration of patents also enables new opportunities. The intellectual encumbrances are removed, and with the monopoly gone, the technology becomes cheaper. For instance, the major patents for the PCR product and process (US Patent No’s 05352600 and 4889818) have now lapsed. A question to answer, however, is whether cutting edge technologies will become as cheap as paint or photo developing; Maja comments:

Some of them will, but as things go, artists always find new and expensive things that we want to use as our tools. I also think it’s not only a matter of expense – it’s also a matter of access. Computers were very expensive and available only in research labs, when first media artists began making their work in the 60s. Internet was difficult to access when net-art began, at this moment, we’re struggling to get access to ‘smart materials’, etc. also – maybe once the technology becomes cheap and accessible, the art-forms become less experimental? (Maja, FoAM, personal communication).

New media artists will always seek new experimental fields within which to operate. From a biological science background it is easy to see techniques and discoveries that will provide fertile ground for art experimentation and critique. Synthetic biology is an example of converging technologies, drawing from biotech, nanotech and information technology in order to design and create new biological artefacts (‘Extreme Genetic Engineering’, 2007). RNA interference (RNAi) allows switching off of genes and holds great promise for treating a wide range of diseases such as macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older people (Cromie). From an artist’s point of view it could be used to switch off various pigment genes in order to make transiently patterned organisms. Bio printing is also an emerging technique to explore, providing a new and relatively rapid way of printing tissues from assemblages of cells. Gunnar Green, for example, used bioprinting to explore text or letters, using plant seeds, bacteria and pheromones in various works (Pohflepp, ‘Living Letters’).

There is a real need for new collaborative ventures because of the demise or downsizing of several influential blue sky research organisations after 2000 (e.g. Bell Labs, Brussels’ Starlab, Europe’s MIT Lab). I believe that collaborations between artistic, scientific and humanistic researchers will grow to occupy and utilise these voids as new areas of creativity. Strong interaction between the arts and sciences will lead to a convergence, and interdisciplinary research is required.

In order to work in interdisciplinary fields an understanding of the language of technology is required. Mari Velonika explains in an interview in New Scientist that she convinced the researcher Hugh Durrant-Whyte, director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, to work with her on her Fish-Bird project by demonstrating that she knew how to design, and construct a circuit board. i.e. they had a common language (Nowak, 2006). Areas of agreement are more useful to these enterprises than trying to work out irreconcilable differences; it is about spending time where it is most useful, not on dogmatic arguments. Both parties reserve the right to interpret the ‘object of the enterprise’ in different ways, and for different purposes. This process can take time; Blast Theory and MRL took 18 months to bridge the gaps in process and vocabulary between the two organisations.

However, one field that needs a special focus is the bioarts, which by its very nature has complex issues of access. Any artist wishing to work in the sphere of bioart with cutting edge medical science will always need familiarisation with scientific methods. In order to clear ethical regulatory hurdles and conduct experiments, artists need a similar research rigor to that of scientists. As well as laying the foundation for successful collaborations in the future, interdisciplinary education can support the emergence of a researcher who is comfortable in both the arts and sciences. Yet what do the scientists gain? They reap real benefits from working with the artist, from the artist’s fresh thinking and innovative approach and unique insight into their work.

Arts and humanities councils are now playing a major role in encouraging and developing meaningful dialogue between scientists and artists. This generates good working relationships and mutually beneficial collaborations. Yuri Soloviev predicted that in the future artists and scientists would create a ‘special language’ that would evolve over time, and would ‘co-operate…new ways will be found to explain their purposes; perhaps also a new higher creative activity will come into being; designing new material and spiritual values, a kind of synthesis of all tasks and methods involved in pursuing all the aims of science, technology and art’ (Soloviev cited in D’Arcy, 1968: 11).

In the future, the trend is for more complex collaborations. Some significant problems of access are being erased by open source approaches and knowledge-sharing networks. Technology workshops are erasing other barriers. This is crucial as artists cannot critique new technologies without access and literacy. Moreover, how can artists be involved in and enhance the direction that these technologies take without access? Indeed, the regulatory access issues around bioart are major and merits significant research. As generalists and agents comfortable with occupying uneasy positions, artists are in a prime position to become equal researchers to the technologists and scientists. With the opportunities currently available there has never been a better time to bridge the cultures of art and science.

Author’s Biography

Brian Degger is a UK based artist whose self directed arts development was in Adelaide, South Australia. A formally trained biotechnologist, he plays with notions of ecology, alienation, and what it means to be an urban inhabitant. He does this through word, moving image and sound. His first foray as an artist was spoken word in the Interactive Art Gallery, Adelaide. He has had two photographic exhibitions of local Adelaide live acts (AdLibEmulsion) and animals (FFS, fur, feathers & scales), as well as musical performances of his own and others songs. His moving image pieces have been screened in Adelaide as part of SA living Artists week (2003, 2004, 2005) and OpenHouse (2003). His images have also been projected in DriversLane, Melbourne (2004) and by Epoch, Dublin, Ireland (2005).

He has participated in a number of workshops and master classes given by national and international artists. During the 2004 Adelaide fringe, he was part of a team of artist that assisted Blast Theory(UK) stage and perform “I like frank, in Adelaide”. For this mixed reality game he, in collaboration with Nick Tandavanitj, designed the online environment, a 3d representation of Adelaide city. During the running of the game, he was on the streets to help stranded players with their mobile devices. In 2006 he helped install Ken Rinaldo + Mat Howards exhibit ‘ Telematic Spider Bots’ as part of the north eastern England media festival, Avfest (Newcastle/Sunderland/Middlesbrough). His current research direction is in exploring how artists get access to the cutting edge technology (networks, tissue culture,mixed reality etc) they wish to explore. See http://transitlab.org

Acknowledgments

Thankyou to SymbioticA, Blast Theory and FoAM for allowing me to find out about the collaboration processes. In particular I wish to thank Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney from FOAM, Guy Ben-Ayr, and Oron Catts from SymbioticA, and Matt Adams from Blast Theory for insights into the specifics and generalities of collaboration. Thanks to Sarah McDonnell for her continual support.
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Introduction

Much of my writing has grappled with issues which I find fundamental to the formation of art-practices which exploit the capabilities of emerging technologies (often but not always, involving real time digital computation) (Penny, 1995; 1997).[1] These theoretical inquiries arise out of pragmatic attempts to apply these technologies to artistic practice. I have been developing custom electronic and digital technologies for cultural practices for twenty-five years. Throughout that time, I have felt an abiding disquiet regarding implicit disjunctions between technological and cultural practices, at a fundamental level. This paper is an attempt to make explicit a set of issues which I feel are fundamental to the contemporary socio-technological context, and crucially relevant to questions interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary digital arts practices, and to the question of the role of the arts on campuses and in the world at large.[2]

The presence of arts practices on contemporary campuses is fraught with complexity. While contrasts are commonly drawn between the science and humanity ‘sides’ of campuses, these practices share a common commitment to abstraction, symbolic notation and some notion of the power of general applicability. The academy as a whole, is a culture of the symbolic notation, of the book and the text. The arts, at its core, bypasses this translation from worldly experience of materiality to symbolic representation as alphanumeric characters. The arts is largely concerned with the way objects, forms, materials, and bodily actions can mean. The arts focus on immediate sensorial experience, unmediated by alphanumeric translation. I make this generalization quite aware that it is full of holes, but I make it in order to set such practices in stark contrast to alphanumeric practices of alphanumeric abstraction, and specifically to the act of coding and the functioning of code as an alphanumeric machine.

I am at pains to emphasise that although I will identify problematic aspects of theoretical, technical and cultural practices, I am not antagonistic to any of these. Indeed, I am an active and longtime practitioner in them all, and in their combinations. My goal is to help to establish a rigorous interdisciplinary critical foundation from which well-informed digital cultural practices can proceed.

This inquiry maps out a project of radically interdisciplinary intellectual research and artistic/technical production concerning the relation of embodied practices to the current state of digital technologies and the underlying values reified in the technology. As such it entails:

1. a rigorously interdisciplinary agenda,
2. a tightly integrated relation between theory and practice, where practice initiates theorising and theory informs practice,
3. the recognition of the need for the development of a theory of practice and of the ‘aesthetics of behavior’.

In my opinion, the full force of some of these realities is felt most clearly by the practitioner in the complex process of realisation of cultural artifacts employing these technologies. Contemporary digital arts practice is shaped, in large part, by the ramifications of the disjunctions discovered in a process where technological components formulated for instrumental ends are applied to goals which exceed these instrumental conceptions. Michael Mateas observed that ‘you push against the materials and the materials push back’. But in the case of digital arts, one might well assert that it is the ideology pushing the materials back.

These concerns can be differentiated into sub-categories. The most superficial (but nonetheless challenging), have to do with the pragmatics of the technical capabilities of these devices and the development of a design and development process for cultural applications which incorporates them. Another layer of concern is about how employment of these devices changes the kind of art which is made. Basic to any theoretico-historical study of emerging digital art practices is the recognition that such practices are the confluence of two streams. These are the traditions of industrial automation rooted in rationalist science (and consumer commodity economics); and the traditions of artisanal arts practices and their related institutions and philosophical contexts.

Digital Cultural Practice is a heterogeneous field, and distinctions can be drawn in along diverse axes. A fundamental distinction is between practices which are the emulation in digital technologies of pre-existing practices, as compared with those which are novel and ‘native’ to the new medium, for which one must struggle to find precedents in pre-digital practices. 2D image treatment rooted in photography, graphic design and painting, and digital video, is a prime example of the former. On the other hand are practices which are in some sense native to the context of computational technologies, and could not exist via backwards-emulation: 3D modeling and animation, hypertextual and sensor based interaction, interactive and multi-player networked gaming. (While this distinction is fundamental, it is not always clear, and as practices evolve, these distinctions tend to become aspects).[3] Any practices that exhibit dynamic real time behavior, or responsiveness to their environment and require real time computation and/or networking fall into the class of practices for which, I believe, a wholly new branch of aesthetics is demanded: the aesthetics of behavior.

A deeper level of inquiry concerns the negotiation of the values of the professional culture which gave rise to the machine with respect to the values and traditions of the arts. What flows from this is a recognition of how the values of the discipline of engineering insinuate themselves into art practice and art consumption, changing the practice. At root, one is drawn into a deeply interdisciplinary consideration of the fundamental values and world-views of these two kinds of practice, these two cultures (see Snow, 1998 [1959]).

What is called for then, is a simultaneous assessment of these values and their implications for contexts outside their ‘native’ territory, and simultaneously, a reassessment with respect to these issues, of the core values, methodologies and sensibilities of the arts. We need then, to find new, relevant and compelling argument for the arts in the new techno-social context. This will necessarily lead, I believe, to a re-evaluation and re-valuing of aspects of the traditions of the arts which have been or are in the process of being occluded or lost, due to the authority of technological rhetorics perceivable on every campus, a certain kind of cowering in the face of such rhetorics, and an articulation deficit on the part of arts practitioners.

Framing the Enframing

Embodied in the machine there is an idea of what the mind is and how it works. The idea is there because scientists who purport to understand cognition and intelligence put it there. No other teaching tool has ever brought intellectual baggage of so consequential a kind to it. Theodore Roszak (1986: 217).

“..most tools produce effects on a wider world of which they are only a part, the computer contains its own worlds in miniature…” Paul Edwards (1990: 108-09).

A computer…does not simply have an instrumental use in a given site of practice; the computer is frequently about that site in its very design. In this sense computing has been constituted as a kind of imperialism; it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image. Philip Agre (1997).[4]

Heidegger proposed that the essence of technology is a project of ‘enframing’. We make the world amenable to manipulation and exploitation through instrumental science. We dominate nature through knowledge. The last few centuries can be characterised by an ever-growing assemblage of knowledge and power, science and technology, which enframes the world and ourselves within it. At issue is not whether instrumentality is a good thing, but whether the machinery, the hardware and software, is imbued with the ethos of instrumentality. And; in applying this technology to human pursuits not previously embraced by such technology; if the practices are thus perturbed in a way which might be deemed unfortunate.

Technologies do not pop into the world fully formed, they emerge from specific cultures with specific traditions. In order to understand what the computer, at root, is, we must look at its history, its precedents, the goals set for the research, the interests of the funders, and the intellectual traditions of the generating contexts. The question then becomes: can we assume that the computer a neutral tool, or does it inhere specific notions about information, knowledge, and representation (etc)? This would not be a huge issue if the technology remained located in its original application zones. But the contemporary socio-technological situation is one in which this technology is constantly moving out across society and culture, engaging various sort of established practices for which the instrumental paradigm (and related values) has dubious relevance. This then is a call for an active critical engagement. The following questions must be asked:

1. Are fundamental philosophical values reified in the technology? If so how and where, and how are they expressed.
2. Are these values supportive or destructive of each of the new zone into which the technology moves?
3. These questions then imply an assessment of the core values of the practices which are effected.
4. If the result of the inquiry reveal areas of serious concern, then one must ask: is the situation salvageable, i.e. can the tools and the practices be adapted together to produce a positive situation. If not, must the entire project of technological art be abandoned or is it possible to imagine a technology which would have such positive qualities.
5. If so, we must discuss how to build technologies which are more supportive of the core values of these practices. An entire interdisciplinary technological research program is thus implied, one that moves towards technics from real human needs, rather than moving out from motivations of profit and manufacturing efficiencies, through advertising campaigns into the market.

The Cartesianism of the academy and its emphasis on abstraction; the construction of Generality as a virtue in computer science (which is itself entirely in sympathy with the logic of economy of scale in industrial production); and the emergence of the digital commodity and its associated culture: these three form an unholy alliance which demands interrogation in the interests of more critically sound digital cultural practice. The rationalism of the academy is characterized by the valorization of symbolic forms of representation: textuality, logico-mathematical symbol systems, and symbolic representation more generally. Computer code is entirely consistent with this environment. (The paradox of code is that it implements and reifies academic textuality as an operational machine). Philip Agre makes a similar argument when he observes that these fields ‘concentrate on the aspects of representation that writing normally captures. As a result, theories will naturally tend to lean on distinctions that writing captures and not on the many distinctions that it doesn’t (Agre, 2003).

Cultural practices are traditionally often concerned with specificities of history, personality and context. They have not, in the past, been subject to evaluation on the basis of instrumental criteria such as efficiency, productivity and optimality. With the emergence of computing as a commercial and a cultural force, these values have insinuated themselves, into areas of cultural practice. When the values of computer science piggyback on commercial technologies as they travel out of one socio-cultural niche into another, they can cause havoc. The computer is, in this sense, a Trojan Horse which carries these ideas, hidden, through the gates. Agre describes the application domains of computational systems as a frontier: ‘Each of these borderlands is a complicated place: everyone who resides in them is, at different times, both an object and an agent of technical representation, both a novice and an expert…every resident of them is a translator between languages and worldviews: the formalisms of computing and the craft culture of the “application domain”’ (Agre, 1997).

We cannot dispute that computers and computation constitute the paradigmatic technology of our day.[5] As in Descartes’ day, when human physiology was described in terms of the cogs and springs, so today, even thought is susceptible to computational metaphors. It is reasonable to be deeply suspicious of any theorisation that adopts such metaphors unreflexively. Yet, by the same token it is easy understand why computational explanations are unreflexively adopted: they are the intellectual waters we swim, they are a constitutive part of our world view. As a result, many fundamental concepts of our culture evidence a drift as a result of the ubiquity of computation and computational metaphors.

Take for instance the astonishing changes in the notion of play over the last couple of decades. When stripped of its colorful monsters and futuristic weapons, game-play in the paradigmatic first person shooter is indistinguishable from the worst qualities of industrialized labor: constrained and highly repetitive tasks executed in social isolation, a tight harnessing of user and machine, rewards linked to high rates of production, to say nothing of the covert inculcation of military skills. In this way, pleasure has been instrumentalised and commodified. Any gaming-partisan can (and several have) taken me to task, saying ‘but game X is not like that’, or ‘such an analysis ignores aspects PQR which are culturally good’. It will also be asserted that such games are shaped by the market as well as by the makers who themselves are the product of a larger and older culture. I do not, in principle, dispute those objections, but the fact remains that, for better or worse, such game-play is colored and constrained by the history of industrial labor and the development of sciences of man-machine integration for military applications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore dimensions of the fundamental problematic encountered when machines for abstract mathematico-logical procedures are interfaced with cultural practices whose first commitment is to the engineering of persuasive perceptual immediacy, employing sensibilities and modalities alien to the technology and possibly incompatible with its structuring precepts. I must necessarily paint in broad strokes, in order to broadly describe a class of issues. Inevitably exceptions can be found. My concern is not so much to persuade as to make explicit a set of issues which must be engaged if critically coherent practice is to occur in the field. This paper is thus a call to a Critical Technical Practice in Digital Cultural Practices. I want to draw a distinction between Agre’s use of his term and my use here. He called for such practice as a corrective for the difficulties he recognized in a discipline (AI) with a substantial history behind it. I want to argue that in digital arts, we need a critical technical practice in order to build a critical/theoretical apparatus adequate and appropriate to an emerging range of practices.

This conversation, is, at root, concerned with the power of scientifico-technical rhetorics and their relevance to fields which have come to be on their margins, whether that is because of an imperializing on the parts of those discourses, or due to their attractive power to previously non- scientifico-technical fields in the current technophilic climate. (I do not mean to universalize regarding scientific practice, there are many ‘sciences’. I refer to the power of the those discourses as presented in their oversimplified form for ideological or commercial purposes.) As Friedrich Kittler noted, following Nietchze, ‘If the 19th century…was a victory of the scientific method over science, then our century will be one which saw the victory of scientific technology over science’ (Kittler).

There could be little argument that the computer is the most complex appliance in common use at home and in the workplace, so any discussion of its use must be general, or must differentiate between diverse aspects: the interface, the operating system, various applications, the fundamental procedures which define the von Neumann machine, theoretical paradigms, the status of the device in contemporary cultures and in the past, the various modes of use, as research tool, as office tool, as pleasure tool, the integration of the machine into a global network and all the dimensions of networked computer use. To address all these aspects would exceed by far the time and space available here. Here I focus mainly on the history, cultural placement, computational fundamentals and the interface.

Academic Cartesianism and Artisanal Craft

All the art projects I have worked on have at least one thing in common… From an engineers’ point of view, they are ridiculous.
Billy Klüver.

There is, in the western academy and other aspects of western culture, a deep value which ascribes greater worth to more abstract and ‘mental’ work, and implicitly or explicitly denigrates work which involves manual labor and skill, and therefore devalues the people who do that work. This is a dangerous and foolish belief system. Manual work is not inherently stupid, an where it is, it has been made that way through the de-skilling of labor in industrial contexts, and prior to that in the proto-industrial context of slave labor driven Carribean sugar plantations (Mintz, 1985). It is necessary to distinguish between aggressively de-skilled industrial labor, and artisanal labor. Technical labor, crafts and trades, bodily training in sports, dance and martial arts, often require high intelligence (think of virtuoso musicianship). Intelligence and manual skills are not mutually opposed.

Computer science, as a technical discipline, reifies philosophical notions which, oddly, were already under interrogation in other disciplines prior to its formation. Among these are the Cartersian dualism, an implicit and unproblematised Objectivism and a simplistic notion of Intelligence. The conception of intelligence in computational discourses is rooted in an early-mid C2Oth approach valorizing mathematico-symbolic problem solving – precisely the same functions that the first generation of AI researchers sought to simulate in their systems (famously Newell, Simon and Shaw’s Logic Theorist). This monolithic conception of intelligence has been largely abandoned by the psychological community, replaced with an idea of intelligence as individually varying aptitudes in 20 or more aspects. It is surprising is that mathematical logic should be unilaterally hailed as the hallmark and epitome of intelligence in humans, and yet the process is utterly consistent with a logic of isomorphism ubiquitous in computer science. Boolean logical operations are implemented as a machine – then the machine demonstrates (via applications such as Logic Theorist) that human intelligence is logico-mathematical in nature. Here then is a prime example of the representational nature of computer science, in which an automated system is built to emulate a certain description of a human capacity, and this system and the rhetoric around it then goes on to form an entire school of thought about human thinking – computationalist cognitive science.

This issue is of great significance in the current discussion, as the kinds of intelligences which enable the arts and cultural practices are among those exclude from the mathematico-symbolic conception. Handwork can involve high intelligence and sensibility. But that kind of intelligence – embodied, kinesthetic and multi-modally sensorial intelligence, tends to be irreconcilable with textual, alphanumeric logico-symbolic forms of work. Contrarily, the process of translation from the abstract to the concrete is an exercise of high intelligence, and valuable knowledge and insight is drawn from actual manipulation of matter, as opposed to talking about it or using pre-constructed simulations.

Conventionally, artists are ‘not very clever but they are good with their hands’. The implication is that artists are stupid, but it also reinforces the mode of bastardized Cartesianism which infects our campuses that asserts that manipulating matter and intelligent thought are mutually exclusive.[6] An artist must have a deep sensitivity to their tools and their medium. There is a tension between the academicism required of the university, and the traditions of bodily training and kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensitivity development so crucial to virtuosity. As programmable technologies have become increasingly usable, coding as a practice has become increasingly pervasive and basic mechanical and electronic skills have seemed less relevant. In many fields, computer technology is causing a problematic drift away from embodied and material intelligences.[7]

To a generation naturalized to commodity digital technologies since childhood, three related assumptions seem to qualify their relation with that technology: an assumption that all possible digital commodities already exist; that they are value-neutral; and that all that is required in making a project is to plug them together and provide necessary software glue. None of these could be further from the truth. All commodity technologies come with constraints as well as affordances. These constraints are often only revealed in the process of working with them and attempting to make them do something they were not designed explicitly to do. Poor choice of high level components can make tasks more complex and more difficult than necessary. Such reality is consistent with the general principles of knowledge representation; indeed, such artifacts embody and reify certain modes of knowledge representation.

The notion of information having the possibility of existing in a disembodied form is, we must remind ourselves, axiomatic and rhetorical and without evidence. All information is materially instantiated, and the idea that information can be migrated from one material to another does not assert the independent immaterial existence of information as a thing. The entire computational dualism of immaterial information inhabiting a material substrate is nothing but a recapitulation of Descartes’ peculiar and tenuous dualism, conjured up to resolve his own crisis concerning the relation between the immaterial soul and the material body. It is odd that computer science would take as so fundamentally formative an hypothesis that has not a shred of scientific evidence to support it.

Contrary to the idea from symbolic AI that ‘intelligence’ was the logical manipulation of symbolic tokens in an abstract reasoning space unconnected to the world, it is equally easily asserted that interaction with the physical world constitutes intelligence, and that historically, AI took its position because sensing and interpretation tasks were technically challenging, if not intractable. (see ‘the matter with matter’, below).

Man-machine interaction and technophile rhetorics of liberation

Our computers retain traces of earlier technologies, from telephones and mechanical analogs to directorscopes and tracking to radars. David Mindell (2004: 321).

As David Mindell reminds us, the physical conformation and functionality of the machine we use is determined by the history of technologies from which it arose. It is a skeuemorphic assemblage. The history is military, bureaucratic and commercial, to varying degrees (depending on who you read). Interactive multimedia, we must recall, is the child of Cold War computing research. The ur-HCI project was the SAGE system, which put soldiers with keyboards and lightpens in front of monitors, to accomplish the complex pattern recognition functions which the system could not autonomously manage. This constellation of technologies was the model for the keyboard-mouse-monitor paradigm. The fact that this harnessing of flesh to machine was later clad in the rhetoric of liberation in the heyday of interactive multimedia remains deeply ironic.

Why do I sit at a desk to use a computer? The unavoidably historical answer is that the device was developed as a replacement for a component of a preexisting organisational and architectural order, in this case the business office. The desktop computer is, or was, an enhanced typewriter and calculator with added filing-cabinet functionality. It follows then that it is particularly useful and relevant for activities which resemble office desk activities, and is decreasingly appropriate for activities whose social and architectural placement diverges from that scenario. Most cultural and artmaking activities do not resemble office work in their physical contexts, methodologies or goals.

While various pioneers in computer art have been and are being inserted into a retroactively compiled pre-history of the field, the fact remains that in the formulation of the fundamental aspects of the machine, hardware and software, and their relationship, serial processing and operating systems, networking and interface, artistic needs, goals and applications were never considered and no artist was ever consulted. It seems surprising from this perspective that any artist would imagine that computer art might be possible. (That, I suppose, is the genius of art.) By the same token, it is no surprise that in attempting to utilize the machines, artists have experienced repeated frustrations. (In the past I have likened the situation to sending a swat-team into battle with excellent hair-dryers and toaster-ovens.) And seldom does this frustration reach a level of analysis where a distinction can be made between a technical fault (a bug) and a limitation in principle.

There is no end to the accolades we hear offered for the triumphs of computer animation, or scientific visualization, or hypertext, or the web, or multiuser gaming- new cultural practices which are more or less compatible with the various constraints of conventional computing and computer use. It is much more difficult to ask – if the basic conformation of the device and its peripherals were different, what kinds of socio-cultural practices might be accommodated, assisted or afforded? This very acceptance of the hardware conformation of the machine constrains the kind of practices which can occur. Here then is a research agenda which begins from rigorous intellectual inquiry and offers the prospect of unimagined realms of technical and aesthetic development.

Embodied and situated practices and the drive to Formal Abstraction

As a longtime practitioner of practices of embodied intelligence, I remain alarmed that we are prepared to accept as generally useful, a machine system which is only capable of interpreting as input, linear strings of alphanumeric characters. The machine knows nothing of the world, except that which a human predigests and feeds to the machine as alphanumeric strings. Such a system is excellent for doing arithmetic and accountancy, calculating tide and firing tables, storing and retrieving textual records (the kinds of practices which the technology was originally designed for) because these practices have already been abstracted into formal mathematico-logical representations and organizational and cataloging systems generations before the machine existed. (Implementation of algorithms for sorting by date an alphabetically clearly depend on the prior development of calendars and alphabets, and the construction of a more or less universal literacy with regard to them.) Indeed, the machine is well attuned to these practices because the formalisms upon which the machine is based, and the formalisation of those organizational practices arise from a common root.

Reflect on the larger historical arc, beginning, as AI practitioners like to do, with Descartes and the establishment of rationalism. Here, in broad terms, we see the success of attempts to categorise and organize the world according to mathematico-logical ordering systems. Subsequently, we see the development and increasing sophistication and elaboration of mathematically based techniques for designing and building machines: engineering and the industrial revolution. This paradigm gains momentum as electricity, radio, telegraph and related technologies arise, and coalesce as electrical engineering and electronics, during a time when engineering itself is being reconfigured as an increasingly analytic and mathematical discipline (Ferguson, 1994). From this technical base arises electronic, and digital computing. Now while many of the founders of AI were psychologists, the technology they employed had a different provenance. The implementation of Boolean logic as electronic machine was the foundation upon which programs like logic theorist ran. So it should be no surprise them that such technology was found to be highly amenable to the automation of mathematical logic, and by the same token, it explains why problems outside that realm have been found so intractable. Again, Philip Agre concurs : ‘a theory of cognition based on formal reason works best with objects of cognition whose attributes and relationships can be completely characterized in formal terms’ (Agre, 1997).

Our world is replete with complex cultural and social practices in which the calculation, storage and retrieval of data play a vanishingly small part, and in which spatial awareness, texture, gaze, gesture, tone of voice, perceptual integration, active sensing, kinesthetics and proprioception (all sensibilities outside the ken of the computer) play key roles. What this means, in effect, is that the technology to which we are encouraged to apply to these functions is incapable of sensing or measuring these qualities (I hesitate to even call them variables). In effect, the conventional PC is a filter which filters out all aspects of our complex embodied intelligence except that small part which can be encoded as strings of alphanumeric characters. Rhetorics of computing, both marketing rhetorics and the more complex and subtle characterisations of the computational in literature and film, commonly contain extropian and anti-corporeal sentiments which imply that human experiences which are not amenable to serial Boolean logical expression are somehow irrelevant. Surely this should be an issue of greatest concern to practitioners and theorists of embodied practices, yet there is an almost entire absence of informed critical assessment of the relevance of such a technological paradigm to activities like, for instance, choreography, painting, cooking, sailing, clinical diagnosis or physical therapy.

At root, this is the danger of the implicit acceptance of the von Neumann machine as the paradigmatic technology of our day as is the case in computationalist cognitive science. By taking the functioning of the serial processing Boolean computer as an acceptable analogy to the functioning of mind, we thereby afford the development of a specific range of ideas and research programs and close off the possibility of many others. There is thus, an underlying and seldom acknowledged conflict between the values reified in the hardware and software of computer technology, and the purposes to which these technologies are put. The simple fact is that media arts employ technologies designed for instrumental purposes – automation, accountancy, archiving. It cannot be asserted that artistic needs and purposes were ever considered in the design of the basic technologies. It follows then that existing computer technologies are unlikely to be optimally appropriate for such applications. This is unlike, for example, the evolution of the medium of oil paint, which was developed over generations specifically for the task of painting pictures.

A machine designed for manipulating strings of alphanumeric characters may simply not be relevant to certain human tasks – why should we assume it should be? Why should we be at such pains to deny the obvious fact that our intelligence and our embodiment are precisely attuned to each other, through childhood development as well as through evolutionary process? Our intelligence is expressed in all modes and all combinations of modes of our lived physical being. Yet we are increasingly naturalized to the idea that we should be ready to translate any sort of human notion or practice, into keystrokes, in order to make in acceptable to this cloth-eared device. Not only is it absurd that such an expectation be attached to such a purportedly marvelous technology, but it relegates any human quality not amenable to such processing to oblivion or irrelevance.

All too often, digital culture workers seem to think in terms of ‘how can I (change my behavior in order to) exploit this (available, commodified) technology’. This assumes that the currently available range of commodified hardware products are adequate and sufficient. I find this preposterous. Vast new areas of research and practice will open up if we instead ask: ‘what sort of technology would be an asset in the prosecution of my chosen task?’

We are conditioned to imagine that the output (and input) of an interactive system will be symbolic, textual and graphical, probably on a monitor: a technologically arbitrary arrangement determined only by historical factors. Even though the hegemony of the desktop appears to be fissuring, the new portable, locative and wearable technologies generally simply miniaturize and otherwise replicate this paradigm, as was the case for many of the interfaces developed for immersive stereoscopic environments (VR) in the 90’s: devices such as the ‘wand’ which absurdly ported the pointing device with buttons idea, originated to compensate for the lack of spatiality and tangibility of the desktop, into the realm of embodied interaction.

The machine which has trickled down to artists is a machine for the quasi-arithmetic manipulation of abstract alpha-numeric symbols.[8] It is very good at that. But if digital arts practices are to develop in a well theorized way, we must ask: is art practice, always, primarily or ever, about the logical manipulation of symbolic entities? Indeed, to ask this question would be to open a range of important inquiries. Occasionally, exploratory work in the media arts explores the range of possible practices less constrained by paradigms of data-entry and command-and-control. It is worth noting that while such practices were more common in mid twentieth century art+technology experimentation, they were less common in late twentieth century work, after the consolidation of the desktop computer paradigm. It may be that such projects are now more confounding to audiences due to the naturalization of that audience to the desktop and related paradigms.

Art and AI

Art and AI are remarkable foils for each other. While AI saw logical problem solving as the defining pinnacle of intelligence, that capacity does not rank high in any conception of intelligence in the arts. Whereas AI came to grief in the complexity of everyday life, art would come to grief in attempting logical generalism. While CS takes generality as a virtue, one might propose that Art takes specificity as a virtue. While reductivism is part of the very fabric of CS, art is holistic. Artificial Intelligence found its initial successes in the automated solution of mathematico-logical problem solving activities, the logic theorist and GPS of Newell, Simon and Shaw, chess programs, toy and micro-worlds and the like. These were heralded as heights of intellectual achievement but they were consistent and constrained, local logical domains. AI stumbled on the realities Kurt Goedel articulated, as it attempted to extrapolate these successes to the real world, spoken language and the like: untidy, heterogeneous and illogical domains in which artist are trained to operate.

The drive toward abstraction and generality came into computer science from the mathematical side. Abstraction is beguiling in its promise of transcendent clarity. Abstraction affords a certain kind of power, yet it also forgoes any power that specificity and the particular can bring. As Wendy Chun notes, ‘Programming languages inscribe the absence of both the programmer and the machine in its so-called writing’ (Chun). Indeed the march to ever ‘higher level’ languages creates increasing abstraction in which both hardware specifics and stored data are increasingly effaced. Instrumentality entered from another side, linked to digital technologies as they arose as a form of industrial production. Against these, as it were, are arrayed situated and embodied sensibilities native to the arts, and a commitment to material specificities.

In the histories of the plastic arts, in the modernist period, there was a notion that the appearance of an artifact should betray the nature of its materials and methods of manufacture. Hence the Bauhaus dicta of ‘form follows function’ and ‘truth to materials’. Computing, contrarily, hews to a postmodern aesthetic of surface and superficiality: the function of the interface is to obscure the true nature of the machine. To protect the machine from the user and/or vice versa is the motivation of HCI.

In terms of effective HCI, a tool or package is successful to the degree that it is intuitive. That is, that it recedes from conscious awareness, that it facilitates an illusion that there is no mediating technology between the user and the work object or process. Contrarily, that an artwork should contrive to obscure its own artifice is almost unconscionable in the modern and postmodern periods. Works often exist to bring to attention the artifice of the medium, the qualities of the technology or the way they perturb the situation or object of attention. Illusionism is constructed only to be broken, or intentionally problematised. In these terms, the relationship of (naïve) HCI and (critical) media art practice are entirely opposed. If HCI aspires to be ‘ready to hand’, media art aspires to be ‘present at hand’. In my own work Fugitive, an illusion of immersion was facilitated, only to be abruptly disrupted, in an attempt to bring the user to an awareness of their own trajectory of embodiment (as opposed to their subject position as an actor of limited agency in a prestructured world) and their own willing suspension of disbelief. The function of the project, then was intentionally reflexive and ‘meta’. It was conceived, as most of my works are, as an intervention into a discourse, in the form of an artifactual system which is directly experienced rather than read.

A significant difference between computer science research and media arts practice lies in the ontological status of the artifact. As discussed above, for an artwork, the effectiveness of the immediate sensorial effect of the artifact is the primary criterion for success. It is engaging, it is communicative, it is taken to be coherent, or it is a failure. The criterion for success is performative. Most if not all effort is focused on the persuasiveness of the experience. Backstage may be a mess, a kluge. In computer science the situation is reversed. If the physical presentation is a little rough around the edges, or even missing entire pieces, this can be overlooked with a little handwaving, because the artifact functions as a ‘proof of concept’ which points to the real work, which is inherently abstract and theoretical.

Information, communication, meaning

Fundamental to CS is the idea of information, and the idea that information exists, or can exist, in some abstract non-material realm, separate from and independent of, its material substrate. This is an (inherently Cartesian) assertion and not a self evident truth. As a structuring assumption it is ripe for critique. As such, it has permitted the sorts of advances compatible with the paradigm, but, equally, has excluded entire avenues of research.

Due to the elaboration of this paradigm, an ontological drift in the term ‘information’ has occurred over the past half-century under the influence of the development of techniques which utilize Boolean operations in von Neumann architectures. Expressions such as Information Economy and new disciplines such as Informatics attest to this drift. The range of common contemporary uses of the term indicate, that, like many expressions in common language in which technical definitions and uses have been applied applied to them retroactively, the word possesses a hazy cloud of meanings. I suggest that the discipline is structured by an informal working definition which is not unproblematic because it confuses ‘information’ with ‘computability’. ‘Information’ has been formalized as quantifiable and logically manipulable (Shannon), and hence, information which is not quantifiable and logically manipulable is no longer information. Now it may be that it is not logically manipulable because there has been no compelling (commercial) reason to render it manipulable, or it may be that it is inherently not amenable to logic or quantification in that sense. We must therefore examine the value structure thus created, if logical manipulability is valorized, then vast realms of human practices are hence devalorised.[9]

As Ronald Day (2000) notes:

Within the context of information theory’s operational and statistical understanding of language and affect, all human actions are subject to statistical and predictive prediction and design. Needless to say, such prescriptions have dire consequences for any statistically marginal dialects, forms, genres, or identities that are not socially dominant, as well as for activities of language (such a poetry, art, and even, sometimes, critical theory) in which language’s formal and social functions precede and ground their more, so called, “communicational” functions’. The conduit metaphor ‘not so much plays the role of describing an empirical event, but rather, of transmitting and prescribing a certain model of language and society. That model is an utopian one of a formally closed communicational society, similar to that which is found in the “closed world” of the Cold War. (Day, 2000).

In effect, these operational and statistical understandings construct a hegemonistic order which changes a landscape of plurality and diversity into an oppressive order, marking certain practices as deviant and forcing them underground.

Interestingly, it is into this subterranean well that mainstream culture then dips for novelty. One way to understand the artistic avant-garde is as the provider of this mechanism to reintroduce (memetic?) variety from the cultural ‘wilderness park’ or ‘biodiversity preserve’ which is thereby constructed – a protected zone of (named and tolerated) deviant behavior which is simultaneously nurtured and marginalized. The mechanisms of the art world – small semi-commercial galleries and performance venues, small presses, low budget media production, and marginal public media (ie pacifica) provide the ‘conduit’ by which this diversity is sucked back into mainstream culture in metered doses to revivify it.[10]

Objectivity

One of the large trends in western thought over the last century, felt equally in the sciences, in the humanities and the arts, has been the challenges to the presumed authority, validity or even possibility of objective knowledge or a detached objective viewpoint. This trend is perceived in the crisis Heisenberg and Schroedinger brought to modern physics as it is in the problematising of authorial status and the authority of texts (Barthes, Derrida etc). In the sixties and seventies, both second-order cybernetic theory and autopoietic theory addressed the condition of the observer directly. As Heinz von Foerster remarked “Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him.” The culture around computer science, like any other academic discipline, has its inconsistencies and oddities. These include subscription to an unreconstructed Cartesianism and unreconstructed Objectivism, explicit in the ‘gods eye view’ often encountered in software and systems.[11]

Enactive and situated theories of cognition and phenomenological critique of AI (Dreyfus, Suchman, Varela, Lakoff and Johnsonl) exposed a platonic and top down spirit in that enterprise and the school of cognitive science associated with it, and led to a recognition of the relevance of theories of situated and embodied cognition. This opened a way for more subjective and less autocratic modes of technical practice (Brooks, Maes, Agre, Horswill and Chapman). David Marr begins his well-known 1982 book on vision with the statement that ‘vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is’.[12] But in human and animal biology, the study of perception as a one way process, an of methods in which are clinically isolated from lived experience has given way to the conceptualization of active sensing, which asserts the importance of examining the kinesthetically engaged, temporal coupling of sensing and action.

In the plastic arts we see an ongoing challenge to the single, detached, privileged viewpoint reified in perspective, first in modernist image making (Cubism) in which the conventional perspectival view was perturbed and multiple viewpoints were combined, thereby problematising the unique and authoritative viewpoint of the observer. By the mid 60’s, the authority/authoriality of the artist was actively under critique by artists themselves, as was the divide between critic and artist, and between text and the plastic arts (Conceptual art). This process generated a profusion of new genres in which the reliable stasis and formal relationship between viewer and work, as well as between artist and work, were broken down. In such cases the spatial and temporal subjectivity of experience was emphasized. Such works were thus often disorienting to their audiences.

As I have previously observed, the theoretical agendas of (at least the first generation of) media artists were established in this period. In hindsight, one can view the radical work of the 60s and 70s as prefiguring and modeling the challenges of digitally based art forms. (This would be consistent with the idea that one of the functions of art in our culture is as a cultural ‘early warning system’.) With the availability of computational tools, the arts have engaged in the design of (automated) behavior and interaction. Recognition of this paradigm shift demands the abandonment of old aesthetics of passive contemplation and calls for the formation of an aesthetics of dynamic engagement by and with cultural artifacts (Penny, 1996). This trend gives rise to modes of cultural practice in which the user takes some active and constructive role in the creation of her experience. This trend is clear in the transition from the authority of the cinematic eye/screen to the distributed contingencies of multi-user gaming in hybrid environments combining the agencies of remote players and semi-autonomous software agents or ‘bots’.

As instrumentality is natural to the realm of machines, so autopoeisis and symbiotic relationships are natural to biological organisms and systems thereof. In biological (as well as social) systems, cybernetics notwithstanding, identification of discrete inputs and outputs depends on a tenuous and strained contrivance. A critically motivated practice might work towards technological projects in which organization is based on an autopoietic or ecological metaphor, where none of the entities or parts produce ‘output’ but, in the spirit of Actor Network Theory, all entities – humans, animals, instruments, networks and institutions are conceived as agents are linked in a hybrid, heterogeneous and mutually enhancing circulation. New paradigms for understanding and making interactive cultural pursuits may be theoretically enhanced by reference to contemporary Cognitive Science, Neurophysiology, Ecology and Social Theory.

Generality and Specificity

A fundamental commitment of computer science is that of the General Purpose Machine. From the outset, generality was taken to be desirable, for reasons which are unassailable in formal terms. The principle of the ‘general purpose machine’, is an elaboration of Alan Turing’s fundamental notion of the ‘Universal Machine’ (known latterly as the Turing Machine). The virtue of generality was reinforced with the GPS (General Problem Solver) of Newell, Simon and Shaw. It is basic to the concept of the digital computer, (this is textbook computer science history). The unquestioned axiomatic acceptance of the concept of generality as being a virtue in computational practice demands interrogation, especially when that axiomatic assumption is unquestioningly applied in realms where it may not be relevant. Indeed, the fact that the idea of the universal relevance and validity of the concept of generality is rarely asked; itself suggests fertile ground for interrogation.[13]

Historically one can identify a two-stage process of elision and reification, related to the economic principles of the computer industry and the rapid uptake of the computer in diverse socio-cultural contexts far from the original applications of the machine. The first stage was the transfer of the notion of ‘general purpose’ to the beige colored box and its big vacuum tube appendage. Quite possibly a result of the odd combination of ignorance, mendacity and pecuniary interest so particularly characteristic of the advertising (so-called) industry. The idea of generality, entirely substantiable in formal mathematical terms, became thus attached to a physical commodity. The notion of generality thus offered justification for highly profitable strategies of consumer commodity. The casualties of this capitalist sortie are seldom discussed. But if all uses for the computer could be contained by alpha-numeric desk-work, the other sorts of human practices which were not compatible with that particular work culture, or not identified as profitable enough sectors to justify the investment in software tool development; had to reshape themselves or suffer the stigma of remaining uncomputerised.

The world was thus divided into the computerized and non-computerised realms, and caché and advantages flowed to the computerized practices, in popular culture, which was itself increasingly defined by and located in digital practices; as in the academic and research worlds, where computerized/computerizable disciplines wear able to access comparatively huge funds (much of which flowed directly back to the computer hardware and software industry). The result of this trend was that all sorts of human practices for which the computer, as formulated by the industry, was not ideally conformed, often then bent and reconfigured themselves to adapt, often at a significant cost to the integrity of the practice and its sensibilities and knowledge base.

This process is observable in diverse fields and disciplines over the last quarter of the C20th, from engineering to the arts, but it is in the arts that such trends are particularly stark. This is because, as argued, the arts the practices rest on such profoundly different foundations, both historically and theoretically. This then is the core of my argument. Artworks are made by individuals of particular physical conformations, with particular perceptual and physical skills, immersed in specific cultural and historical contexts.

Embodiment, situation and TOOLS

Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general.
Alfred Jarry[14]

Tools are specific to functions. There is no such thing as a general purpose tool. Every craft has a range of specialised tools. The skilled craftsman is highly discerning about matching a task to a tool. The notion that generality is a virtue is opposed to a generally accepted notion that there is a tool for every job and a job for every tool. Contrarily, informed by the dual evil motivations of user-friendliness and generality – software tools seek to reduce the diversity and specificity of individual and cultural motivations and world-views: user friendly software tools make easy (generalisable) tasks easier and difficult (more specific) tasks more difficult.

In opposition to the ideology of generality, one might propose that art is naturally Pataphysical. An artwork is deemed to be excellent if it addresses a particular situation with persuasive precision. That is, by a subtle combination of the signifying potential of spatial organisation, materials, sounds, images and user dynamics; a coherent experience is generated which leads the audience/user into a particular realm of interpretation. An artwork is successful to the extent that it is specific. Generality is not a virtue in the Arts. Generality and affective power seem to be mutually exclusive. It’s hard to imagine what a general purpose artwork would be like, unless it was one of those generic and vacuous hotel room pictures, whose work is to proclaim a respect for art on behalf of their owners, while safely avoiding the danger inherent in actually being art. This is the fatuous conundrum at the root of the myriad of techno-cultural projects which attend to and intend to automatically generate cultural artifacts. The notion of the general purpose machine has indisputable power and relevance in its place. But we must be wary of the drift of axiomatic assumptions which can flow from a paradigmatic technology of both rhetorical and economic power.

Over the latter part of the C20th, computer based image making became increasingly sophisticated as the technology became more affordable and dispersed across culture. As such image processing engaged the realm of painting, we can observe a degeneration of the bodily and material culture of painting. Painting as a tradition of practice has honed its tools and techniques over hundreds of years, such that the painter trained in and practiced a diverse and integrated range of proprioceptive skills, kinesthetic sensibilities and perceptual procedures which taken together, resulted in a practice of infinite diversity, expressiveness and subtlety. All this then went out with the bathwater when painters were enticed to sit with a fixed focal length at a small scintillating image while pushing a little plastic box around on a small space of desktop nearby.

The interface and tools used some of the language of painting, but the actual physical interfaced was utterly unlike the performative context of the painter: the display was small and of low resolution, the complexity and subtlety of physical skill was completely absent, and the ‘output’ product was (usually) of small scale. How neatly the rhetorical power of the paradigm of disembodied information dispatched the unnecessary and encumbering bodily knowledge and liberated the abstract and pure idea content of the practice. In the face of six hundred years of refinement, the desktop computer painting emulator had barely sixteen. The technology did, and does, afford all sorts of capabilities which painting did not: actions could be reversed, multiple versions could be kept, product could be sent over network to a remote location – all remarkable and wonderful qualities. But, like the tea produced by the nutri-matic machine, it was almost entirely unlike painting.[15] It is strange to observe that amongst practitioners, teachers and theorist in such contexts (and there are many, not just with respect to painting but to a wide range of other skilled professions), critical assessment of the value and quality of the traditional practices vis a vis the new technologies is rare. Ironically, software developers are more likely to undertake a study of the traditional practices than are the purported guardians and partisans of the practice likely to undertake a study of software tools.

The midi instrument: perils of generality

Electronic music interfaces tend to hew to two different paradigms. Some adapt or augment an existing instrument. This approach exploits the richness and specificity of the sensibility developed by the musician to the artifact. In musical performance, the bodily/artifactual cultures of virtuosity compare to similar practices in the visual and plastic arts, and each can be read in terms of interface and interaction design. Here one might consider the assumptions underlying in the term ‘interface’. For, as the face is conceived as the sensory front end of the brain, as the windscreen through which the driver of the bodily bus peers, so the notion endorses an archaic notion of perception a one-way sensory information flow into the brain, and simultaneously denies the any reality to an ‘interbody’.[16]

Traditionally, the facility of the musicians bodily skill with his instrument is regarded as a measure of virtuosity. The sensitivity and specificity of the bodily actions of the musician is integrated, by dint of long training, with the trained ear and the mental characterization of acoustic quality. This is truly embodied interaction in a most refined and virtuosic sense. The alternate scenario is that of the patchable multi-function electronic musical instrument interface device. Such devices are, in HCI terminology, ‘controllers’.[17] They afford the performer the possibility of mapping any variable of the computer music system to any perturbable aspect of the device. Such devices therefore import the ‘virtue’ of ‘mappability’ or ‘assignability’ from the purportedly ‘general purpose’ physical incarnation of the general purpose machine across to the musical instrument. But the musical instrument is a paradigmatic example of the specificity of tools argument. What makes a Stradivarius much more of a violin than a cigar box with a rubber band stretched over it? A history of increasingly refined atunement between the material specificities of the artifact and the embodied intelligences and skills of the player.

The special quality of any instrument is, it would seem to me, its integration with a long standing culture of training and playing, and these things combined permit the subtlety of virtuosity. When played by a trained player, subtle and complex effects are produced. Specific kinds of modulation are associated with specific kinds of physical actions in specific locations on the instrument. The multi-function electronic musical instrument forgoes such possibilities. The range of possible variables can be void of common qualities. The same manipulation might address amplitude, or key, or access different samples on the hard drive. The assignment of any control function to any input sensor, and thus to any bodily modality, is variable and arbitrary. With such flexibility and diversity, a fluent bodily relation to the material artifact cannot be developed.

The matter with matter: specificity and simulation
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory (anon).

From now on, lessons in rice planting will occur in the paddy fields
(notice posted on blackboard in Chinese Cultural Revolution Film Breaking with Old Ideas).

In computer science, consistent with the dogma of the general purpose machine, and platform independent technologies which succeed from it, hardware is usually taken as a given, and assumed to be adequate or even optimal to the task. The machinations of code can proceed without reference to the real physical world. But in fact, such hardware substrates always come with their specific affordances and constraints, and their interface to the physical world is delimited. In a world of networked databases, required data is (paradigmatically) always unproblematically available in a form which does not require interpretation. Contrarily, among the robotics community in the 90’s, the remark ‘fix it in software’ was often heard and it was almost always tongue-in-cheek. The remark signalled a recognition that many problems could not be ‘fixed in software’, that the real world was a dirty and complex place, and that specific physically tangible electronic and mechanical technologies had to be designed and tested with respect to specific environments in order to create a context in which code could usefully work. Data is generated by the digitisation of signals from sensors which exploit electrophysical phenomena. If any part of that ‘front-end’ process is faulty (wrong alignment or calibration, bad optics, unreliable power supply, unexpected response to environmental factors such as humidity, etc) or if the scaling and parametrisation of the a/d process is inappropriate; then the data representation of the real-world phenomenon is forever flawed. No amount of software downstream can regain the correct data. At best it can retrofit a simulation of it, based on accurate measurement of the kinds of errors inherent in the faulty sensor. This, of course, can add a second cycle of inaccurate representation.

This tension between the power afforded by abstraction, and the simultaneous loss of precision, is explicit in the case of simulation. By the same (fix it in software) reasoning, computer simulation of real world contexts must be regarded with some reservation. As Eugene Ferguson, among others, has observed, any simulation tool is itself a design artifact, and depends for its representational accuracy on several factors. First, that the designer correctly identified all the relevant physical effects. Second, that such physical effects are amenable to algorithmic representation. Thirdly that these representations are accurate and of adequate resolution. Forth, that all possible interactions of these relevant factors were appropriately calculated and represented. Certain kinds of physical phenomena, particularly those manufactured to reliably embody and express a mathematically simple physical process are more simple to simulate. The behavior of a tree in a storm, or the turbulence of water on a ships hull demand more complex computation, or may be inherently uncomputatable. Here the isomorphic loop of industrialism and engineering stands out in stark relief. A gear train or resistor-capacitor network is easily simulated because these things are themselves produced to embody behavior easily described in Newtonian terms. One is inevitably reminded of the Borgesian conceit of the map in ‘Of Exactitude in Science’. The recognition of the fundamental necessity of computability of a simulation is a reality which seems often forgotten. Inevitably, there are more factors at play in the real world than in the simulation. Thus many practitioners, particularly those trained in the computer science disciplines, are deeply shocked when the real world does not conform to simulation. As Hamlet noted, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Conclusion

A critical technical practice will, for the foreseeable future, require a split identity,– one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique. Philip Agre (1997).

If the thesis of this paper is taken to be valid, at least in part, then several paths of action are called for. The first is a thoroughgoing assessment of the effects of the computational paradigms on cultural practices, this is both a theoretical inquiry and a context for historical work and case studies. Practitioners are duty-bound to assess the values inherent in the technological tools they employ, lest they sabotage their enterprise. If and when these ontological booby traps are identified, a new mode of technology development is called for: the imagining, design and development of tools consistent with the values which underlie and shore up the practice itself; always allowing for the possibility that any form of technology could be antithetical to, or destructive of, the cultural enterprise.

The other, alternative and parallel path is the negotiation of new cultural practices native to the new technologies, in a process which intelligently and attentively assesses the potential disharmonies between the artistic goals and the qualities of the technologies.

Both these kinds of design processes must address the technologies at a plethora of different levels, from the smallest component level to entire devices, from implicit entailments of programming languages to dynamics of the interface and interaction, and everything between.

Author’s Biography

Simon Penny is Professor of Arts and Engineering at University of California Irvine. He is an Australian practitioner in the fields of Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction, Art and Technology and Interactive Art. His practice includes five main aspects: artistic practice, technical research, theoretical writing, pedagogy and institution building. He makes interactive and robotic installations utilising novel sensor arrays, particularly custom machine vision systems. These works address the issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video art, installation and performance; and by theoretical research in ethology, neurology, ethnology, situated cognition, phenomenology, human computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, robotics, critical theory, cultural and media studies. Informed by these sources, he designs and builds custom technologies with custom code, electronic, electro mechanical and structural components.

Penny curated Machine Culture (arguably the first international survey of interactive art) at SIGGRAPH 93 in Anaheim CA and edited the associated catalog and anthology. He edited the anthology Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press 1995). He has spoken widely on Electronic Media Art around the world. His essays have been published in seven languages. http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny for essays, illustrations and further details. Recently his writing addresses the challenges of interdisciplinarity, within the media arts and more generally in the academy.

Notes

[1] Although ubiquitous,I do my best to avoid the descriptor ‘new media art’. In my opinion, all three terms are dubious. It is facile to observe the transience of ‘new’. Less often is questioned the assertion that this practice can be described under any of the concurrent definition of media. From my point of view, that these practices comprise ‘art’ in a sense that is compatible with conventional notions of art is also, at least, an assertion worthy of discussion. Though awkward, I prefer Digital Cultural Practices, or Computationally Automated Cultural Artifacts (CACA).
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[2] Inasmuch as institutions of higher learning are hosts to the pedagogical environments where these practices are developed and taught, this inquiry has direct relevance for institutions with programs which address such areas of practice, and specifically to the challenges of interdisciplinarity. Articulation of the details of such contexts goes beyond the scope of this paper, but has been addressed by the author previously in: ‘my Adequate pedagogy: the missing piece in Digital Culture’, in Lizbeth Goodman and Katherine Milton (eds) A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation (by and for artists and the cultural sector), AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service), 2003, and in forthcoming papers.
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[3] Such practices imply the development of an Aesthetics of Behavior. Elsewhere I have argued for the recognition that such a modality of aesthetics is not only fundamental to such practices but unprecedented in the history of the plastic arts.
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[4] I make full acknowledgment of the insightful work of Philip Agre in his analysis of the cultures of AI and CS; he is quoted more than once in this paper.
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[5] This useful term was coined by JD Bolter in his pioneering work of digital cultural studies, Turing’s Man (North Carolina University Press, 1984).
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[6] This is silly of course, but the staff-faculty class structure of the (American) university is based on this. This is another dimension of academic life which reinforces the hardware-software dualism, and the attendant notion that knowledge-work or creative work occurs exclusively in the abstract mental realm of text and code.
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[7] My class ‘Hardware Intelligence’ argues against the dualistic academic dogma which proposes that the more engaged with the physical world a practice is, the less intellectual or intelligent it is. Far from being just a remedial skill building class, this class brings students who have been alienated from the physical world by software, back into a rich engagement with it. The ACE program has a pedagogical commitment to a holistic approach to technologies and the intelligent manipulation of matter and the production of material product.
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[8] I use the term ‘trickle down’ with full recognition of its origin in discourses of military to civilian technology transfer.
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[9] Ronald Day (2000), discussing Shannon’s formulation of information theory, similarly asserts “: information” has, among other qualities, that of being quantifiably measurable and “factual” in the sense of being clear and distinct semantic units.” Implied in this conception of information as being susceptible to manipulation presumes the separability and independence of information from materiality. If as a disciplinary partisan, one embraces such assertions (and clearly career success within the discipline depends on it) then a certain kind of process is prescribed, an information-oriented process in which hardware is taken to be generic and software is where the intellectual innovation takes place.
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[10] Tiziana Terranova (2004), in her exemplarily self-reflexive consideration of information theory, proposes that for a critical apparatus to effectively address contemporary communication and information issues, it must combine the poststructural critiques of meaning rooted in semiotics and deconstruction with an understanding of mechanisms of transmission which such poststructural approaches ignore, and this supplement must be based in information theory. She notes: ‘Information is not simply the name for a kind of form meant to survive the attack of noise, but more a quasi cause or catalyst for an active power of constitution and transformation that it does not contain in itself’. The image she conjures, to extend her employment of tropes from complexity theory (elsewhere in the paper), is the image of an agent poised at an energy maximum, for whom the injection of information creates a movement characterized by a ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’.
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[11] Philip Agre (1997) draws attention to another such anomaly, the utilization of introspection as a method in AI.
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[12] This is what active vision researcher Andrew Blake called ‘a prescription for the seeing couch potato’ (1995). In contrast, in the active sensing view, behavior is tightly coupled to sensing, and behavioral programs operate on minimalist representations of the world that are computed from changes in the sensory information reaching the animal as it manipulates its body, and thus its biological sensor arrays, through space http://www.cnse.caltech.edu/Research02/reports/macIver1full.htm.
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[13] Phoebe Sengers undertook a similar inquiry with respect to another computer science tenet, modularity, in her PhD thesis, Anti-Boxology. Carnegie Mellon University, 1998.
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[14] If physics is the study of what is and metaphysics is the study of what ‘what is’ is, then pataphysics is the study of what ‘what “what is” is’ is. ‘Pataphysics…is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics… Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one… Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions…’ (Jarry).
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[15] The Nutrimatic machine, in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, produced a liquid which was ‘almost entirely unlike tea’.
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[16] Music became electronic long before imagery. The act of composition was abstracted from the act of performance and music was resolved to symbolic notation long before computing machines dealt in such notation as currency. This may well be due to the amenability of music to the symbolic realms of computing.
Computer music also seamlessly mapped onto the precursor and parallel technological cultures of audio amplification, transmission and recording. It may be surmise that this history itself led circumstantially to the fundamental separtation of sound and image in digital media, ie it may be an entirely unintentional historical accident rather than being intentional according to some project of theoretical justification.
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[17] Eric Singer’s Sonic Banana is one of many examples. http://www.ericsinger.com/workprojects.html
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References

Agre, Philip. ‘Towards a critical technical practice: Lessons learned in trying to reform AI’ in Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan L. Star, William Turner, and Les Gasser (eds) Bridging the Great Divide, Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum 1997).

____. ‘Writing and Representation’ in Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (eds) Narrative Intelligence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003).

Chun ,Wendy Hui Kyong. ‘On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge’ Grey Room 18 (2004): 26–51.

Day, Ronald. ‘The “Conduit metaphor” and the nature and Politics of Information Studies’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51:9 (2000): 805-811.

Paul Edwards. ‘The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity’, Signs, 16:1. From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference (Autumn, 1990).

Ferguson, Eugene. Engineering and the Minds Eye (Cambridge MA: MIT press, 1994).

Jarry, Alfred. Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician Translated by Simon Watson Taylor (London: Exact Change, 1996).

Kittler, Friedrich. ‘On the Implementation of Knowledge — Toward a Theory of Hardware’ http://www.hydra.umn.edu/kittler/implement.html.

Mindell, David. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books, Viking Penguin, 1985).

Penny, Simon. ‘Simulation Digitisation Interaction: The impact of computing in the Arts’, Artlink (1987).

____. ‘Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative’, in S. Penny (ed) Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: SUNY Press, 1995).

____. ‘From A to D and back again: The emerging aesthetics of Interactive Art’, first published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac (April 1996).

____. ‘The Virtualisation of Art Practice: Body Knowledge and the Engineering World View’, CAA Art Journal (Fall 1997).

Roszak Theodore. The Cult of Information (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1959; reprinted 1998).

Terranova, Tiziana. ‘Communication Beyond Meaning: on the cultural politics of information’, Social Text 22:3 (Duke University Press, 2004).

Introduction

Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. One need look no further than the theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference, ‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’, to see this. Because our orientation is always forward towards the future, we are inclined toward a kind of myopia, and reluctance to look at the new through the lens of the past. With this orientation, there is furthermore a danger of placing too high a value on novelty at the expense of other aesthetic and ideological criteria. We see this in new media art discourse again and again. Turf wars regularly take place over ‘firstness’ – which designer was the first to use this technique, who was the first to integrate this type of programming into a new media artwork, etc. We are clearly in the midst of a global communication revolution that has changed the practice of daily life in far-reaching ways, and it is important to recognize, identify, and contemplate those aspects of our culture that are changing so rapidly. In the field of electronic literature, it is important to identify and analyze the media-specific aspects of individual works, to think about what in their formal nature as digital objects produced on and for the computer and/or network distinguishes them from literary objects produced in the past. In our rush towards these new horizons however we need also to look at electronic literature in the contexts not only of the history of computing and digital culture, but also in the context of the art and literary movements from which they emerge and with which they are in conversation. In this essay and in future work, I will argue that electronic literature can be best understood as a polyglot literary and artistic avant-garde movement that owes a great deal technically, aesthetically, and ideologically to various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, beginning with Dada.

The Dada movement was a multimedia avant-garde art practice that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until, roughly, 1920. Beginning as a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois attitudes the Dadaists felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dadaists developed and refined the notion of ‘anti-art’ as an expression of dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in which Dada was an active organized cultural movement was quite short, its legacy is widespread and profound. Individual Dada artists including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and others went on to influence many of the twentieth century’s most important art movements, such as surrealism, modernism, and conceptual art. Some important elements of Dada art include the rejection of the dominant modes of distribution and valorization of cultural artifacts, the elevation of the importance of audience response to and interaction with the art object or event, interdisciplinarity and anti-disciplinarity, the abstract use of language and sound as material, an embrace of randomness as an aspect of artistic practice, the use of diverse ‘at-hand’ media and found objects, and the representation of the human body as man/machine hybrid or grotesque deformity rather than as idealized beauty.

This essay examines new manifestations of these elements of Dadaist practice in works of electronic literature produced in recent years. Ninety years after the original Dada movement, writers and artists use elements of Dadaist practice in the production of contemporary works of electronic literature. By comparing the art and activities of early Dada artists to the work of contemporary digital writers, the essay advocates a critical approach to new media writing that both accounts for the specific properties of literature produced for networked computer environments and examine these artifacts within the contextualizing historical framework of the avant-garde.

Decentered Movements

To consider electronic literature as an art, literary, or cultural ‘movement’ may simply be a heuristic or rhetorical strategy. We see a staggering variety of approaches to creating electronic literature in a multitude of forms and genres, produced by geographically dispersed individuals and groups, who rarely meet in person, and swear no allegiance to each other or any common ideology. Electronic literature is both interdisciplinary and in effect anti-disciplinary. If we begin to think of electronic literature as ‘a movement’, we need to consider that it is a different type of movement than any we’ve seen before, unbound by common locality, art form, or adherence to any singular manifesto, a kind of Noah’s Arc of literary forms filled with strange animals freely miscegenating and mutating at an extremely rapid rate.

Dada, the early twentieth century movement from which many of the other important twentieth century avant-garde movements emerged, was similarly diverse. Dada had not one manifesto, but dozens of them. While Dada had its origins in a specific locality during a specific point in time–1916 Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire – it spread very quickly from that originary moment to other widespread localities including Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. To be a Dadaist it wasn’t necessary to join a particular club or live in a particular city, but rather to identify oneself with an attitude towards the practice of art, or rather more specifically, anti-art. Dadaists ostensibly advocated the destruction of art practices and cultures that preceded their own. At the same time, the Dadaists were consummate ironists, who both recognized and declaimed with great vigor their own hypocrisy. To be Dadaist was to negate, to endorse an extreme vision of duality. In his first ‘Dada Manifesto’ published in 1918, Tristan Tzara writes,

In documenting art on the basis of the supreme simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement, impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom … I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles … I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one gulp of fresh air; I am against action, for continuous contradiction, and for affirmation too, I am neither for or against because I hate common sense. (Tzara, 2006; 1918: 3-6).

While out of context it may be difficult to ‘make sense’ of Tzara’s hatred of ‘common sense’, it is important to realize what common sense implied at this point in history. Europe was just emerging from the fog of the World War I and the horrors of trench warfare. Much of a generation had been lost and as the war wound down, the streets of Europe’s capitals were filled with the amputated and deformed victims of those atrocities. The casual embrace of nationalism and bourgeois ‘common sense’ were precisely what had led Europe to its abyss. Rationality, it seemed, had led to a world gone mad.

Tzara and the other Dadaists often and loudly declared ‘DADA MEANS NOTHING’. In his first manifesto, Tzara runs through a laundry list of meanings for the word in different languages, none of which have a claim to signification greater than any of the others, ‘the Kru Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and Rumanian: Dada’. The word meant nothing and many things simultaneously. Tzara points out that it ultimately makes no difference what the word Dada means: ‘Sensibility is not constructed from a word’ (2006; 1918: 37). Emerging from Zurich, one of the few neutral centers during World War I, Dada was intended to be as non-aligned as possible. In contrast to the various flavors of national romanticism that had characterized much of the art world in the years preceding the war, the Dada were self-consciously anti-national and individualistic. Tzara writes: ‘Dada was born of a need for independence, of distrust towards unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory’ (37). Dadaists are fundamentally anti-monist.

Tzara’s manifesto argues that the one thing binding Dadaists together was a rejection of the values of European civilization of the day. The artistic production of the Dadaist demands to be understood as an act of destruction as much as an act of creation: ‘there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries’ (41). Given the general tenor of negativity in Tzara’s manifesto towards groups generally and towards art as it was previously understood, it may be surprising that the Dadaists produced anything at all. Wouldn’t the ultimate act of negativity have been to simply stop producing art, or perhaps even to set about destroying the art popular among the bourgeois by setting upon the galleries and museums with scissors and torches? Yet ultimately the Dada were not terrorists, they were artists, and if they were going to set about an act of destruction, they would do so through their art, which was conceived as anti-art. And while their impulse was towards radical individuality, by virtue of working within a shared community of practice, in which their works were presented in the context of and produced in conversation with one another, certain similarities and trends in the artifacts they produced nonetheless emerged. The Zurich Dada were among the first movements to embrace abstract art, for instance, and their works present abstraction in forms ranging from Hans Arp’s constructions, drawings and wood reliefs, to Marcel Janco’s cardboard masks, to Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem and Hugo Ball’s sound poetry.

In comparison to a movement such as impressionism, the differences between the forms and techniques of the Dada were great. Writers, dancers, painters, costume-designers, satirists, and writers of manifestos were all presenting their work together. Hugo Ball, the organizer of the Cabaret Voltaire, was interested in realizing Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, ‘the total work of art that would integrate various media into a multisensory whole’ ([9] p23) but in Dadaist practice this whole would necessarily be a noisy and contradictory one, a whole in opposition to the idea of unities. Hans Arp describes a painting, Cabaret Voltaire (1916) by Marcel Janco, which captures the spirit of the gatherings:

The people around us are shouting, laughing, gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, moos and the miaowing of medieval Brutists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost (cited in Dickerman, 2006: 25).

Amidst such cacophony, new works of visual and written art were being presented to audiences. The charged atmosphere of the Cabaret Voltaire was in some sense an antidote to the staid, respectful atmosphere of art museums and galleries. High art, dance, burlesque, satire were all thrown together into one performance in an attempt to shatter the boundaries established by bourgeois culture. From the Dada perspective, interesting art was just as likely to take place on the street as it was inside the refined setting of a gallery, and art no more belonged to the bourgeois than it did to the prostitute or drunkard in the gutter. No one could claim that any particular context was the right one for art, and no one form of art could claim predominance over any other.

While it would be a folly to attempt to generalize the contexts in which electronic literature is produced and appreciated, we can note some similarities between the milieu in which electronic literature and Dada art are addressing their respective cultures. Most electronic writers and digital artists do make strong claims about their work as a way of making art, but they do so outside of conventional channels of cultural production. While mainstream literary institutions are largely ignorant of literary experiences made for the electronic media, authors and digital artists distribute their work independently on websites, small journals of their own creation, and internet mailing lists. While works of electronic literature are finding some audiences within the academic world, the literary mainstream largely regards electronic literature with either apathy or animosity. Electronic literature is distributed virally. Individual works move from screen to screen via links and mailing lists and performances. It shows no respect for the rituals and institutions of publishing houses, and needs no publishers. Formal boundaries between poetry and fiction, art and literature, documentary and satire, and genres of all kind break down. While carefully established niches such as classifications in the Dewey decimal system bound traditional literature, electronic literature defies simple categorization. Where books are discrete objects made for the single purpose of reading in quiet contemplation, works of electronic literature are unruly objects, presented in the cacophonous flow of networked communication, read alongside business correspondence, email messages, stock quotes, newspapers, weblogs, instant messages, Flash cartoons, and MySpace profiles, just another element in an unbroken stream of networked communications. Electronic literature has no home base or center. Electronic literature, like Dada, presents itself as an antidote to established literary and artistic conventions. It is both of literature and other than literature, art and anti-art.

Many authors of electronic literature would laugh at me if I told them they were part of a movement. They have made no pledges to one another, and often have radically different and opposed ideas of the nature of what they create and its purpose in the world. They are a diverse motley crew, who live in different parts of the world and adhere to different values. Yet they are a form of community. They respond to each other’s work, they gather occasionally to fervently debate esoteric matters of art, and they correspond with each other. They borrow from established traditions and disciplines yet work outside of them. Like Dada, electronic literature is a movement of fierce independents, who create their work outside the established constraints of literary cultures and economies.

Redefining Audience And Reception

Although Marcel Duchamp was only loosely affiliated with the Dada movement, his submission of ‘Fountain’, a urinal, under the name ‘R. Mutt’, to the Independents Exhibition in 1917 is considered one of the archetypal Dadaist acts. While in some respects the submission of the work, its rejection, and the publications of The Blind Man and RongWrong were merely an elaborate hoax, Duchamp’s act was also fundamental in establishing the basic idea of conceptual art. The focus of the readymade was not the object itself, but its context and the reaction of others to it.

Duchamp was one of the directors of the Independent Artists Exhibition before he resigned in protest of the Mutt decision in 1917. The first issue of The Blind Man, the journal he set up with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, was largely a celebration of that exhibition, albeit one that can also be read as the set-up of Duchamp’s elaborate joke. Much of the rhetoric of The Blind Man, no. 1 is familiar from contemporary discourse surrounding digital culture. The discussion of both the exhibition and the role its publishers conceived for The Blind Man itself encourage a new form of distribution and critical commentary for art:

‘What is the use of an ‘Exhibition of Independents,’ said some. ‘Under present conditions, new talent can easily gain recognition through the picture galleries. They are many and their managers are open-minded’.

Let us quote from the programme:

On the one hand we have the frank statement of the established art societies that they cannot exhibit all the deserving art because of a lack of space. On the other hand such exhibitions as take place at private galleries must, by their nature, be formed from the ranks of artists who are already more or less known; moreover, no one exhibition at present gives an idea of contemporary American art in its ensemble, or permits comparison of the various directions it is taking, but shows only the work of one man or a homogenous group of men. The great need, then, is for an exhibition, to be held at a given period every year, where artists of all schools can exhibit together–certain that whatever they send will be hung and that all will have an equal opportunity (Roché, 2006: 148).

The Blind Man no.1 praised the Exhibition of Independents for its ‘no jury’ system, which would make it possible to remove the official layers of mediation between the works, the artists, and their audiences. The Blind Man itself was conceived of as a communication link ‘between the pictures and the public–and even between the painters themselves … He will give to those who want to understand the explanations of those who think they understand’ (Roché, 2006:150). The Exhibition of Independents was framed by The Blind Man as an opportunity to facilitate unmediated expression and unmediated communication between artists and their audiences. Art criticism was understood not to be the sole province of professional art critics, but open the response of anyone who cared to express an opinion.

This conception of the Exhibition of Independents has a great deal in common with the way that works of electronic literature and digital are presented and received in contemporary digital culture. Although there are examples of curated or juried exhibitions of electronic literature, the majority of new works are first published on the web and presented to their audiences before any such selection occurs. And while critics and reviewers will occasionally sound off on these works, the first and most direct response comes from the audience itself. It is not unusual for electronic literature to be first presented on weblogs with open comments, or to be the subject of chat discussions and bulletin board conversations, well before it is reviewed in any conventional print publication. Most contemporary artists working the web sign their work not discreetly in the corner of a painting, but with an email address, which encourages the reader to respond to the work, and to respond to its author. While both the print publishing industry and the contemporary art industry have built walls around the author and the artist, presenting them untouchable geniuses, as if they lived in an entirely different universe from their audience, authors of electronic literature know no such boundaries, and mix freely with their audiences. While the author is living, why should it be otherwise?

Reuse, Reinterpret, Remix

In addition to presenting survey questions that the audience of the Independents Exhibition could respond to, The Blind Man had ‘Suggestions’ for less conventional ways that the audience could respond to individual artworks:

Write about the Indeps, or about any special work in the Exhibition.
A dramatic story of less than one hundred words.
A comic story of less than one hundred words.
A dream story of less than one hundred words.
A quatrain, or a limerick.
A song (words and music) (Roché, 2006: 150)

The Blind Man suggested that rather than constructing a dry academic treatise, one legitimate mode of responding to a work of art is by creating a new work of art. This idea is in keeping with the artistic practices of many of the Dada. The Dada were among the first to embrace collage as an art form, and regularly used artworks in one medium as a basis for a new artwork in another medium.

In many ways, the work of the Dada presaged our current era of ‘remix culture’, in which it is common practice to sample from, reference, and build upon previous works in the creation of a new one. This practice is indeed virtually built into the practice of programmed network art of various kinds on a material level. Programmers regularly share and reuse portions of their code with each other. In the world of kinetic poetry and other kinds of animated texts, we often see artists borrowing not only texts and images from other artists, but also snippets of code used to achieve a particular effect. One example of the ways that electronic literature authors borrow from and remix different types of materials is Megan Sapnar’s Pushkin Translation (Sapnar, 2000), published on Poems that Go. The work presents a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin in Russian, translated by Dimitry Brill. As the reader moves the cursor over the poem, the text is revealed in English and read aloud in Russian. In the background, a Russian folk song recorded by the Ospipov State Russian Folk Orchestra plays. The work includes a long titles sequence that gives credit not only to the author, the translator, and the musical performers, but also FreaKaZoid, a Flash programmer from whom Sapnar got some help on the actionscript implementation. The designer Sapnar responded to Pushkin’s work by remixing the author’s text with the work of several other authors and performers, both remediating the original poem and creating a new work in the process, providing a new way of reading the original.

A direct example of an audience responding to a work of net art by creating other works of net art is Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (Lialina, 1996). Other artists have remixed Olia Lialina’s original work, a short hypertext presented in HTML frames that describes a reunion and confrontation between two lovers, in a variety of forms. The audience finds links on Olia Lialina’s site to the original and to twenty different remixes produced in the decade subsequent to its first publication including, a VRML version, a text-only version, an animated gif, an action alert version, a Castle Wolfenstein version, video, RealAudio, paper and gauche, a comic version, t-shirts, a Don Quixote version, and others. The audience of Lialina’s project responded to the original by remediating and reusing it as a framework for other works of art.

Remixing was also the guiding principle of the Mystery House Taken Over project (Montfort et al, 2004). Mystery House is an early and rudimentary graphic interactive fiction by Ken and Robert Williams made for the Apple II and published in 1980 by On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra. In 1987, Mystery House was released in the public domain, leaving others free to use and modify it as they wished. With a 2004 Turbulence commission, Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short reverse-engineered Mystery House and re-implemented it in INFORM, a free language for interactive fiction development, and released it in a kit that made it simple for others to modify and re-implement the game. Eight authors were then commissioned to produce eight new works from the kit. The resulting works are all radically different, yet each retains many aspects of the original game. The kit remains available on the site for anyone who wants to try his or her hand at remixing Mystery House.

From Response to Interaction

The second issue of The Blind Man largely served to foment the controversy surrounding the rejection of R. Mutt’s ‘Fountain’. While Duchamp and Roché were clearly playing an elaborate joke on the art world writ large, in their defense of ‘Fountain,’ they also provide a clear explanation of the idea of ‘non-visual’ art that would guide Duchamp’s work for the rest of his career and establish the idea of conceptual art. In defending ‘Fountain’, The Blind Man argues that,

Whether or not Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has not importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view–created a new thought for that object (Duchamp et al, 2006: 154).

The ‘Fountain’ event made it clear that the work of art could not be understood as an artifact in isolation from the audience that receives it. The artist should be understood not as a creator of well-made objects, but rather a creator of contexts in which to see things differently. The art of the ‘Fountain’ lay not in the appropriated object itself but in the thought to place it in art gallery. Furthermore, The Blind Man itself can be understood to be part of the artwork, as can the subsequent controversy. What makes Duchamp’s readymades compelling and strange is that they are radically re-contextualized in the gallery, and made available for us to see them anew. The audience of ‘The Fountain’ is as much or more a part of the art as the object itself. It is a performance in which the viewer is one of the players. This integration of the audience into not only reception, but also effectively the production of the experience of the artwork is a common aspect of much electronic literature and other networked art forms. Similarly, the reader of a work of electronic literature is not a passive consumer, but an interacting participant in the work.

Language As Abstract Art

Hugo Ball, one of the principle organizers of the Cabaret Voltaire, is today remembered as the originator of Lautgedichte, or sound poetry, which he announced in his diary on June 23, 1916 (Dickerman, 2006: 27). Ball performed three sound poems ‘Seepferdchen und Flugfische’, ‘Karawane’, and ‘Gadji beri bimba’, onstage that evening while dressed in absurd cardboard Cubist costume. Ball’s Lautgedichte is distinguished from other forms of poetry in that he constructed the poems not of words, but of abstract phonemes. By removing the question of denotation from the poems, Ball’s sound poems focus on the musicality of the human voice. From Ball’s perspective, these poems represented a way to reject the way that language was used in contemporary culture, and to create authentic form of expression. Ball described his reasoning in program notes he read before he performed he performed the poems:

In these phonetic poems, we renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we even give up the word, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge. We must give up writing secondhand: that is, accepting words (to say nothing of sentences) that are not newly invented for our own uses (cited in Dickerman, 2006: 28).

Ball’s argument here anticipates the argument of feminist philosophers such as Cixous who argue that Western languages themselves are so phallocentric as to contribute to oppression of women. In Ball’s case, he was rejecting the languages that had been used to bring about the conditions that led to World War I. Ball encouraged us to ‘Spit out the words: the dreary, lame, empty language of men in society. Simulate gray modesty or madness. But inwardly be in a state of tension. Reach an incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere’ (cited in Dickerman, 2006: 29). Ball’s theorization of sound poetry is consistent with the Dadaist impulse towards radical individuality. It also anticipates the larger twentieth century movement of sound poetry, and a new way of treating language as an abstract material that can signify purely through sounds, phonemes, or shapes, in addition to or instead of signifying through denotation. Another related experiment conducted at the Cabaret Voltaire was Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’, a poem in French, German, and English. While the poem has comprehensible meaning in printed form, telling a parable about a soldier searching for a place on the home front, when it was read by Tzara with Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck at the Cabaret Voltaire, the three simultaneous voices clashed, overloading the listener with multilingual input.

A number of works of recent electronic literature similarly reject the idea that language should primarily be considered a device for the transmission of semantic meaning. Rather, like Ball, they treat language as debased, as an abstract material ripe for reinvention. Talan Memmott’s recent work The Hugo Ball (Memmott, 2006a) is a direct appropriation and interpretation of Ball’s ‘Gadji beri bimba’, made in Flash and published in the online journal Drunken Boat. Memmott’s work literarily presents the online reader with an ‘incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere’. In this work, a murky face appears within a circular frame. When the reader mouses over the face, the Hugo Ball recites the words of Ball’s poem in a randomized order while eerie generated music plays in the background. The face actually makes the correct movements for each sound as it says them, and the words also appear in type on the screen. Memmott complicates the presentation of ‘Gadji beri bimba’, providing several layers of linguistic signification for Ball’s nonsense poem.

Jim Andrews’ work Nio (2006a)> presents the reader with a complex aesthetic experience that makes use of phonemes and letters but not of words. Andrews’s piece is a cross between a sound poem, kinetic visual art, and an interactive musical instrument. In two verses, Andrews provides the reader with two different ways of mixing clusters of letters, each of which have a musical voice track attached to them. In the first verse, those clusters of letters then do a kind of animated dance in the center of a circle as the voice loop they signify is sung. The loops are layered on top of each other, allowing the interactor to compose a shifting doo-wop melody/animation. In an accompanying essay, ‘Nio and the Art of Interactive Audio for the Web’ (Andrews, 2006b)>, Andrews explains that he’s ‘trying to synthesize and transform image, sound, and text, not simply juxtapose them. I seek some sort of critical mass to fuse them’. He describes the work as a ‘synthesis of literacies’. In Nio and in much of his other work, including his visual poetry, Andrews attempts to rethink the relationship between poetry and language, creating interactive poetic experiences that utilize texts of various kinds that don’t rely on words to provoke a response from the reader. Letters in motion and the human voice alone, devoid of explicit denotation, can impart a great of emotional and semantic content. Nio is proof of the idea that poems needn’t be composed of words in order to be poetic and evocative.

Maria Mencia’s Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs (Mencia, 2006) >is a Flash work that presents its interactor with twelve play and stop buttons, each of which activates an animation of a bird presented as an animation composed of typography, spelling out the sounds that each bird makes. The bird songs are not themselves sung by birds, but rather by human singers. Just as in Nio, the interactor can select different combinations of the birds. Like Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’, which was intended to remind its listener of the sound of elephants in motion, Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs is a work that uses the human voice to invoke nature. All three of the new media works I’ve mentioned here exemplify a trend common to many works of electronic literature. Just as in the sound poetry of the Dada, these artists are continuing to explore the abstract use of spoken and written language to create aesthetic experiences that signify in unconventional ways.

Random Acts of Creativity

Tristan Tzara famously described the recipe for a Dadaist poem in the July/August 1920 issue of Littérature as follows:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article in the newspaper of the length you wish to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out carefully all the words that make up the article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then remove each cutting one after the other in the order in which they emerge from the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people (Tzara, 2006b).

I don’t think that Tzara wrote ‘the poem will be like you’, entirely in jest. Rather, this cut-up poem was likely to result in a reflection of the same sort of ‘you’ that was Time magazine’s person of the year in 2006, the you formed from the popular consciousness, rearranged at random. The cut-up technique is here clearly posited as an antidote to the romantic (bourgeois) notion of the author as inspired, ‘infinitely original’ genius. Tzara offered the method as a way for absolutely anyone to become a poet. The cut-up method has been embraced and refined by various movements and individual writers since. To the surrealists, it represented a mystical method of accessing the subconscious, and to William S. Burroughs a way of ‘producing accidents’ that could lead to fruitful discoveries (Burroughs, 2003: 91).

In his Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter describes chance as one of the essential elements of the Dada movement. He describes chance as ‘a magical procedure by which one could transcend the barriers of causality and conscious volition, and by which the inner eye and ear become more acute, so that new sequences of thoughts and experiences made their appearances’ (Richter, 1985: 57). Richter attributes to this attitude of embracing chance the wide variety of innovative new forms created by the Dadaists.

One of the distinguishing aspects of art objects made for the new media is that they are often what Lev Manovich describes as variable media. Manovich writes ‘a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions’ (2001: 36). A powerful way to take advantage of the variable nature of new media objects is to introduce an element of indeterminability into the operations of a given work. In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth distinguishes between determinate and indeterminate texts: ‘A text is determinate if the adjacent scriptons of every scripton are always the same; if not, the text is indeterminate’ (1997: 63). Because computers provide a variety of ways to easily select at random and quickly arrange material within a random or preconceived structure, and because the global network offers artists such a wide variety of data sources to choose from, authors of electronic literature have embraced and refined the cut-up technique and used randomization in a wide variety of ways.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich’s Regime Change (2006) is described by its authors as a textual instrument. The work initially opens up with an April 2003 news story about the bombardment of Iraq in which George W. Bush says that Saddam Hussein may be dead or severely injured. The reader can then select certain highlighted phrases, which are linked to an n-gram search for similar phrases in the Warren Commission report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The reader can then cut and paste phrases back and forth between the two documents. Because the n-gram search offers a certain level of logical correspondence between the phrases from the news article and the Warren Commission report, the result of the reader’s cutting and pasting is a new document that mixes the two disparate documents together in a nearly coherent fashion. This is a cut-up that uses a statistical algorithm to offer a degree of control over what otherwise might be a completely random process of generating a new text. While the interface of this work is far from intuitive, Regime Change nonetheless offers a compelling experience of the cut-up technique, and is a strong demonstration of the power of mixing the cut-up technique with a less-random rhetorical intent. In this case the work demonstrates the inconsistency of President George W. Bush’s casual desire to assassinate the leader of another sovereign nation with the revulsion with which the USA responded to the assassination of one of its leaders.

In comparison to Regime Change, Nanette Wylde’s Storyland (2006) uses a far simpler mode of random text generation, though the short stories the program generates are often quite accessible and amusing. To operate the work, the reader presses a ‘new story’ button. Using a simple ‘mad-lib’ style technique of selecting stock characters, situations and phrases from a database and delivering them into a structured six-paragraph template, Storyland delivers its readers a new combinatorial story every time the button is pushed.

Jason Nelson’s This is How you Will Die (2006) >is a Dada slot machine par excellence. The morbid wordtoy, winner of the 2006 Drunken Boat Panliterary Award for Web Wrt, presents its reader with a slot machine interface. The player has demise credits which he or she may use for a ‘death SPIN’. Rather than cherries and oranges, the spinning reels reveal five segments of unfortunate destiny, such as ‘Driving a Kansas highway, watching hail storms whiten knee high wheat fields/ A long dormant virus attacks your brain, and within twelve hours you forget breathing/ and die sing pop songs you hate, because the lyrics make you giggle/ Before your body is cremated, necrophiliacs sex your body with a two-card canasta/ Your death is reported by tenure seeking academics as being suspiciously modernist’ (Nelson, 2006). Certain combinations of the reels result in bonus messages, which reward the player with extras, such as a fatal blood disease. Nelson’s work utilizes randomness to reflect absurdly on the arbitrary nature of human mortality.

Use of Found Materials And Collage

Closely related to the Dadaists’ embrace of chance and randomness was their impulse to integrate a wide variety of everyday objects and materials, found objects, bits of newspapers, photos from magazines, and so on into their art in the form of constructions, photomontage, and collage. The artists of the Berlin Dada, including George Grosz, Raul Hausman, Johannes Baader, and Hannahh Hoch, regularly integrated printed matter into collages to both absurdist and politically motivated effects. Hannah Hoch’s works, such as ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany’ (1919-1920) and ‘Heads of State’ (1918-1919), often recontextualized photographs of Weimar Republic leaders and other contemporary politicians from magazines in order to parody them. Kurt Schwitter’s various Merz assemblages often mixed a wide variety of media, often integrating cast materials he found on around the house and on the street. Schwitter’s Merzbau projects, which he worked on from the 1920s until 1937 (Dietrich, 2006: 173), were collages in the form of three-dimensional sculptures that he constructed in his studios. Odd angular constructions built with a wide variety of materials, the Merzbau sculptures were also autobiographies in sculptural form. Dorothea Dietrich describes Schwitters’ Merz Column (circa. 1923), an installation including paper, cardboard, metal, plater, wood, crocheted cloth, cow horn, laurel branch, and wall sconce on wood as,

… clearly autobiographical. The top documented Schwitter’s family life with the poignant death mask of his infant son; it is surrounded by toys and a selection of organic materials, including a twig and dried flowers, and a small picture frame that leans against the sculpture, as well as objects with either smooth or irregular edges that are more three-dimensional and organic looking than the materials below on the base. There Schwitters pasted down and affixed flyers, announcements and papers printed with large numbers or letters–all memorabilia produced by that printing press that document his life as a member of the international avant-garde (2006: 174).

Schwitter’s Merzbau installations were not stable entities that could ever be understood as completed. The artist kept adding to, building upon, pasting over, and modifying each of the three works until he was forced by circumstances to move to another location, where he then started a new Merzbau. Like many Dada works, the Merzbau sculptures worked against the idea that the practice of art should result in a fixed, marketable commodity. Rather, the ever-changing sculptures had their own lives and deaths, which corresponded to changes in the life of the artist.

In their always-incompletedness, the Merzbau sculptures have a great deal in common with digital textual forms, such as weblogs, which never reach a completed state but which are always in a fluid process of transformation. The process also calls to mind the construction of network hypertext projects such as Mark Amerika’s Grammatron (1998), Robert Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 (1996), and William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton’s The Unknown (1998), all of which were distributed as ongoing hypertext narratives that changed over a period of years as their authors modified them, while they were being read by their audience. The lack of fixity and the embrace of fluidity is one of the distinguishing characteristics of many network narratives.

The collage technique was used for different reasons in the hands of different Dada artists. While Hoch’s works were explicitly political, in Schwitter’s work, the use of multimedia collage more often results in a sense of art emerging from the materials of everyday life. Max Ernst’s collages and photomontages were often cryptic or metaphoric, featuring for instance human body parts merged with those of birds, or human arms springing from the body of a biplane.

Many works of contemporary electronic literature and digital use collage techniques of various kinds. Collage coheres very well with the fragmented nature of discourse on the network. Many writers such as those involved in the Flarflist collective are trying for instance to harness Google and other search engines in the production of texts, integrating search results with constraints of various kinds to produce poetry, stories, and plays that are written not by any single individual but are rather harvested from the many streams of discourse flowing on the network. There is a sense that the seemingly infinite pool of texts on the network, when combined with search technologies, enables artists with a way to access and piece together dispatches from the zeitgeist. The 3by3by3 poetry blog (Newman, 2006-2007) is a collective project driven by a simple constraint and by Google News. Authors contributing to the project select three stories from the current day’s stories on the front page of Google News, and using only words which appear in the first few paragraphs of each story, build a poem of three stanzas, with three lines in each stanza. The project marries the random and arbitrary nature of a given day’s events with the agency of the individual poet. The poems that result are both timely and absurd. Born Magazine’s You and We, a Collective Experiment (Chevrel et al, 2002) is a project that pairs images contributed by users with text contributed by users, synched to soundtrack. While the image/text combinations are completely arbitrary, it is perhaps a symptom of the human impulse towards closure that there often seems to be a logic and intentionality to the pairings.

One powerful effect of the collage technique is that by splicing together different types of discourse and re-contextualizing them, we are able to see patterns we might otherwise not have noticed. Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] (Memmott, 2006c) is a recombinant Flash work that is based on the self-portraits and biographies of a variety of famous artists. In one pane of the work, a mashed-up portrait appears, borrowing elements from the faces of several different artists. On the right, a short biography appears, also splicing together different details from the biographies of several different artists, providing us with often-absurd anecdotal life histories of the resulting artist(s). What’s remarkable about the work is how these mashed-together biographies read as nearly sensible. The work also gives us quotes about art from each of the artist’s mouths that when we mouse over them. While the quotes are attributable to individual artists, when reading the texts it seems as if any artist would have been as likely as any other to have made the same observation, be it ‘Vincent Cezanne’ or ‘Paul Monet’. In reading these textual collages of artist biographies, we begin to understand that the making of ‘the artist’ is not so much a matter of individual genius as it is a process of constructing a formulaic discourse around the life of a given painter.

Bodies, Machines, and the Grotesque

The group of artists that assembled under the Dada banner in Berlin did so in the city that most visibly bore the scars of World War I, the capital of the defeated Germany. The Berlin Dada, founded in 1917 by Richard Huelsenbeck, who had returned from Berlin from Zurich, where he had been among the crowd of the Cabaret Voltaire, was the wing of Dada that responded most directly to the consequences of war and to the political disorder of postwar Germany. The products of their movement are strikingly cynical, ironic, and grotesque. In his ‘First Dada Speech’, Huelsenbeck took a characteristically contradictory position against pacifism, ‘We were for the war, and we were still for the war. Things have to collide: the situation so far is nowhere nearly gruesome enough’ (cited in Doherty, 2006: 87). This statement, like any Dadaist proclamation, can’t be taken entirely at face value. The war had exposed the consequences of nationalism, in the form of death and deprivation. The results of the war were clearly grotesque. The artworks of the German Dada were intended not to continue the war itself, but to continue to make visible the grotesque.

The artist George Grosz wrote in 1924, retrospectively,

What did the Dadaists do? They said what does it matter what art is produced … a sonnet from Petrach … or Rilke? What does it matter if you spend your time gold-plating the heels of boots or carving Madonnas? People are being shot. There is mass profiteering. And hunger. People are being lied to. What is the point of art? Was it not the height of deception that they were pulling wool over our eyes with these ‘sacred’ works? Was it not utterly ridiculous that they were taking themselves seriously? (Grosz, 2006: 310)

The Berlin Dadaists were at war on bourgeois complacency. The art of the Berlin Dada is among the most shocking and purposefully disturbing the movement produced. Their art was not intended to mollify, but to offend, to serve as a kind of anti-kitsch.

Many of the Dada artists dramatized the fragmentation or destruction of the human body, and in particular the relationship between human bodies and machines. The paintings of Otto Dix offer us nightmares of deformity. In ‘Skat Players’ or ‘Card Playing War Cripples’, (1920), three deformed amputees play card around the table, one wearing a military uniform and medals, another wearing a businessman’s suit, all three of them missing various limbs and parts of their faces. All three of them also seem half man/half machine, with peg legs, mechanical arms, missing or glass eyes, bolts and hinges sticking out of their half-shaved heads, a hinged jaw, and an absurd ear phone on a cord in place of a missing ear. Several of Raul Hausmann’s works also focus on the theme of man-machine hybrid. His ‘Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age)’ (1919) features a head from a hairdresser’s dummy with attachments including a crocodile wallet, a ruler, a pocket watch mechanism, camera parts, a typewriter cylinder, a segment of measuring tape, a collapsible cup, the number 22, nails, and a bolt. The assemblage suggests a post-industrial form of humanity, which can’t be separated from the measurements, machines, and devices, to which it is constantly attached.

The paintings and collages of Max Ernst also often feature bodies that have been dissected, segmented, or modified in a variety of ways. His photomontage ‘The Anatomy as Bride’ (1921), for instance, features a woman’s a head and shoulders; her body laid over and connected to a machine of some kind. Her face is half metal, her throat an open anatomy drawing. One of her arms is amputated and connected to the machine with a pipe. The other is a prosthetic device. Several of Ernst’s other works include beautiful venus-like women whose heads have been removed. Man Ray’s photograph ‘Dadaphoto’ (1920) later titled ‘Portmanteau’ presents us with a nude woman wearing a black sock that nearly merges into the background, referencing amputation. In front of her is a paper cutout on a stand of a woman’s shoulders, arms, and head. The face on the cutout is a kind of simple Munch-like scream.

In almost every instance, when we encounter a representation of the human body in Dada works, it is a fragmented body, a body that has in some way been deformed, merged with a machine, or sliced up. In his essay, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture’ (Biro, 1994) Matthew Biro theorizes that Hausmann and the other Berlin Dadaists anticipated the concept of the cyborg, although they never used the term in writing. The fragmentation and deformation of the human body in the work of the Dada was both a direct response to the horrors of modern warfare and the legions of amputees who came home from the battlefield, and in keeping with the larger project of contesting the bourgeois notion that works of art should necessarily be aesthetically pleasing. The Dada contested the notion that when the human body is represented, it should be a beautiful body. The Dada were producing art immediately after a war in which human bodies had not been treated delicately, but had been objectified, de-humanized, and torn apart. Dada bodies represent consequences.

The fragmentation and deformation of the human body is likewise a prominent theme in many works of electronic literature. The Dada presented us with the post World War I automaton tottering off the battlefield and into everyday bourgeois life. In the current period when representing the human form as fragmented of deformed, electronic literature writers are responding both to what Talan Memmott, in Lexia to Perplexia (2006b) has termed the ‘cyborganization’ of human identity within the network apparatus, and, like the Dada, to the dehumanization involved in the practice our current wars. The representation of the human body and the corresponding fragmentation of identity in contemporary electronic literature is a topic that deserves a more thorough treatment in another forum. For the purpose of comparing the representation of bodies in the Dada to the same in contemporary electronic literature, I’ll only briefly discuss some of the work of Alan Sondheim here, though the body is thematized compellingly by other digital writers, notably in the work of Shelley Jackson.

It is difficult to summarize Alan Sondheim’s project. An archive of Sondheim’s Internet Text (1994-February 2, 2006) was recently published in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, but it is virtually impossible to read his work as a whole. His work is not in fact a work in the conventional sense of the word; it is not a body of writing that has discrete and inviolate parts, but a mammoth shifting corpus of writings, programs, videos, and communications of various kinds. Sondheim performs his texts on the internet via a variety of means, via a weblog, a directory and most notably on email lists. The nature of Sondheim’s textual output ranges from straightforward observations and philosophical musings to highly processed texts that have been subject a variety of modifications. Sondheim is constantly digging back into the body of texts he has already created to harvest new recombined texts from it. In a 2001 article published on TEXT, Sondheim described his process,

I’ll very rarely let anything alone–I don’t really care how the text is produced–so I’ll go back into it and rearrange things, making the text say things or lead the reader in new and different directions. In other words, the commands are catalysts for text production–not designed to deliver the final text, but to deliver a textual body I can then work on, operate upon (Sondheim, 2001).

Sondheim’s body of work is the textual equivalent of one of Schwitter’s Merzbau sculptures. Sondheim’s work is never complete, but always a process. It’s interesting that he describes his work method in terms of working on, operating on, a body. In practice, he both destroys and reconstructs his own texts. His practice itself sometimes comes across as a form a violence, for instance when a staid progressive mailing list, for instance, finds its civilized political discourse interrupted by an email from ‘Jennifer Disgust’ with the subject line: KILL ME. In the same sense as Dada art could be understood as anti-art, Sondheim’s works are a kind of anti-spam. Rather than encouraging us to buy Viagra or invest in Nigeria, more often they will remind of us of the condition of corpses in Kosovo, Iraq, and Auschwitz. Many of his textual and video works thematize the body as subject to violence of various kinds. Sondheim often writes from the perspective of a variety of stock characters, such as Nikuko, Jennifer, and Doctor Leopold Konniger. These characters are often subject to and subjecting each other to degrading forms of violence. Like the Dada, Sondheim is attempting to make visible the real violence that is often made to seem virtual and obscured by contemporary media culture. In a recent interview with Simon Mills, Sondheim describes his project as being one of revealing the structure of the virtual:

I’m trying to diagram the virtual as a tool eliminating the other–the absence of corpses for example, of Iraqi–even our own dead and wounded. So the situation might be written (self-virtual)–we ourselves are becoming-virtual as a result of this absence. It’s like a tag that has no place to ‘sit.’ The instability that occurs through this can be politically manipulated–i.e. the war is not a war, the war is safe, the war is clean, everyone loves US. I think this is one of the reasons that the so-called ‘insurgency’ (which it isn’t of course) emphasizes brutality–that gets through, can’t be ignored or controlled by the military (Mills, 2006).

One recent strand of Sondheim’s video work uses poser and other modeling programs and video effects to contort bodies into a variety of twisted, abnormal configurations. Much of his video work mixes the virtual with the actual, moving bodies back and forth between virtual and real realms. For instance, in Sondheim’s short video ‘Avatar Duet’ (2006a) the dancers Maud Liardon and Foofwa d’Imobilite perform a dance based on poser avatars moved by motion capture, in this case transferring the twitching, angular movements of virtual avatars back to human bodies. In other videos, such as ‘Kali Dance Avatar’, (Sondheim, 2006b) Sondheim subjects the avatars to ‘unperformable’ contortions, such as having heads swap places with arms, legs shifting to necks. In the video WolfTC (World Trade Center) (2007) Sondheim layers a video of an animated wolf avatar, whose body is literally coming apart from the inside out, hide peeling off of twisting bones, over an eerie video of the World Trade Center site, as a frenetic soundtrack plays. Sondheim’s video work underscores his theme that what we so often think of in only abstract terms, targets underneath our smart bomb sites, virtual enemies in faraway places, have actual bodies and actual form. The wolf is at our door. Sondheim links the tormented forms of the virtual to the actual sufferings of real human bodies.

Experimentation and Nothingness

In this essay I have treated only a handful of the ways in which the work of contemporary electronic writers reflects themes and techniques either influenced by or directly derived from the work of the Dada. Some of the connections I’ve drawn here are clear, others less explicit. While it’s entirely possible that authors working in new media would have arrived at similar techniques, themes, and attitudes without the precedent of the Dada, I argue that developing a better understanding of the avant-garde movements of the past can only serve to enhance the experience of those who will push the boundaries of new media work in the future.

I believe it’s also useful to remember that for all of the impact that Dada had on the art of the twentieth century, in actuality, Dada lasted only for a very short period as a semi-coherent movement before the Dada split into a variety of other art movements and practices, most notably in Paris to the establishment of the surrealist movement. And while we continue to see the techniques of the Dada at work in both conventional and new media art forms, during the time it was a recognized movement, there were never more than a few dozen artists who were active in the movement. I mention this because as we think about the future of electronic literature through the lens of Dada’s past, it’s quite encouraging to realize that it doesn’t take a particularly large group of people, or a particularly long span of time, for an interesting approach to creating new forms of art to have a great deal of positive impact. While some of the Dada were well-known artists during their day, and many of them became famous in subsequent decades, at the time most of their activities were regarded by the conventional art world as ridiculous at best, if not dangerous.

While the practice of electronic literature is still not widespread, a growing group of artists have been seriously engaged in the creation of literary experiments for the computer and network for close to two decades now, and while some have already declared ‘the golden age’ of literary hypermedia past, the community of writers producing literary experiences has only grown stronger in recent years. Electronic literature now has a variety of established publication venues, works of new media literature regularly appear in university syllabi, and perhaps most importantly, informal communication networks have developed between writers and artists around the world. If much of the world still doesn’t know that literary art specific to the computer even exists, the writers themselves do, and are aware of and responding to each other’s work. Like the Dada, the electronic literature movement is fundamentally different from, and in many ways in opposition to, the established conventions of print-oriented literary culture. No hypertext novel has every appeared on a best-seller list, indeed most works of electronic literature are not sold at all, but rather given away in a gift economy.

For a long stretch of time after the movement dissolved, the Dada was largely not taken seriously within the ‘official’ art world. How could this chaotic brand of ‘anti-art’ find a place in museums and collections and so on, when its proponents declared themselves in every way opposed to that culture? Yet today, of course, the art world credits Dada with many of the most important techniques and ideas of twentieth century art. Digital writers who consider themselves to be on a fool’s errand, toiling in obscurity, might do well to take note of this.

The Blind Man’s issue on the Exhibition of Independents included one important thought that I’d like to conclude with. The Blind Man asked,

If a painter shows you a picture, you can make nothing out of, and calls you a fool, you may resent it. But if a painter works passionately, patiently, and says, ‘I am making many experiments which may, perhaps, bring nothing for many years,’ what can we have against him? (Roché, 2006: 151)

Beyond the creation of any single technique, the most important thing that the digital artists and authors of the future might learn from the Dada is their very willingness to experiment, to create objects and experiences that may bring nothing for years, or alternatively, may inspire other artists a century hence.

Author’s Biography

Scott Rettberg is an associate professor of Humanistic Informatics in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. He is a co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization, and currently serves on its board of directors. A writer and practitioner as well as critic and scholar of new media, Scott is the co-author of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown, the email novel Kind of Blue, and the sticker novel Implementation. He is a regular contributor to the new media research weblog Grand Text Auto, and has published a variety of critical and theoretical articles on electronic literature. Along with N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland, he recently co-edited the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, a CD-ROM and web anthology of electronic literature. Most of his writing is available on his website: http://retts.net

References

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Introduction

I must admit a general unease yet compulsive fascination towards the emerging social environments in Second Life. Partly I am wary of the time commitment associated with learning and developing the necessary skills for a full community participation in Second Life. By this I am referring to both time to develop both the technical proficiencies as well as the time to develop and maintain friendships and community connections that combine to actualize a socially participatory experience appropriate to a resident rather than a tourist or visitor. Here time becomes a currency, and while every artist and researcher must invest time, it is the consideration of extra time at a networked computer that must have as its consequence less time in the grounded experiences at ‘home’, with my immediate and very physically located friends and family. In this sense I confess that my observations and enquiries are more grounded upon my occupying a position of academic researcher (an outsider or tourist), than a fully participating member of the Second Life community.

This paper reflects my introduction to one particular artist while we were both exhibiting at the ISEA 06/Zero One digital art festival and symposium in 2006, and examines his recent work in online world Second Life. At this stage, DC Spensley (and through his avatar Dancoyote Antionelli) had been receiving attention for his contribution towards a definition of art in this popular online world.

This paper will document the ideas and philosophies of the artist DC Spensley, who has an extremely prolific practice across media that we may consider as an explosion of art production and use of Second Life particularly as an exhibition context. In some cases the artist is showing work that developed from a personal practice of digital image-making well before Second Life appeared online. In other cases his creative work is entirely produced by using the Second Life scripting language. His intensive research has resulted however in a substantial oeuvre and many new works.

In some ways this examination is fuelled by my personal research interests surrounding the rhetoric of decontextualized communication within online worlds such as Second Life, that suggests that we leave much of our local context behind when we enter into the mediated spaces of Second Life, and adopt ‘new’ names and roles. It is my hypothesis that we drag with us much of our attitudes and intents from our local material context, but this is a research proposition in its very early stages.

Rather than unpacking a case study to make claims about what art ‘is’ or ‘might be’ in Second Life, I aim to not decontextualize myself as a researcher, and art viewer. Rather I will consider the development of identity, value and art in Second Life, while keeping my own position and material context grounded in New Zealand. It is my aim that through negotiating a relationship between the contemporary art practice of DC Spensley and art histories within the settler culture of New Zealand we may finds links or useful precedents that may help contribute to a developing understanding of art in Second Life.

To discover these links, some of the values surrounding DC Spensley’s artistic success will be explored, particularly questioning the role and position of Spensley’s work in this managed social software experience designed to enable creative play and interaction. These will be compared briefly to other kinds of online art and also to some art historical practices in New Zealand.

I have divided the paper into two sections. The first part of the paper will examine the artist, his philosophy and achievements. This has been developed from interviews with the artist as well as additional web-based research. Dancoyote Antonelli is the name and form of DC Sopensley’s avatar. Malia Ventura is my own avatar. The second section will consider the context in which Spensley’s art is produced and read. This will begin with an examination of the role of representation, contexts and methods of art history. A further examination of context will be developed through a positioning of art and environment, particularly addressing the environmental metaphors of Second Life. Here I will consider colonial precedence and use examples drawn from New Zealand art histories to consider the role of art in new environments.

Discussion will draw upon contemporary research frameworks as well as contemporary art strategies that question specific relationships to site, to examine whether established art historical models can be transposed into digital worlds and their emerging art histories in useful ways, or whether other methods need to be developed.

PART 1. THE ART OF DC SPENSLEY aka Dancoyote Antonelli

Hyperformalism: the artwork of DC Spensley

DC Spensley, or as he is known in Second Life, Dancoyote Antonelli, is a relative newcomer to Second Life, but his work in digital media began many years ago. A graduating student completing a traditional art training at San Francisco Art Institute, Spensley has been working with pixel-based art since Photoshop 1.0. It has taken more than ten years however for the appropriate exhibition medium to evolve for this current work. Second Life has become the home and proper place for his digital imagery, animations and conceptual forms. Spensley however has also found a very real market in online art collectors trading, Spensley says, in scarcity and authenticity. In one interview Spensley positions his art in terms of market value:

Most art in SL until my entry was sold as copies like shoes. I found that there are real collectors in SL who love the chance to have an original and trust me to guard their investment. It is a pact between me and each collector (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

Further to this Spensley explains his carefully crafting of this market:

I am cultivating an 1980’s style art boom in SL and attempting to define value of fine artworks in a virtual medium (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

Image 1: The artist avatar Dancoyote Antonelli stands next to a sign for his large-scale work Modernist Marvel. Photograph by Ellen McCormick

Spensley’s personal philosophy outlines three developmental stages of online art as it has evolved rapidly in Second Life. The first generation involves imported images ranging from imported digital paintings to scans of paper-based images and even reproductions of photographs. Second generation work is made entirely in Second Life, using available materials in the world: the free, off-the-shelf textures, scripts and objects are available to any user or available free on the Second Life grid. Third generation work is a hybrid of the first two. In the following excerpts from an interview Spensley outlines his terms:

Malia Venture: what is a digital painting in terms of first generation work?

Dancoyote Antonelli: a digital painting is native to the digital format, it is not a photograph but made with math inside of a computer for this medium, like hyperformalism, in many cases it is native to digital, which makes it original when uploaded (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

Spensley describes his art philosophy, devising his own terms ‘hyperformalism’ and ‘opnetics’ as a way to theoretically position the abstract digital art he creates with software tools. His work incorporates both 2D ‘paintings’ and 3D ‘sculptures’ and incorporates static, moving and fly-through formats, architectural design and production and performance direction.

In DC Spensley’s own blog (www.spensley.com), he defines hyperformalism thus:

Hyperformalism is an aesthetic philosophical construct that may be employed to describe a late 20th century, early 21st century mass art phenomena consisting of scores of personal computer users generating abstract, often spatially unique artworks with software tools. These spatial realities have no analog [equivalent] in the physical world, and instead of making reference to physical reality, create a unique continuum of reference; a rearrangement of photons to illuminate alternate worlds of form, shape, color and space.

He continues:

The term Hyperformalism is derived from the combination of the words Hyper and Formalism (as described by Wikipedia) and is being used here to describe aesthetic self expression without anthropomorphic, or representative context. This separates Hyperformalism from digital collage, aesthetic photo manipulation and other forms.

From this we may paste together ourselves a definition of hyperformalism based on ‘hyper’, a prefix generally added to confer presence in more than usual or three spatial dimensions (hypertext, hyper-real), and ‘formalism’, referring to an art movement which places an emphasis on form over content or meaning. Stallabrass (2003: 34) cites an interest in form as one of two major developmental threads in early internet art. This thread he suggests is evident particularly in the computer games industry and the drive towards ‘the ultimate goal of virtual reality’.

Spensley’s hyperformalism however does not strive for a hyper-real scenario. He adds that hyperformalism is neither anthropomorphic nor representational, though hyperformal art may resemble natural formations or even employ naturalistic algorithms. Spensley’s hyperformal artworks however never contain recognizable elements like text, figures, landscapes, objects and concepts relating to humanity. Rather we may consider Stallabrass’ conclusions relevant regarding the relationship of early Net formalist artists to Modernism:

…the Net formalists could not be formalists in the old way, if only because of their acute and historical consciousness about the meaning and fate of modernism…yet the insistence of their references to it suggest the deep affinity felt with their predecessors, based upon a shared engagement with novel and fast-moving technology (2003: 35).

In this sense Spensley is engaging directly with his chosen material, and context, but without reference to human action or effect, despite his highly social engagement in the production and exhibition of works. He believes that digital imaging tools ‘naturally’ lead from an abstractive language; the tools themselves are mathematical abstractions governed by algorithms. One of the unique qualities of the tools, Spensley reports, is the ‘undo’ function, allowing ‘fast iteration and endless variation’.

In a conversation in Second Life Spensley writes

hyperformalism is my answer to the pathetic nihilism of postmodern theory, it is my way of saying enough is enough! Let’s get back to basics, let’s re-enchant art practice with wonder and de-anthropomorphize art practice, and appeal to a different lobe, an older lobe: formalism in hyper medium (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

It is curious that for Spensley, this ‘older lobe’ resides in the values and contexts of pre-digital art movements.

What is Real?

In the curator’s notes for group show The Real (April 2006) at Second Life’s online gallery Ars Virtua, James Morgan reflects on Second Life as an area where we can share a common experience of the virtual. DC Spensley’s work, he comments, reminds us of the numbers and commands that exist underneath our visual assumptions. Spensley’s level of reality, he suggests, is drilled down into the function of the machine: we experience the abstract beauty of the formula (http://arsvirtua.com.exhibitions).

Image 2: DanCoyote Antonelli as artist at work, photograph by Ellen McCormick, August 2007

Reflection upon the emerging history of online and digital artworks reveals a wide variety of approaches, among which we find other artists who share Spensley’s concerns with the ‘material’ of digital media. The artwork of Karl Sims, such as Galapagos (1995) also uses algorithms, creating works that appear to grow in response to simple audience triggers. The artwork in this case is a system, inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. ‘”Genetic” organisms seem to develop within their own environment inside the computer’ (Rush, 2001: 206). In contrast however, Spensley’s works do not respond to audience interaction, but remain art as object. Greene suggests that the theatricalization of data in art practice is exemplary of a wider phenomenon – the theatricalization of all spaces, which she suggests has been developing as a result of entertainment culture and television media, calling into question ideas of boundaries and definitions of interface (Greene, 2004: 133-134). Artists and writers on digital art, such as Christiane Paul and Rachel Greene, connect other generative and software art movements with earlier precedents of conceptual art movements including Fluxus, drawing parallel concerns between the tools of representation and enactment (Greene, 2004: 163).

While Spensley’s ‘paintings’ are constructed using the same ‘materials’ – software and algorithms – available to all residents of Second Life, his construction of these works as art (and exhibited by DanCoyote Antonelli as artist) positions these works in an economic relationship not consistent with digital art histories. Nevertheless, we can imagine that these works, in their attention to formal qualities, communicate the unseen in this digital environment, otherwise highly concerned with representation (Rajchman, 2005: 392).

Along with Hyperformalism, Spensley uses his own term ‘opnetics’. Opnetics refers to the optical and kinetic collaborations that evolve from Spensley’s works, where translucent ‘paintings’ shimmer and slowly move and merge in animated layers within their surrounding environmental space. In other cases images, light and effects surround an artwork temporarily, as choreographed layers flowing through space. We may consider Spensley’s opnetic features both as a cultural product and a dynamic visible process.

Image 3: ZeroG SkyDancers poster, original caption: ‘ZeroG SkyDancers 15/06/06, think aerial water ballet…’, photograph DC Spensley. Sky Dancers perform choreographed works using specific movement commands of flight, available in Second Life. Depicted here is also the crafted architectural space within which the dancers perform (right hand image), as well as the more traditional seating arena in which the audience remains seated for the spectacle (top left image).

Art Exhibitions, Communities and Economies

DC Spensley exhibits mainly in Second Life galleries, and is an active developer of online art exhibition venues. The artist (at the time of interview, August 2006) had built and was managing seven galleries in Second Life, and working also within existing Second Life gallery sites such as Ars Virtua, a Second Life project gallery (http://arsvirtua.com).

To further communicate his work and opinions the artist maintains several websites outside of Second Life:

I work solely on patronage and private sales: patronage for land to exhibit, and sales for collectors who must have original art. My economic model is deliberate. When I make a new piece I place as many copies for display as I want. But when it sells, I take them all down. I have found that people want unique things in SL [Second Life], and not copying makes the value increase if the collector resells in RL [‘Real Life’, or offline]. I also create jobs in SL. Already I have a team of two scripters, two builders, two sales reps and one clothes designer to help me create and communicate my newest generation work….My goal is to have 100 locations in SL, all with different work (http://uvvy.com/index.php/Dancoyote_Antonelli).

Spensley’s strategy and art community-building resolve have clearly paid off. Popular with Second Life art investors and publics alike, Spensley’s prolific art practice is making waves and attracting attention. The artist achieved over half a million Linden dollars worth of sales (the Second Life online currency, convertible to US dollars) in his first three months of exhibiting in Second Life, a meteoric rise to fame unlikely in offline art economies. Spensley does however seem to have mastered the digital languages specific to Second Life, both for creating and marketing visual art objects, as well as a clear and fluent grip on the background code, an understanding that has helped him to position his work in the evolving online capitalism of Second Life.

This involves the development of his avatar character DanCoyote Antonelli. According to Anhinga Chaika, exhibition curator for The Bluffs Nature Preserve and Center for the Arts, ‘…he is magnetic…His work is fresh, it is alive, it has passion!’ (www.metaversemessenger.com/pdf/2006/06/MM-2006-06-06.pdf).

Dancoyote regards his involvement in the art market as part of his conceptual art practice, and working within an historic moment:

Dancoyote Antonelli: It is a conceptual piece, taking place in a capitalist petri dish…yes the term ‘original art’ is up for grabs and I aim to solidify it.

He goes on to talk about the relationship between his art objects and conceptual approach:

Dancoyote Antonelli: I make objects still

Dancoyote Antonelli: but perform neologism, as art as well
Dancoyote Antonelli: I name things and twist the metanarrative

Dancoyote Antonelli: my objects have always had rich layers of meaning as well

Malia Ventura: objects and ideas live together in the art world, here and in the other life

Dancoyote Antonelli: intended and unintended, yes, however in SL there is scripting, I call scripting the 6th finger. It is our adaptation to life in metaverse… that is where I am on fire. (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

These values are reflected across Spensley’s practices and sites. Spensley is involved particularly in one development project as Lead Architect and Producer in Uvvy Island.

According to the Uvvy 1.0 design notes:

Architecture in SL is user interface. User interface serves a purpose to guide a user to certain content and facilitate what the user wants to do with that content. Pursuant to this I propose that while some aspects of ‘brickspace’ may be useful as familiar analogies, brickspace concerns should be discarded when SL native solutions, not analogous to brickspace, provide for better user interface design (http://uvvy.com/index.php/Uvvy_1.0_design_notes).

Uvvy Island Design Principles aim for a ‘Sense of Wonder and Confidence, (to) Make it Fun and Intriguing, Interesting and Informative’, and these principles are clearly echoed in Spensley’s art values and practice.

Spensley does not stop with painting and architecture. Recent works have ranged from choreography of Sky Dance performers, through to landscape art. Spensley’s aeronautic dance troupe takes advantage of the Second Life ‘fly’ function, with complex choreography and coded visual effects performing under the name of ZeroG. ZeroG have performed on several occasions, including ISEA 06/Zero One in San Jose.

Image 4: Audience members gather for the ZeroG performance, Second Life screen shot, photograph DC Spensley, August 2006

An example of Spensley’s landscape art can be found in the Second Life online campus NMC’s ‘Artists on the green’ project, where Spensley created several temporary shimmering animated and textured ‘landscapes’ for limited periods on August 12 2006.

Image 5: One of Spensley’s four contributions to NMC’s ‘Artists on the Green’ project, August 12 2006. Spensley chose to use the 14 acre campus site as his canvas, temporarily etching in to ‘grass’ and creating temporary landscapes, forms and layers to existing geographies.

IP and digital culture

Within his first three months the artist encountered a range of problems surrounding IP and digital culture, telling a narrative of deceipt and misrepresentation. In August 2006 Spensley writes:

There is a SL celebrity that keeps taking pictures of my work and publishing these photos as hers. At times (she would go as far as exhibiting the works) giving only bylines to the artists.

The artist talked to the ‘celebrity’ twice about the problems relating to IP, before responding through his art practice.

He discusses his reaction:

Dancoyote Antonelli: But here’s the art: I commissioned a script that opaques a painting when she is within 25 meters of the work.

Dancoyote Antonelli: If she takes photos of original art she needs to license the photos like anyone else, or get permission.

Spensley retells his action as an art response, aligning it to an ‘art action’ of the conceptual art movement:

Dancoyote Antonelli: Well the script is conceptual art

Malia Ventura: Yes the script is yours, as well as the script that opaques a painting: a perfect solution in this medium.

Dancoyote Antonelli: The truth is there are even more damaging ways to hack into a work in SL (McCaw and Spensley, 2006).

In this story Spensley crosses values between art historic precedents, using strategies he aligns with conceptual art actions, as well as holding onto traditional modernist concepts of ownership of visual art, images and IP. The question must be considered whether digital art that is positioned within the economy of Second Life is able to avoid the capitalist separation of original and copy. It is precisely the copy and paste commands that Spensley cites as valuable tools in his iterative production that threatens the terms of his ownership.

Between Two Worlds

Spensley is working across platforms and is aware of the crossovers and what there is to be gained and lost in the digital translation. On one hand Spensley has been working in pixel-based images for many years, and an online world such as Second Life has the potential to offer so much more than a website as an online exhibition context. On the other hand he notes that offline experience offers riches too.

‘I am a fine artist in real life and Second Life, but digital fine art is NATIVE to SL’, says Antonelli, who has taken to being an established resident in an astonishingly short time. ‘I was born to be here. I have been making art since Photoshop 1.0 and have many digital generations iterated into the bodies of work. Each time I take the work out into RL by scanning and photography and bring it back into the digital world, it gains’.

Spensley defines art value in this sense as ‘transformative’. Interestingly his aspirations remain focused upon traditional offline centres. A modern art historical relationship of artist to audience is alluded to with his intentions to see his art find a place in traditional fine art institutions.

Just sitting on a computer, this work is trivial, just files in the eyes of many, not respected as fine art yet. But displayed and viewed in SL, it transforms magically into the fine art I intended it to be in the first place. I fully intend to show the SL art in the MOMA [Museum of Modern Art], Whitney, Tate and Guggenheim.

So what is the proper place for art?

PART 2: ART IN ITS PLACE

The second half of this paper will consider the emerging art practice, environment and economy of DC Spensley and Second Life. It will consider possible connections between the values and methods of Spensley’s practice with some Western art historical traditions, some internet and online art traditions and colonial art histories as they have been documented in New Zealand over the last 100 years in order to consider what has changed and possible emerging features of new spaces for art such as those developing in Second Life.

Representation, context and methods

At least since Plato the theory and practice of visual arts have been founded almost exclusively, upon the relationship between the real and its copy. This duality has shaped the writing of art history as a story of the conquest of the real… and has helped to define modern art movements, like abstraction, that consciously rejected iconic resemblance (Camille, 1996: 32).

Western art histories have traditionally valued representation. Artists’ abilities to create images that were illusory and could tell stories highlight the tension between illusion and truth, genuine and copy, that are among the core values of early Western visual art. But art has not always been evaluated solely on its ability to create a likeness. Vasari, writing during the Renaissance, is credited with writing the first extensive art history of this period. He also sets out the ground rules for methods of evaluating art. Vasari includes connoisseurship and humanist principles as well as visual likeness and visual illusion (which help to define the boundaries of beauty) as important qualities for evaluating Renaissance art (Fernie, 1995: 11). In contrast contemporary Art Historian Eric Fernie defines art histories in terms of methods, which he claims are in turn defined by their historic and social contexts (Fernie, 1995: 9).

While art historians of the early twentieth century abandoned some of the earlier methods of evaluation and understanding art (including the importance of likeness and illusion), some aspects of these earlier methods and values have pervaded. On the whole artwork was still perceived as the successful production of individual genius and twentieth century art history is still considered as a canon of great names. Other interpretive languages such as pschychoanalysis were added to these earlier methods, but remained techniques of connoisseurship. Art appreciation for much of the first half of the twentieth century remained firmly a part of ‘high’ culture, and institutions, such as museums and galleries continue to protect the kinds of knowledges that surround the visual languages of art, as well the artifacts themselves.

Camille points out that even art movements such as abstraction, where Spensley positions himself as aligned with Formalism, (an abstract movement that rejected pictorial representation) is nevertheless positioned within a dichotomous relationship surrounding representation (Camille, 1996: 42).

Representation, context and methods

I first discovered online worlds in the early 1990’s in the form of text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and MOOs (Multi Object Oriented online games). These very evocative and imaginative shared social experiences continue to intrigue me. As the graphic capabilities of networked personal computers accelerate and technical literacies become common languages, online worlds are becoming increasingly visual. MUD worlds were once descriptive texts, personal and shared storytelling environments more related to fiction- or script-writing. And yet 3D worlds such as Second Life through their visual allegory, are evoking different relationships to these performative sites, and draw from different histories, communities and evaluative languages.

The issue of representation then does not only relate to art and its emergence as a defining term in Second Life. All citizens and visitors in this world must (as a part of their logon procedure), engage in making visual choices, in the initial creation of their avatar. Avatars are visual representations of our online characters. They are how we see ourselves, as a constructed identity in Second Life, as much as they are how we present ourselves to others. Yet these avatar images are not based upon values such as likeness or authenticity. When we choose our visual identities from a range of (initially) predetermined options, some likely roles come with them. From the colour of our skin to the size of our nose we are choosing costumes that have been associated with other mediated stereotypes. The question of the relationship between the original and the copy is always present in our shared interface, its connection both attractive and troubling. Through our avatars we inhabit two locations, and we are able to cross between them using visual and textual cues.

Image 6: avatar selection window, screenshot from Second Life

As a recent technology of visualization, game genres differ from earlier art technologies such as photography or painting, and have different histories. The evolution of social networked media, from MUDs and MOOs though to Second Life, has required a major shift in the literacies of users. At one time in the 1980s and early 1990s a good word-per-minute typing speed and a lively wit were the skills required to gain respect and contribute to many and multiple running conversations in a MUD. As technology developed, the use of hypertext and embedded images added scope to how we might navigate or traverse connections between offline and online personas, and between synchronous and networked social spaces.

Second Life, like other 3D game genres, is still low in terms of resolution and likeness. There is no convincing relationship to illusion. However we are required to relinquish our ‘consumer’s relationship’ to these images and, as literacies develop, we may begin to associate all 3D graphic scenes as landscapes that may be navigated from a first-person perspective. As online worlds such as Second Life grow in population and architectures, we also begin to see these architectures and forms as ever-evolving and constructed from an infinite combination of primitive shapes. While technically anything is possible in this toybox of our imagination the combinations people do choose to create, regularly rely on representations of that which is already familiar.

The significant shift occurs as consumers of game cultures become increasingly invited to take the role of producers. The opportunities for audience-members to redesign themselves as creative participants in the environment and culture of Second Life is a popular and accessible example of this shift. And while this is not a shift for MUD players, who have regularly taken on the role of producer, the tools of visualization have changed. The entirely visual content of Second Life draws upon histories and behaviours that are not necessarily drawn from prior game technologies, and we witness a convergence of media and art histories and literacies from the sparkling blue eyes of our permanently teen bodies!

While new tools of visualization offer the potential to develop a visually democratic agora, offline, the role of aesthetic judge and arbiter has traditionally been negotiated between architects and designers, artists and town planners. As noted historic and sophisticated systems exist to ensure that aesthetic education and decision-making is circulated through the portals of high culture. Offline ‘experts’ govern the design of our cities and habitats, our entertainment and certainly our art. This leads inevitably to the question of ‘what makes art different’ in a visual, creative and participatory environment such as Second Life? The example of DC Spensley suggests in part that it is these offline systems, at least in the emergence of this art economy, that have served to define the role and position of art and artist in Second Life. Spensley’s language and training have offered him the perspective of a visual expert and this is the role he plays as DanCoyote Antonelli – a highly crafted persona of a traditional artist.

Spensley regards his hyperformalism as ‘the art movement that the art world missed – a broad proletarian explosion of art’. He characterizes this proletarian aspect as

scores of personal computer users generating unique artworks sharing technical and aesthetic discoveries specific to their medium with each other on the World Wide Web. Their material is the pixel, their medium is the electronic display delivered to the viewer via the Internet, and the occasional visionary art venue (http://uvvy.com/index.php/Dancoyote_Antonelli).

In addition, the terms of economic value surrounding Spensley’s art rely on there being ‘scores of computer users’ but not that they all must consider themselves artists. As Spensley himself points out, scarcity and authenticity are the conditions if his trade.

It then seems inevitable in this context that traditional offline notions of connoisseurship, patronage and ownership related to art are being conserved. And yet Spensley’s art is not something you might buy in order to make your Second Life living spaces a little prettier. The scale of Spensley’s 2D and 3D work in most cases would require a hefty investment in land purchase and the construction of large scale architecture. Walter Benjamin’s renegotiation of art after technology predicted that advances in technology would eliminate authenticity, as a criterion of value (Schneider Adams, 1996: 63). We are seeing the opposite propogated in this Second Life art practice and economy. Spensley has commissioned code to protect his authenticity from particular characters/players who challenge this notion. This action emphasizes the traditional art historical values of individual artworks as an act of creative genius, by an authentic producer. While any visitor can capture a screen shot of Spensley’s work, it is his desire to control the reproduction and distribution of that image, not only as source code, but as an art object.

So what might potentially unique aspects of art in Second Life be, if as Spensley claims the term ‘original art’ is still being defined?

While Spensley’s success can be measured in economic terms, it is more difficult to evaluate in terms of its social and theoretical contribution. To understand and negotiate the role and potential definition of art in Second Life, we will need to acknowledge the omnipresence, not just the availability, of the tools and materials of art in this context. The theoretical approach of second wave Marxist art writers such as Ernst Fischer may be useful, encouraging the creative act of work. For Fischer people gain control of their world through the use of tools. ‘A subject-object relationship [that] only occurs through work’ (Schneider Adams, 1996: 61). All building in Second Life, from objects of art to building and personae requires an engagement in creative processes.

Landscape: the environment visually perceived

Landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can be understood only as a part of a wider history of economy and society (Appleton, 1984: 11).

For us to consider Fernie’s approach for understanding art through the context in which it is produced and seen, it is necessary to acknowledge the environment and emerging economies of Second Life as this context. An online ‘world’, Second Life, like many of the terms of the internet, references geographic metaphors. Second Life is built upon, and relies on our fundamentally familiar relationships to landscapes and social interactions that occur within them.

It is Cosgrove’s argument that habits of perception (‘ways of seeing’) of societies can be constrained by various combinations of circumstances of social, cultural and economic kind (Appleton,1984: 12), and this can be said to apply equally to both the reading of art as well as ways of seeing landscapes.

Intuitions towards landscapes (as well as intuitive responses towards art) are ‘transformed, overlain and mediated by social, cultural and economic as well as personal meanings’ (Appleton, 1984: 12).

A useful 19th century example of this relationship to landscapes can be seen through the cult of the wilderness, a profoundly social and nostalgic consideration for landscape that is not inhabited by humans. Also emerging out of times of huge technological change, namely Britain during the Industrial Revolution, wilderness can be seen as an idealization of particular landscapes in terms of leisure and tourism, retreat and refreshment, pure and ‘natural’ in comparison to impure urban environments that is maintained in our contemporary imagination. Not coincidentally this was also the era in which New Zealand was being settled, a far away wilderness for consumption. More generally countryside becomes constructed as an antithesis to the city and it is not surprising that this countryside metaphor was the initial visual metaphor employed by the designers of Second Life (Aitchison et al, 1995: 51).

Appleton suggests despite this socio-cultural molding that we in part recognize landscape as an archetype, and he uses the example of the widespread attraction which people feel towards ‘parkland’ as an idealized, contrived arrangement. I am suggesting that Second Life is constructed more as a parkland than a wilderness. Its natural features include benevolent green rolling hills atop islands, and sea you can fly through. Conveniently this modeled rural landscape is empty and pest-free when purchased, ‘homely, stable and ahistorical’ (Aitchison et al, 1995: 50). It is free from environmental concerns, the grass doesn’t need to be mowed. We are visitors-as-residents and we rely on the controlled stasis of the environmental metaphors, more similar to a holiday house we may visit regularly than the neighbourhood we return to after work.

Image 7: Spensley’s cultivation of an 1980’s style art boom, where art is seen in an economic continuum following from real estate and pornography suggests historical precedence. Screenshot from the Second Life website explaining land sale.

Colonial precedent

The model inferred here is highly colonial. Second Life is positioned as a Terra Nullius and this applies layers of colonial meaning and association.

The term ‘terra nullius’ is from Latin origin, meaning ‘no man’s land’, or empty land, not possessed already by people. It has a close relationship to the term ‘res nullius’ which denotes objects that are not yet owned, such as wild animals, or abandoned property. The two terms form the legal the foundation and justification for colonial enterprise, whereby the act of ‘finding’ and ‘occupying’ land was justification for claiming ownership of that land, and its occupants: generally defined as fauna (res nullius). The relationship is primarily based upon the principles of economics. If land is not producing economic value then it is un- or under-utilized. Land and its use value become synonymous with ownership.

We may easily recognize the abuses of these legal concepts through cursory examination of South African and Australian histories, where nomadic indigenous peoples were considered not to be occupying land because their land value systems contrasted with those considered economic. Second Life is modeled on a highly metaphoric and endlessly extendable landscape also viewed in economic terms as real estate.

Danny Butt in his essay on Local Knowledge (2005) proposes three impassable contradictions, related to settler culture, indigenous culture and location. One of these Mapping – the most basic function of the colonial process – Butt writes, functions by turning a profoundly social relationship with the land characteristic of indigenous culture, into data.

And while the designers of Second Life created a land conveniently without indigenous people, its first owner (the Linden Corporation who establishes initial trading rights for each ‘new’ island) and the Linden inhouse building tools frame the world. I suggest that the way that we construct the formation of culture in this empty land draws upon a colonial model and precedents. The research question that follows from these initial considerations is: is it possible to have new empty land that allows for a different model of colonization, or will older models prevail? And how can we consider art in this relationship?

Major differences

There are of course fundamental differences between the colonization of material geography and the relationship we have to the metaphoric landscapes of Second Life. The first major difference begins with our relationships to our avatars as body-metaphors, which online have no material needs other than a broadband connection to our keyboards, requiring neither food nor shelter. The laws of sustainable land usage, and the effects we may have within an environmental ecological system based upon material relationships therefore may be abandoned. New systems evolving in Second Life are based upon social relationships and economic models, with a limited range of tools (‘native’ proprietory software) accessible to all. As noted earlier, time becomes a currency as it enables users the opportunity to master these tools and social languages. This is also evident in the artwork of DC Spensley, whose prolific art activitiy is enabled through many hours of education and practice. What we experience within this emerging and participatory culture is the realisation, or potential realisation, not of needs but of desires. And we witness increasing numbers of inhabitants in Second Life realizing their desires in traditional off-line ways. According to DC Spensley, the first economies to develop in Second Life were real estate and followed closely by pornography. It is Spensley’s prediction that an art economy will follow.

Image 8: From Second Life homepage February 2007

Representing landscapes

To return to the subject of emerging art histories, I am attracted to make a comparison to art histories that have emerged in other colonial settings, specifically looking towards New Zealand colonial art histories, which have been dominated by landscape painting.

For the sake of simplicity, I suggest that there have been several periods of artists in New Zealand in the last 150 years that have been acknowledged with the role of contributing towards colonial understandings of place and belonging. I will choose examples from two of these periods.

The first wave of European artists sent to New Zealand may be illustrated using the example of the work of Charles Heaphy. Heaphy was appointed artist and draughtsman by the New Zealand Company, based in England and joined Colonel William Wakefield in a preliminary expedition to New Zealand in 1840. His initial role and duties while traveling around the country was as artist and surveyor, though his entry in Te Ara, an online New Zealand encyclopeadia, also lists him as ‘explorer’ (http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/H/HeaphyCharles/HeaphyCharles/en).

While the purpose of these original British artists was to document new territory, their resulting images tell stories of a new place, more based on desires and economies than on mimetic or documentary representation. Heaphy’s energetic role went on to win him political status and employment. Te Ara however identifies his chief successes as an artist.

Heaphy is remembered mostly for his neat maps and for his paintings and drawings of the New Zealand scene. These are more than the accurate topographical illustrations the New Zealand Company employed him to produce; the best of them are illuminated by some poetic insight; most of them indicate his struggle to come to grips with the savage landscapes so alien to one brought up in the milieu of the traditional English water colourists.

Heaphy’s ‘tidied up’ landscapes were intended to create desire and a sense of the exotic in order to please his employers and encourage more immigrants to join him in this tamed landscape. The painting (below) of Mount Taranaki, also documented online in the Te Whenua me Nga Tangata, Land & People Project at Otago University is accompanied by the following caption:

Charles Heaphy’s spectacularly symmetrical Mount ‘Egmont’ painted in 1839 aimed to attract settlers to the New Zealand company’s ‘beautiful’ New Plymouth settlement. His deliberate omission of the heavy rain forest between the coast and mountain represented an early form of real estate ‘spin’ (collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library) (http://www.otago.ac.nz/nzpg/land_people/index.html).

Image 9: Charles Heaphy ‘Mount Egmont from the Southward’ 1840

Feeling out of place and creating an art true to Pakeha (European settler) culture independent of Britain became a primary concern of early twentieth century New Zealand-born artists. One of the most recognized for his contribution to this kind of art knowledge was painter Colin McCahon. McCahon (1919–1987) is credited as New Zealand’s first painter of international significance, but is interesting here for the role he played in helping an emerging colonial nation state help to see itself. Colin McCahon might best represent the second wave of New Zealand artists.

Image 10: Colin McCahon, Mapua landscape, 1939, medium: grass stalk ‘pen’ & ink, ‘finger-pushed’ on paper. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki

Early work of McCahon’s such as Mapua landscape (1939) shows the artist developing a visual shorthand for recording his relationship to the landscape, using the materials of the land (grass stalk, pen and ink) as well as his own fingers to physically integrate this relationship of people and place. Literally pushing ink upon the surface of his painting and scratching the surface with grass stalks dipped in ink McCahon’s shorthand reveals a deep study of the landscape.

It is McCahon’s later paintings however that became iconic, and represented a shift for McCahon, but also for settler culture in New Zealand. Landscape and religion combine to communicate McCahon’s humanist message. Often generalized abstract New Zealand landscapes were used as contemporary settings of religious events, and increasingly landscapes became employed for its symbolic content. Large painted fields, and hand painted texts are well recognized elements of McCahon’s paintings, upon canvas, board and large scale panels. The iconic value of this work was a collective social recognition of the landscape as a visual trope. Perhaps most significant however was the promise that despite much imported (colonial) content in New Zealand culture, meaning may be written and read in local settings and environments.

image 11: Colin McCahon, As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the pure land, 1965, medium : enamel paint on hardboard. Collection of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch.

This painting with text and landscapes uses two of the visual communication devices employed in Second Life.

For McCahon the landscape, while depicted as empty, was already full of God, a spiritual connection to the land borrowed from (or perhaps recognized in) traditional Maori worldviews. Nicholas Thomas writes that

the deep association between indigenous people and the land provided strong and condensed reference points for a colonial culture that sought both to define itself as native and to create national emblems (Thomas,1999: 12).

It is both the realization of the auratic nature of the landscape, and its potential role as a theatrical set in which richer meanings can be played out that informs McCahon’s particular vision. In this sense the landscapes, usually empty of people, may be seen as a local ‘Garden of Eden’, and a site from which embodied (self) realisation emerges, an omnipresent and invisible creator casting texts towards us. There is some analogous relationship that can be drawn here between McCahon’s landscapes and/as texts, and the function of land in Second Life. An omnipresent and invisible creator (the Linden Corp) lies also behind the tools and metaphors of our emplaced interactions. The Garden as theatrical set is also a model we can recognize, although the religious message to the children of the garden relies more upon the promise of economic gain and eternal youth.

Since McCahon, new forms of travel and communication technologies have changed our geographic and cultural horizons. A recent illustration of the use of simplified messages fusing these changes can be seen in a current Air New Zealand marketing campaign set to be released on television, in cinemas and within the urban landscape, on billboards. The campaign values the importance of ‘being there’, and associating this national airline as the way to accomplish this, with close metaphoric association with New Zealand’s landscape, but also drawing upon our familiarity with flying over landscapes in Second Life. One television commercial depicts a person working in a cafe in the northern city of Auckland. He walks outside to a jetty looking sad and doleful. He then jumps into the air and flies the length of New Zealand to land outside a landmark building in Dunedin (a southern city, some 2 hours away by air) to kiss his girlfriend. The key visual analogy however is that he flies over empty land and at the same level above the earth that he would fly in Second Life. In an online press release Air New Zealand marketing manager Steve Bayliss says the ‘Amazing Journeys’ theme exemplifies the heart of Air New Zealand’s brand.

Central to our brand promise is a set of beliefs that include our belief that ‘the only way to truly say I love you is with a hug’, and that ‘we live in the most inspiring place on earth’.

This is characterized by an attitude typical of McCahon’s spiritual relationship to the landscape, but with a Second Life perspective.

‘The campaign showcases New Zealand’s stunning landscape through breathtaking aerial shots. It creates powerful dreamlike sequences and encourages viewers to have a romantic connection with, and sense of pride in their country,’ says Mr Bayliss.

And just like Second Life the actors are everyday folk:

In keeping with previous Air New Zealand campaigns, staff were involved in the creative process by submitting their personal ‘amazing journey’ stories (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0701/S00234.htm).

Site and cultural production

Other tools and strategies need to be investigated as possible alternatives to assist and enlargen the current framing of art and its role in Second Life. Contemporary art theories that may provide useful alternatives to traditional models include site-specific methodologies and decolonial methods.

Curator and researcher Claire Doherty writes that contemporary art is no longer produced in a studio in isolation

…we have witnessed the convergence of site specific, installation, community and public art, institutional critique and political activism (Doherty, 2004: 10).

Doherty cites Miwon Kwon’s understanding of site which has shifted from being a fixed, physical location. Rather Kwon and Doherty concur that site is constituted through social, economic and cultural processes. A new vocabulary (Doherty, 2004: 10) bound with social engagement marks the ‘new-ness’ of this participatory art. While these two researchers are in fact referring to material geographies, their re-construction of site as fluid and culturally engaged and responsive may offer useful clues toward a new definition of online contexts. It is perhaps through these concerns that we can re-imagine the role of art in Second Life as a part of a constructed social and economic field, rethinking colonial relationships to site through engagement with representation and context, not in opposition but through a necessary and negotiated tension.

Sara Diamond suggests that new technologies demand a shift in the way that we observe, absorb and respond to technology. She notes that:

technology is a material force: while social, cultural and economic structures shape technology, technology also acts back on social, cultural, economic and physical bodies. The materiality of technology and of the image (which acts not only on language but as a language on us) are in constant tension (Diamond, 1996: 134).

These sentiments are echoed by Judith Mastai who adds that digital technologies signal a deep suspicion of a single truth and that contemporary curatorial practices must reflect multiple communities and therefore consider multiple ideologies (Mastai, 1996: 152).

Decolonial methods may assist us to consider landscapes, people and belonging in ways outside of colonial thinking. Writers such as Edward Said among others have drawn attention to the link between imperialism and high culture (Thomas, 1999: 7). Subsequent art writers such as Nicholas Thomas claim that the way to include a presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world, is to refocus on meanings which are examined from a distinctive, local vantage point (1999: 8). Colonial relationships emerged not only from governorship from afar, but also through direct contact and local interactions. Thomas claims that the settler relationship is a particular discourse, claiming both utopian visions and antagonistic intimacy (1999: 10).

Conclusions

To return to Spensley, while his art is neither representational, nor concerned with landscape, we may recognize an engagement with the forms and materials of a new environment. His contribution to a growing definition of art in Second Life relates particularly ideas familiar to traditional offline art. Spensley’s work can help us to consider a bigger picture of what art is, and what art might be, and how art may be located in emerging online worlds such as Second Life in other ways. It is perhaps curious that Spensley’s work does not sit easily within, or develop from the emerging traditions of internet-based, or online art histories, but rather reflects the dominant model of Second Life as a capitalist simulacrum. Spensley’s personal positioning within this world reflects this economic model ahead of cultural or art historical concerns. And will further and future research in contemporary art and art movements in Second Life reveal other references and directions artists forging these connections in a world where everybody has access to the tools of art-making?

Attention to the context of Second Life helps us to position artwork within a landscape (cultural and metaphoric) that artists’ works emerge from and within which they are read. While currently we see reflected the centrality of the relationship of value, art and ownership, art has the potential to reach outside of these economic concerns. As with offline settler cultures, art will play a role in the development of a tenuous cultural distinctiveness, explicit and visible in Second Life. The risk is to not create a too narrow definition of art and culture that could encourage or support existing homogeneity.

It is clear that we will need to sharpen the tools passed on from previous disciplines (such as traditional art histories), and to develop new tools where necessary, to navigate this new territory and to avoid following false trails observed from our offline histories, acknowledging that there remains a risk of suppression of cultural diversity, and of cultural simplification.

If we are to acknowledge that art is effective in defining social relations and meanings, then art may radically redefine them. In order to do this the languages and avenues for art criticism will need to inform artists, collectors and publics alike, and not just a market economy. Fora for discussion and exhibition also must evolve, that are open to forms of art that are not-so-traditional and invite people who have not yet tried the ‘role’ of artist so that they may help to stretch definitions in useful ways.

Author’s Biography

Caroline McCaw is a Senior Lecturer and Academic Leader in Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic, in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her research interests include examining situated creative practices, participatory art and design, and particularly the relationship between material location and networked culture drawing from examples in the fields of
both art and design. Her design and art practices perform these research interests, through work in publications, mixed reality, and multi‑location art events. She is actively involved in the Aotearoa Digital Arts network, and contributes to a wide range of community activities. Caroline is a PhD student at Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. She has published papers, curated and exhibited digital art internationally, most recently exhibiting work at ISEA06.

References

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Butt, Danny. ‘Local Knowledge: Place and New Media Practice’ in Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts, Broadsheet publication accompanying the international symposium of the same name, Hoani Waititi Marae, Auckland/Tamaki Makaurau, 1-5 December 2005.

Camille, Michael. ‘Simulacrum’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Shoff (eds) Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Diamond, Sara. ‘Technology matters: material issues in the information age’ in Peter White (ed) Naming a Practice, Curatorial Strategies for the Future (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 1996).

Doherty, Claire. From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004).

Fernie, Eric. Art History and Its Methods: a critical anthology (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).

Greene, Rachel. Internet Art (London and New York: Thames and Hudson World of Art Series, 2004).

McCaw, Caroline and DC Spensley, interview in Second Life, August 2006.

Mastai, Judith. ‘Oh Heck!: Art Galleries, ideologies of practice and shifting paradigms of knowledge’ in Peter White (ed) Naming a Practice, Curatorial Strategies for the Future (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 1996).

Rajchman, John. ‘The Lightness of Theory’ in Z. Kocur and S. Leung (eds) Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Rush, Micheal. New Media in Late 20th Century Art (London and New York: Thames and Hudson World of Art Series, 2001).

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Images

1. Digital screen shot in Second Life. Dan Coyote Antonelli stands in front of a sign promoting his work ‘Modernist Marvel’, August 2006 http://blog.ellenmccormickmartens.com/2006_08_06_ellecoyote_archive.html, accessed 20 Feb 2007.

2. Digital screen shot in Second Life. Dan Coyote Antonelli stands in front of a digital painting, August 2006 http://blog.ellenmccormickmartens.com/2006_08_06_ellecoyote_archive.html, accessed 20 Feb 2007.

3. ZeroG SkyDancers artists poster. One of four contributions to NMC’s ‘Artists on the Green’ project, August 12 2006. http://spensley.com/hyperformalism accessed 20 February 2007.

4. Digital screen shot in Second Life, DC Spensley http://uvvy.com/index.php/Dancoyote_Antonelli, accessed 25 February 2007.

5. ‘a mesmerizing landscape of vibrantly colored glacial fjord like canyons’, photograph by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/10/23/dancoyote/ accessed 23 February 2007.

6. Avatar selection window for new characters. http://secondlife.com/whatis/avatar.php accessed July 2006

7. http://secondlife.com/whatis/land.php. Promotion of Real Estate on Second Life website. Accessed July 2006

Second Life homepage, http://secondlife.com accessed 23 February 2007.

8. ‘Mount Egmont from the Southward’ 1840. Watercolour on paper. 37.7 x 60.7cm signed Charles Heaphy, collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Purchased 1916, published in Charles Heaphy by Briar Gordon and Peter Stupples, Pitman Publishing, Petone New Zealand, 1987.

9. Colin McCahon, Mapua landscape, 1939, medium: grass stalk ‘pen’ & ink, ‘finger-pushed’ on paper. Collection of of Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand. accessed 23 February 2007, PENDING APPROVAL (permission kindly granted by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust to reproduce this image).

10. Colin McCahon, As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the pure land 1965, medium: enamel paint on hardboard. Collection of the Robert McDougal Gallery, Christchurch New Zealand, PENDING APPROVAL (permission kindly granted from the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust to reproduce image).

Introduction

Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so ornery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner’s swine (Ishmael Reed, the opening to Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,1969).

Signifying, the African diasporic tradition of one-upmanship by verbally stringing together escalating oblique hyperboles, invigorates the passage above with its crescendo-ing description of ‘a bad man’. Signifying is but one important trope in African diasporic oral traditions, which often gains evocative power by employing oratory tropes (Gates Jr, 1988). In his essay ‘Oral Power and Europhone Glory’, author and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1998) identifies and elaborates a set of principles for analyzing oral systems of communication, and a perspective on the deployment of those principles in African diasporic contexts. He foregrounds an oral aesthetic system (to be explored later in this paper) including an account of conditions for performance, namely architectural space, time frame, an oral equivalent to mises-en-scène, and the audience-performer relationship. The elements of performance described by Ngugi are also central in many forms of computational narrative with its virtual worlds, procedurality, and user-machine interaction. This parallel fuels the realisation that computing technologies hold great potential for contributing to new forms of computational narrative expression beyond the privileged models typically encountered in discourse surrounding computational expressive practices; a broader view of narrative reveals diverse aesthetic traditions that contain well developed philosophies of interactivity and generativity that blend naturally with the expressive affordances of computational media.

The use of particular privileged cultural models is currently entrenched in computing practice. However explicitly highlighting diverse cultural foundations is not a radical or revisionist gesture. I believe that it holds concrete advantages. This paper uses the case of computational narrative as exemplified by the GRIOT system to explore the importance of, and challenges involved in, explicitly grounding computing practices in culturally based values and practices.

Section II elaborates upon the observation that cultural models are implicitly built into all computational systems, ranging from the structuring of basic hardware functionality, as in operating system design, to performing tasks usually thought of as human, as in artificial intelligence (AI) practices.

Section III provides grounding remarks about the relationship of this paper’s central argument to controversies and crucial issues in socio-cultural theory, in particular avoiding typical pitfalls of essentialism, stereotyping, and cultural exploitation involved in explicitly culturally-based technical practices.

Section IV details gains to be made by making the role of cultural values and practices in computing explicit using the relationship between African diasporic orature (traditions and systems of oral communication) and the GRIOT system as a case study. It articulates a view of African diasporic orature, primarily based upon that of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, that attempts to avoid the pitfalls of describing orature only in a binary oppositional relationship to literature, and the cultural prejudice that usually results from that dichotomy (Ngugi, 1998). This section also describes the functionality and structuring of the GRIOT system, some of its theoretical underpinnings, and five dimensions along which it reflects the view of African diasporic orature presented previously.

In the conclusion, I discuss some of the challenges inherent in any broad discussion of cultural systems and a possible future direction for methodology useful for forwarding my argument.

I Cultural Foundations In Computing

Computing systems have developed within particular histories, communities of practice, conceptual metaphorical bases, and other dimensions of specific contexts. Consider the example of the ‘von Neumann architecture’, which refers to the type of stored-program architecture detailed by John von Neumann in his seminal work (von Neumann, 1945). Most contemporary references to this type of architecture elide its historical, material, and metaphorical origins. Von Neumann’s work was a profoundly mature articulation of an architecture type that persists in use to this day, but of course it arose in the context of its time. This can be seen easily by its initial proposed reliance upon the technological resources of its times. Von Neumann (1945) wrote ‘It is clear that a very high speed computing device should ideally have vacuum tube elements’.

Of greater conceptual note, von Neumann’s metaphors have an unfamiliar ring to contemporary readers. Of the “central control part” of a computer, von Neumann (1945) wrote that ‘the logical control of the device … can be most efficiently carried out by a central control organ’. This usage of the biological term “organ” was not an isolated case of an incidental metaphor. In the parlance of his times, von Neumann wrote also of ‘memory organs’, ‘input and output organs’, and of information produced by ‘human actions being sensed by human organs’. The metaphorical mapping of a computer’s subunits to ‘organs’ has not persisted to this day. Von Neumann also claimed that ‘neurons of higher animals are definitely ‘elements’ such as those found in computing devices. While the analogy between computers and brains has persisted, for von Neumann (1945) it was a very literal analogy as he stated that the central arithmetical part, the central control part, and the memory ‘correspond to the associative neurons of the human nervous system’ and later he discussed the ‘equivalents’ to the sensory and motor neurons. Contemporary cognitive science has passed by the early McCulloch and Pitts model of the neuron first (indeed the cognitive linguistics enterprise within cognitive science has passed by the ‘brain is a computer’ metaphor) that von Neumann refers to, which at one time was seen as potentially powerful enough to model human neural functioning (McCullock and Pitts, 1942).

The point of this discussion of von Neumann’s work is that even ubiquitous technical hardware innovations are deeply grounded within cultural and historical practices. These cultural-historical origins tend to exist implicitly within technologies as opposed to being articulated explicitly within technical or popular discourse. When technical work is conflated with philosophy, sciences studying the mind/brain complex, human languages, or related areas, the tangle of implicit cultural bases only becomes more challenging to precisely locate.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science are interdisciplinary fields with precisely the tangled heritage of traditions described above. The origins of these fields rest in a reification of the ‘brain is a computer’ metaphor as developed within engineering practice and (often empirical) scientific experimentation. However, the cultural and philosophical bases of these fields have been deeply criticised in (Agre, 1997; Dreyfus, 1992; Winograd and Flores, 1986) as being rooted in a particular tradition of thought, an important constituent of which is an interpretation of the philosophy of René Descartes. Describing the relationship between Cartesianism and computing in AI, Philip Agre (1997) writes:

…a powerful dynamic of mutual reinforcement took hold between the technology of computation and a Cartesian view of human nature, with computational processes inside computers corresponding to thought processes inside minds. But the founders of computational psychology, while mostly avowed Cartesians, actually transformed Descartes’s ideas in a complex and original way. … Their innovation lay in a subversive reinterpretation of Descartes’s original dualism. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes had described the mind as an expressionless res cogitans [thinking thing] that simultaneously participated in and transcended physical reality. … Sequestered in this nether region with its problematic relationship to the physical world, the mind’s privileged object of contemplation was mathematics.

Agre concludes his argument as follows:

… the founders of computational psychology nonetheless consciously adopted and reworked the broader framework of Descartes’s theory, starting with a single brilliant stroke. The mind does not simply contemplate mathematics, they asserted; the mind is itself mathematical, and the mathematics of the mind is precisely a technical specification for the causally explicable operation of the brain (Agre, 1997).

The acceptance of the mind as being computational relies upon a set of assumptions that are based within a certain tradition. Recall that Descartes’ philosophy is intertwined with his theology. In Meditations on First Philosophy, for example, Descartes offers several philosophically based proofs of the existence of God (Descartes, 1996). It is not a far stretch to see the Cartesian foundations of AI and early cognitive science as a theological base for a type of computing practice. I make this stretch here to emphasise the point that implicit cultural beliefs, rooted in cultural traditions of thought, inform all of our technical practices.

Similarly, in earlier work, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986) critiqued a type of rationalism held to be ‘the mainspring of Western science and technology’. Their critique of the rationalist tradition does not pit rationality against irrationality, but rather addresses a tradition that focuses on systematic and precise formulations of how valid reasoning is constituted. They argue that scientists often feel that a narrow rationalistic approach is seen as only opposed to ‘mysticism, religion, or fuzzy thinking that is a throwback to earlier stages of civilization’, a problematic worldview in that it omits its own implicit cultural origins, such as in the case of Cartesianism within the strand of computer science and cognitive science described above (Winograd and Flores, 1986).

Here, I argue for the necessity of, within computing research and arts, critical thought about implicit cultural biases in computing (echoing Agre’s (1997) call for critical technical practices in Computational and Human Experience). Such critical thought can comprise bases for new technical and creative innovations. Overcoming such biases can enable computing to contribute to diverse cultural traditions, including that of African diasporic orature.

II Remarks on Essentialism, Stereotyping and Exploitation

Before discussing the primary content of this paper, I would like to ground the discussion with a few remarks to make my agenda and position clear. Any discussion of broad cultural traditions tends to generalise cultural phenomena, obliterate nuanced concern for the diversity within various traditions, and is ripe for criticism of the very notion of a ‘tradition’ itself. The concept of an African diasporic tradition of orature is problematic itself because of the extreme diversity of contexts and histories found within the diaspora, the interweaving of diverse culturally informed views that may or may not have contextual or historical relationships to practices and values of Africa, and the unique relationships to context and history that every individual in the diaspora may have. There are intersecting communities of practice with features that originated in particular specific African contexts, and that persist (often in quite transformed instantiations) in practices with African cultural origins or influences. I hope that the reader is aware of these and related issues, and sensitively regards the simplifications made in the argument here in service of the broader point that emphasises the explicit grounding of computing practices in culture.

There are further issues related to discussion of cultural traditions that are imperative to raise. I do not want to suggest the ideal of a separate ‘African diasporic computing’, imputing technical practices with essentialist characteristics of ‘Africanness’. I also do not want to stereotype the aesthetic systems of particular cultures, perhaps implying, for example, that characteristics such as oral performance or integrative arts (discussed later in Section 4) are uniquely African, that African diasporic culture necessarily integrates metaphysical concerns with practical/productive concerns, or that cases of rationalism cannot arise in contexts other than those steeped in the ‘Western tradition’. Furthermore, I do not want the argument to be seen as enabling cultural plunder, i.e. using diverse aesthetic traditions only to empower privileged traditions within computing rather than enriching computing practices grounded in a plurality of worldviews. The following is a discussion of these issues.

While discussing the relationship between African culture and technology in the West, and the confluence of these histories in the lived experience of the African diaspora, Ron Eglash notes that:

Opposition to racism has often been composed through two totalizing, essentialist strategies: sameness and difference. For example, Mudimbe (1988) demonstrates how the category of a singular “African philosophy” has been primarily an invention of difference, having its creation in the play between “the beautiful myths of the ‘savage mind’ and the African ideological strategies of otherness.” In contrast, structuralists such as Levi-Strauss have attempted to prove that African conceptual systems are fundamentally the same as those of Europeans (both having their basis in arbitrary symbol systems) (Eglash, 1995).

I reject the notion of an ‘African diasporic orature’ akin either to the ‘African philosophy’ disputed by Mudimbe or the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. Instead, I present a model rooted in traits of embodied performance and explicit subscription to a set of psychosocial/cultural values by some cultural producers. I believe that basing technical and creative production upon such explicit foundations can drive technical and artistic innovation. Such innovations will reflect the great individual variety of particular cultural productions, rooted in their contextual specificities, and drawing both explicitly and implicitly upon cultural resources ranging from culturally situated self-conception to adherence to large scale cultural narratives (even cultural narratives with dubious status such as Ong’s oral/written culture distinction (discussed later in Section 4), or the type of rationalistic perspective that Winograd and Flores critique) (Biakolo, 1999; Ong, 1982; Winograd and Flores, 1986).

My aims coupled with the critique of ‘rationalistic’ models may suggest, for some, a binary opposition in which the cultures of the African diaspora are pitted against the oppressive imperial force of the Western tradition. While not ignorant of the historical, often colonial, circumstances from which both the monolithic and the simplified binary portraits arises, I oppose them both. Diverse traditions of orature have surely influenced my own computing practice, and many traits of orature are not restricted to any cultural tradition. My focus on African diasporic orature is motivated by the need for cultural specificity in order to make my points with precision, and the fact that African diasporic cultural traditions directly and explicitly influenced the development of the GRIOT system. In previous publications these influences have not been the focus of my presentation of the GRIOT system, and this may have had the residual effect that many aspects of the system have unfortunately heretofore been described primarily in terms privileged in computer science practices (Goguen and Harrell, 2004; Harrell, 2006).

I believe that engaging in computing practices based explicitly in cultural traditions compels practitioners to critically examine what those traditions afford us. For example, knowledge is not neatly packaged into purely rational or purely mystical boxes. René Decartes and Isaac Newton both invoked forms of mysticism, yet their works also bear systematic components amenable to computational implementation and scientific investigation (Descartes, 1996; Dobbs, 1991). But my argument is not an appeal to mysticism. In explicitly culturally grounded computational practices we do not have to abandon rationality and appeal to intuition or mysticism. We must, however, acknowledge that some forms of knowledge are inherently not formal or computational, and that other forms of knowledge may be naturally amenable to formal representation and computational manipulation. For expressive computing practices, we can investigate the aesthetic and interpretive effects of computational structuring and algorithmic processing on cultural forms. Understanding that cultures contain many non-computational aspects, even mystical aspects, does not mean that we should abandon approaching serious humanistic issues within computational contexts. It also does not make the computer science ‘fuzzy’ by association. Instead, new possibilities can arise by engaging in careful, respectful dialogue between cultural traditions and computational practices when the affordances of the computational medium are seen as resources for culturally grounded development and implementation.

Finally, the proposal here is not that computing practices should mine diverse forms of cultural production for new models that can inform development of new systems and creative practices to exist within an imaginary shared culture amongst technologically privileged practitioners and consumers. This point of view would posit cultures as ‘resources’ to be exploited by technical work. Instead, the proposal is that examination of diverse cultural practices and values can enrich our understandings of our computational practices, and that computational practices always are rooted in particular cultural values. I am only attempting to make explicit the ways in which culture can provide a lens with which to view our work, and that cultural views and values that are often not privileged within technical work may prove to be a valuable lens.

III Case Study of African Diasporic Orature and the GRIOT System

In this paper I focus upon the ways that privileged/dominant accounts of, implicit biases within, and incontrovertible traditions underlying computing practices exclude possibilities enabled by other traditions.It is the inverse of the model that proposes to export technologies to under(materially)resourced ‘third-world’ contexts as an humanistic gesture. I suggest that diverse cultural values and practices represent not merely resources for new possibilities within (implicitly Western) computing, but rather legitimate foundations for rigorous technical and/or artistically expressive computing practices. The accounts of African diasporic orature and the GRIOT system that follow reflect this focus.

African Diasporic Orature

My view of orature is informed by a plurality of traditions within the African diaspora. Orature takes on particular importance in the African diasporic context because crucial bodies of knowledge, for example ontologies of ancestry, of deep cultural and religious significance in many diverse African cultures, have traditionally been transmitted orally. The cultural role of the griot, a West African praise singer and performer often serving the role of providing an account of genealogical ancestry, is an example of cultural infrastructure for maintaining such ontologies. This account has grossly simplified these issues, but hopefully has proved sufficient to motivate the specificity of the discussion of orature that follows.

Remarks on Orality

Walter Ong has presented a well known commentary on the dual modes of communication know as orality and literacy (Ong, .1982). He described speech as being fundamentally related to time, since it is apprehended primarily via our auditory faculty, and the written word as being primarily related to space, since it is apprehended primarily via our visual faculty. He differentiated the irredeemable nature of time, and therefore of oral utterances (except via memory), from the revisitable nature of space, and therefore of written signs (that are arrested in time). While Ong makes a sharp series of observations about the reliance of oral communication of memory and common traits of oral exposition such as repetition or contextual situatedness, his grander argument is a reductive one that exhibits a type of technological/linguistic determinism in which prevalence of either oral or written communication technologies and modes of communication within a culture combine to have a singular determining effect upon the nature knowledge and discourse within an entire culture. A thorough critique of Ong is presented by Emevwo Biakolo (1999), which illuminates ways in which the binary opposition between oral culture and written culture serves to preserve a system of cultural prejudice informed by a ‘faulty principle of causality’. Biakolo cites Ruth Finnegan to make this point:

Much of the plausibility of the ‘Great Divide’ theories has rested on the often unconscious assumption that what the essential shaping of society comes from is its communication technology. But once technological determinism is rejected or queried, then questions immediately arise about these influential classifications of human development into two major types: oral/primitive as against oral/literate … It is worth emphasizing that the conclusions from research, not only about the supposed ‘primitive mentality’ associated with orality, but also about, for example, concepts of individualism and the self, conflict and scepticism, or detached and abstract thought in non-literate cultures now look different … [and] once-confident assertions about the supposed differentiating features of oral and literate cultures are now exposed as decidedly shaky (Finnegan, 1988).

Rather than reproducing Biakolo’s argument, and the prejudices inherent in Ong’s that it reveals, in this paper I focus on an account of African orature provided by Ngugi wa Thiong’o that does not rest upon the orality/literacy binary opposition (Ngugi, 1998). Ngugi does not essentialise African orature or engage in a narrow (implicitly hierarchically) comparative project as such. He begins with a comparative approach only to destabilise the hierarchy in which literacy is presented as privileged more than orality, and quickly moves to the matter of articulating a culturally situated view of oral aesthetic systems. Ngugi is informative here because he indeed focuses on the factors that come into play in ‘the actual execution’ of oral performance. For some cultural producers, it is the shared values of cultural participants that are taken as the primary aspects of a particular communication form, embodied performance (in the cognitive science sense of not only physical embodiment but also implication within contextualised social systems (Dourish, 2001) is seen as secondary. In this paper, the concept of African diasporic orature proposed by Ngugi is interpreted in this manner. For Ngugi, twin aspects of orature are the embodied aspects of its performance, and the fact of a commitment to a set of shared values in processes of cultural production. That is, adherence to a particular set of such values, that are often deployed through embodied oral performance (but need not be), can comprise a cultural form of production. Those particular values, however, are not essentially intrinsic to individuals forced into any particular cultural category, or to any one group of people or particular culture. It is a nuanced position, but one that helps to define a concept of African diasporic orature upon which cultural producers can explicitly build, but one that does not try to assert grand unifying themes that are necessarily and essentially exhibited by all cultural producers within the diaspora.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Model of African Orature

The author Ngugi wa Thiong’o asserts that the term orature was ‘coined in the [Nineteen] Sixties by Pio Zirimu, the late Ugandan linguist’, and that the impetus for the coinage arose from two debates (Ngugi, 1998). The first regarded the elevated status of the English language and English departments in the>African>>Academy>. The second regarded the casting of ‘oral literature’ as folkloric and primitive or as the original basis of all textual composition (and that power relationships associating peasantry with illiteracy and the technological characteristic of the reproducibility of text were perhaps the root of its dominance). These debates arose to question the secondary role that oral tradition has come to occupy in relation to the literary traditions, while in many African societies oral traditions played a central role in knowledge representation, transmission, and expression. The central observation about this debate being made here is that orature need not stand in an hierarchical relationship to literature (Ngugi, 1998).

The oral system is not a ‘pre-literate’ system, it is a different ‘formal narrative, dramatic, and poetic system’ ((Ngugi, 1998). This shift of perspective allow for the insight that media forms such as cinematic systems and computational narrative systems do not (in the words of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin) simply ‘remediate’ older forms via ‘absorption’ (replacing old media with new), thereby rendering oral or textual into obsolete relics (Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Ngugi, 1998). Older media can also be said to be ‘hypermediated’ (refashioned while retaining attributes of its media heritage) by newer media (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Under this view, it is not necessarily literary, or textual, media forms that comprise the remediated bases of computational media forms. Forms of orature may be the primary media forms that are remediated in some cases, and in such cases it is instructive to investigate the attributes of the influential traditions of orature. Ngugi suggests two characteristics of African diasporic orature that may persist and serve as foundations for interpreting “cyberspace” media forms (Ngugi uses ‘cyberspace’ as a blanket term for computational media involving spatial and social performance). These two characteristics are its (1) performative, and (2) integrative dimensions discussed respectively hereafter.

Ngugi (1998) describes four conditions underlying the realisation of performative oral aesthetics in many African contexts. These are (1) architectural space, (2) time frame, (3) (oral) mises-en-scène, and (4) the audience-performer relationship. Descriptions of each of these conditions follow. The architectural space typically is an open space, and most often a circular space. The choice of a circle is not incidental, it has a symbolic unifying import within the traditions the Ngugi describes. Ngugi describes how time frame establishes the conditions for performance in several ways. Time frame can relate to the functionality of a particular performance, for example work songs being performed during work time or rite of passage performances coinciding with the necessary time of the ritual. The length of time also establishes conditions for performance. For Ngugi, ‘oral mises-en-scène’ refers to the different ambiences that can be created on the basis of costume, light source, etc. He writes ‘one can imagine the play of shadows and light on the bodies and costumes of the actors. The sources of light, whether fire, the moon, or the sun, could create different ambiences’ (Ngugi, 1998). Finally, the most important condition is the audience-performer relationship. Ngugi (1998) describes how the audience can play varying roles within performances, for example as critics or co-performers such as in stories ‘where a choral phrase or song or response’ is taken up by listeners who then become a part of the action. In such ‘real-time’ (live) performances, production and consumption dynamically intermingle.

Ngugi’s description of the integrative characteristic of orature comprises a more delicate argument. This is because it arises from a view orature as a complete aesthetic system, reflecting adherence to a set of values shared among cultural participants. The conditions of oral performance are connected to the cultural beliefs, values, and contexts of its participants. This has already been seen in the example of dominance of the circle in architectural and performance spaces, with its symbolic and cosmological connotations. Ngugi (1998) comments that:

The interconnection between phenomena captured in the image of the circle, the central symbol of the African aesthetic, is consonant with the materialist metaphysics that one finds in so much of the pre-colonial African societies, the remnants of which still condition the African world-view.

The point here is not the essentialisation of the ‘African world-view’, but rather that in performances based in such world-views, the establishment of the conditions for performance is not accomplished by happenstance or the stylistic innovation of a singular author. As an example, Ngugi notes that many pre-colonial Kenyan oral narratives reflect ‘the interdependence of forms of life in the fluidity of movement of characters through all the four realms of being and their interactions in flexible time and space. Plants, animals, and humans interact freely in many of the narratives’ (Ngugi, 1998). Thus, for cultural practitioners subscribing to such values, orature is a ‘complete aesthetic system’ in the sense that that the content of an oral performance, the material and social conditions of the performance, and the world-view informing the choice of content and conditions, are all integrated. This is one sense in which, within a shared cultural interpretation, African diasporic orature can be said to be integrative.

Another sense in which Ngugi describes this culturally situated model of orature as being integrative is its rejection of formal boundaries of media and conventional artistic form – it allows for the integration of diverse art forms. This sense of the integrative character of orature potentially separates it from its roots in oral communication. Under this view, underlying cultural aspects of the aesthetic system are deployed through the conditions and form of the performance, but do not rely upon them. Indeed, by cultural participants, these cultural beliefs, values, and contexts may be seen as more intrinsic to the aesthetic form than even the fact of its oral transmission. If a particular form of expression is rooted in traditional aesthetic systems that are in turn rooted in an oral performance, then that form of expression can be seen as grounded in orature.

This argument takes on life in a case Ngugi raises regarding the black arts movement in>Britain> around 1988, the author Kwesi Owusu invokes this integrative perspective as he writes:

Many black artists work in various media simultaneously, forging creative links, collaborations and alliances. This state of consciousness, a reflection of African and Asian attitudes to creativity, is what is called orature (Owusu, 1988).

This essentialises and romanticises African and Asian cultural traditions, but it is informative in that Owusu’s conceptualisation hinges on the idea of orature as an integrated aesthetic system, and that particular oratory expressions can take shape in various eventual forms. Understood this way, orature becomes something like a communal and improvisational stance toward art. The term ‘orature’ becomes incredibly expansive, but not vacuous, under such an interpretation.

This view of orature is informative in performance cases where there exist cultural traits originating in unique African contexts, but are deployed in diverse contemporary (often post-colonial) diasporic contexts. In such cases, the material conditions of performance may be radically transformed, for example the original architectural spaces, musical instruments, costumes, etc. may be unavailable. Furthermore, the cultural situations of participants may be radically transformed, for example they may speak colonial languages or may even be unaware of the traditions upon which the performance is based. The performance may also exist as an amalgam of various performance traditions, or include written, cinematic, or computational aspects. In such cases, orature provides a lens with which to examine cultural continuities within content, world-view, and media usage. In this paper I focus on continuities of media usage. The traits of orature mentioned here are not exclusive to African diasporic modes of expression, indeed Ngugi (1998) notes that Europhone theatre includes ‘mime, dance, masks, story-telling’, which features similar traits involving the conditions of performance. However, the performative and integrative characteristics of orature articulated by Ngugi present a frame that is based in careful reflection upon African diasporic cultural continuities, and that can undergird expressive computational practices as described below.

This argument, though atypical for a computer science practitioner to make, is no more exotic than finding roots of computational systems in Descartes’ view of the mathematical mind and transformations of that view. On the contrary, it is more explicit in its articulation of cultural influences, and carefully delineates the manner in which cultural practices and beliefs have influenced cultural production. In media theory there exists the notion of the computer as a ‘metamedium’, capable of reproducing other forms (but crucially featuring its own unique characteristics) (Manovich, 2001). I use the notion of African diasporic orature as a ‘metacultural’ concept, theorising an aesthetic system with clearly articulated media concerns (e.g. the four conditions for performance described above), but extending beyond oral performance to its hypermediated deployment using computational media. The GRIOT system, described below, is an implementation constructed within the tradition of computer science, but its areas of application have been greatly influenced by an explicit interest in (and implicit cultural world-view incorporating) the traits of African diasporic orature (Harrell, 2005a; 2005b).

IV The GRIOT System

GRIOT is a computer program developed as a platform for implementing interactive and generative computational narratives. The first systems built in GRIOT enable generation of poetry in response to user input. Joseph Goguen and I have coined the phrase ‘polymorphic poems’ or ‘polypoems’ to describe these works (Goguen and Harrell, 2004). A polypoem is not the individual output of one execution of GRIOT, but rather the code that generates a variety of poems algorithmically. An overview of the aims of the GRIOT system follows.

The narrative computational media works created with GRIOT feature the following characteristics: generative content, semantics based interaction, reconfigurable narrative structure, and strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding.

Generative content means that a system can dynamically compose media content. The GRIOT system is an example of this. It has been used to implement computational poetry that generates new narrative poems with fixed themes but varying particular concepts upon each execution. This generativity is enabled by the Alloy system, which implements an algorithm that models key aspects of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s (2002) theory of conceptual blending. Alloy is also the first implementation of Joseph Goguen’s algebraic semiotics approach to blending (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002; Goguen, 1998).

Semantics based interaction means that (1) media is structured according to the meaning of its content, and (2) user interaction can affect content of a computational narrative in a way that produces new meanings that are constrained by the system’s author. ‘Meaning’ in this case means that the author has provided formal descriptions of domains and concepts pertinent to the media and subjective authorial intent. Reconfigurable narrative structure means the formal structure of a computational narrative can be dynamically restructured, either according to user interaction, or upon execution of the system as in the case of narrative generation.

Strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding here implies that despite the use of formal descriptions of semantic concepts, meaning is considered to be contextual, distributed among artifacts and through social interaction, and embodied. he formalizations used derive from and respect cognitive linguistics theories with such notions of meaning. In practice, a system author must be sensitive to these issues to effectively utilize the technical framework provided. Furthermore, the notion of narrative here is not biased toward one particular cultural model, the architecture is layered so that atop a technical layer a cultural producer can implement a range of structural narrative models.

The GRIOT Architecture

The following is a condensed description of GRIOT’s functionality. Technical details and a more elaborate description can be found in Goguen and Harrell (2006) and Harrell (2006).

User input, in the form of keywords, is used to select the conceptual space network from a set of ontologies, called ‘theme domains’, that each contain sets of axioms about a particular theme. These axioms consist of binary relations between sorted constants. This conceptual space network, called an ‘input diagram’, consists of a generic space, two input spaces, and mappings from the generic space to each of the input spaces. The input diagram is passed as input to the ALLOY conceptual blending algorithm. ALLOY is the core component of GRIOT that is responsible for generating new content. An ‘output diagram’, consisting of a blended conceptual space and morphisms from the input spaces to the blended space, is output by ALLOY. Concepts are combined according to principles that produce ‘optimal’ blends. Typically this optimality results in ‘common sense’ blends, but for particular poetic effects different, ‘dis-optimal’ criteria can be utilised. ‘Phrase templates’, granular fragments of poetry organized by narrative clause type, are combined with the output of ALLOY (converted to natural language by mappings called ‘grammar morphisms’) to result in poems that differ not only in how the phrases are selected and configured, but in the meaning being expressed by the blended concepts. The phrases are said to be ‘instantiated’ when they are combined with the natural language representations of the blends by replacing ‘wildcards’ in the text. These wildcards are tokens representing where generated output can be incorporated, they also contain variables that specify how they are to be replaced, e.g. constraining the choice of theme domains, or selecting the lexical form to be mapped to by the grammar morphism. These templates are selected according to an automaton called an ‘Event Structure Machine’ (or ‘Narrative Structure Machine’), which also structures the reading of user input (Goguen and Harrell, 2006).

Figure 1: The GRIOT System Architecture

GRIOT’s Basis in Orature

The Alloy algorithm central to GRIOT was, in part, conceived of as a critique of ‘good old fashioned’ symbolic, logic-based artificial intelligence approaches to meaning construction. The GRIOT system was implemented to allow authors to create subjective ontologies to be deployed for generating content within a range of culturally based narrative models – including African diasporic models of call and response interaction. Development of these aspects of the GRIOT system involved critical engagement with several of the issues considered in this construal of African diasporic orature, at multiple levels.

Certainly, as in any process of cultural production, a particular world-view informed the development of the GRIOT system, including its reliance upon particular cognitive scientific theories, and its initial areas of application. I would stress, however, that its development was by-and-large a technical practice (my computer science Ph.D. dissertation project), firmly employing software engineering techniques, and influenced by the value systems of the engineering discipline. Yet, the narrative models, applications, claims, and goals may have been based in cultural traditions and values typically absent from computer science discussions. One of these cultural traditions resonates strongly with Ngugi’s formulation of orature (and my reframing of Ngugi’s model as African diasporic orature) (Ngugi, 1998).

I propose that GRIOT involves African diasporic orature in at least the following ways:

1. The basis in cognitive semantics allows for a systematic approach to culture that admits concerns such as orature into my computational practice.
2. The architecture allows computational narrative authors to enable subjective content generation and improvisational, collaborative relationships with the audience/users.
3. Interaction with polymorphic poetry is structured as call and response interaction as opposed to command execution.
4. Polymorphic poetry implemented in GRIOT addresses issues related to African diasporic orature and relies upon thematic ontologies in which questions explicitly related to the African diasporic contexts are raised.
5. Oral performance has been central to polymorphic poetry execution and performative deployment has been theorized as one of four levels of using GRIOT.

A discussion of each of these involvements of African diasporic orature follows.

Cognitive Semantics and Orature in GRIOT

GRIOT’s knowledge representation structures are rooted in the cognitive semantics theory of conceptual blending (the human ability to dynamically, systematically, and optimally integrate concepts). The cognitive semantics framework paves the way for systematic approach to cultural concerns. Empirical research in cognitive semantics suggests that language activity is only the observable result of processes in which humans draw upon ‘a vast array of cognitive resources’ involving ‘innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, engage in creative mappings, transfers, and elaborations’ (Fauconnier, 2000). Gilles Fauconnier has referred to these process of meaning construction as ‘Backstage Cognition’. The assertion that many aspects of backstage cognition are based upon shared cognitive structures or operate on the basis of general principles is referred to as ‘operational uniformity’ (Fauconnier, 2000). Cognitive semantics researchers see linguistic distributions (language phenomena across various levels of specificity) as only examples of observable manifestations of processes of backstage cognition with striking operational uniformity. This operational uniformity of processes underlying conceptual thought applies to our understanding and creation of cultural products regardless of the culture in which they are developed. This contrasts strongly with academic traditions such as cultural anthropology which seeks in part to understand cultural productions in its contextual particularity as opposed to uniform underlying cognitive processes. On this basis, the cognitive semantics foundation of my work applies just as readily to products of African diasporic orature as to any other form of cultural production or aesthetic systems.

In Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science, Mark Turner (2001) raises Clifford Geertz’s description of the role of the anthropologist to make this point. He presents Geertz describing his brand of analyses as ‘not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical’ (Geertz, 1973; Turner, 2001). The nature of Geertz’s enterprise, what Turner (2001) calls the ‘historical retrospection’ and ‘particularity’ of the approach, contrasts strongly with the cognitive semantics focus on cognitive operations such as analogical inference, metaphorical mapping, and conceptual blending. The cognitive semantics approach is not a case of scientific reductionism however. On the contrary, the focus on operational uniformity provides cultural bridges between phenomena in diverse cultures. It provides a type of comparative interpretive analysis at the same time as providing an experimental analysis based upon ‘weighing data, making hypotheses, building models, offering explanations, sometimes offering even predictions or tactics for intervention’ (Turner, 2001). For example, George Lakoff and Mark Turner (1989) have analysed poetry by critically examining deployment of empirically determined culturally entrenched metaphors within particular poems. The cognitive semantics approach has allowed me access to elements of cultural narratives such as African diasporic orature that does not seek to exoticise them, but rather to understand their implications when mapped to the domain of computation.

Architectural Structure and Orature in GRIOT

The GRIOT architecture allows computational narrative authors to implement works involving subjective content generation and an improvisational, collaborative relationship to the audience. Cultural knowledge must be explicitly authored in the form of theme domains and phrase templates. The author defined event structure engine allows polypoem authors to also structure the sequence of user-input opportunities. The combination of these features echoes Ngugi’s (1998) observation within orature of ‘how the audience can play varying roles within performances, for example as critics, or as co-performers’. The relationship between user input and system output in GRIOT can be equally nuanced. This is exemplified by the varying relationship between input and output in examples of polymorphic poetry: e.g. in Walking Blues Changes Undersea user input affects the emotional disposition of the output, in The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs user input selects how thematic identity constructs arising from stereotypical binary oppositions can be recombined, in The Griot Sings Haibun user input focuses the output on a particular aspect of Buddhist view of qualitative experience of everyday events (Harrell, 2005a; 2005b; 2006; 2007). This concern with improvisational meaning generation as enabled by collaboration with an audience is intentionally informed by an African diasporic oratory impulse.

I tentatively suggest another more abstract influence of orature upon the GRIOT research goals. The general architecture of GRIOT is theorized to extend to non-textual media, such as the combination of images and dynamic computer graphics, as well. While this can be interpreted as an example of the engineering value of generalisability, it can also be seen as exemplifying the African diasporic oratory value of integrative arts. Though this discussion of orature’s influence upon the GRIOT architecture can be seen as a rational reconstruction of the systems underlying values, I believe that the influence is more profound. The expressive aims of the initial polypoems created in GRIOT were explicitly created with improvisational narrative forms based in African diasporic orature in mind.

Call and Response Interaction and Orature in GRIOT

The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs polypoem provides a commentary on racial politics, the limitations of simplistic binary views of social identity, and the need for more contingent, dynamic models of social identity. The dynamic nature of social identity is also reflected in the way the program produces different poems with different novel metaphors each time it is run. It draws on a set of ontologies providing structured knowledge about domains such as skin, angels, demons,Europe, an Africa, given as sets of axioms. Interaction with The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs invokes attributes of African diasporic orature. As described previously in Harrell (2007), dynamic improvisation and call and response structures are familiar aspects of Pan-African narrative forms as diverse as the African Brazilian martial art and dance Capoeira Angola, Charles Mingus’ calling out of the segregationist Governor of Arkansas in ‘Fables of Faubus’ from Mingus (1960), the penetratingly satirical fiction of Ishmael Reed, and hip-hop freestyle rhyming. The output of The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs is founded in African and African American vernacular traditions of signification (Gates Jr, 1988). An example of output from The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs follows (Harrell, 2005a):

>africa
every night she wakes covered with winged-creature original-lady sweat

>africa
she nearly died while choking on lady black candy
skin black ideas and miserable thoughts whipped through her

>europe
her failure was ignoring her scaled-being sunbather nature
and her pride privilege feet danced

>europe
she worked raising ashy-skin wintery-skin children of her own
and her mathematics bullet feet danced

> angel
she finally knew that a privilege love woman would never be loved

The output reveals the intention behind the knowledge base provided by the author. Stereotypes of both Africanness (the ‘original lady’ with ‘skin black’) and Europeanness (the ‘sunbather’ with ‘wintery skin’) are conjugated differently upon each execution.

For contrast, another execution with the same user input reads:

>africa
her arrival onto this earth was marked – black ghost knows longing and fear

>africa
her wax hot drips anansi bitemarks in the flesh and psyche of hope loss loves
her condition was melaninated impoverished-elder-like

>europe
tears ran relay races between her combination-skin bullet eyes and her pain entitlement earlobes and back|
longing awe ideas and miserable thoughts whipped through her

>europe
when hungry she dined on shame smugness rice and female imperialist yams
life was an astounding miracle

> angel
her pointed-nose piercing-arrow spirit would live on

A parallel structure can be found in many examples of call and response orature, for example in the words of the Capoeira Angola song ‘Ê Paraná’ (Harrell, 2005a):

Ê Paraná
Eu não vou na sua casa, Paraná
Ê Paraná
Pra você não ir na minha, Paraná
Ê Paraná
Porque você tem boca grande, Paraná
Ê Paraná
Vai comer minha galinha, Paraná
Ê Paraná
Puxa, puxa, leva, leva, Paraná
Ê Paraná
Paraná está me chamando, Paraná
…

The song excerpt translates in English roughly as (Harrell, 2005a):

Eh, Paraná
I do not go in your house, Paraná
Eh, Paraná
For you go not in mine, Paraná
Eh, Paraná
Because you have a great mouth, Paraná
Eh, Paraná
You will eat my chicken, Paraná
Eh, Paraná
Pull, pull, take, take, Paraná
Eh, Paraná
Paraná is calling me, Paraná
…

The repeated invocation of an historic place in the ‘New World’ is a common theme in African diasporic call-and-response lyrics. When these songs are sung, new lyrics are often spontaneously improvised. The creation of traditionally structured songs with new meanings, especially layered meanings as in capoeira songs (the songs often have double and triple functions within the art form) also serves to create new identities for postcolonial contexts. The output from The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs above was enabled by the polypoems intended affordance for supporting precisely this type of emergent content via participation in its call and response structure.

Social Commentary and Orature in GRIOT

In the previous subsection we have seen GRIOT used to implement polypoems in the service of social commentary, for example to critique narrow reliance upon power relationships of binary opposition in identity politics (e.g. in stereotypical oppositions such as male vs. female, black vs. white, oriental vs. occidental) (Harrell, 2005a). Similarly, GRIOT was used by Joseph Goguen, in collaboration with the author, to implement a polymorphic version of Goguen’s poem November Qualia (used as content in the performance The Griot Sings Haibun), which describes singular moments of qualitative experience from a Buddhist perspective (Goguen, 2005a; 2005b). Sample output from this polypoem follows:

qualia are moments of luminous world,
empty, suffering, compassion
mind body snapshots
neither arising, departing, or dwelling
gone beyond
gone far beyond

6:41 am
mind cloud ocean
unmoved moving trees
connecting blue high, blue emptiness flesh
forever being sky
timeless, perfected tender self

6:53 am
the pipes:-
connecting, pipes of compassion
vivid bolted
shining, empty
neither atomic nor not
always connecting
timeless, perfected
beyond being beyond

7:26 pm
save us from fear, wanting
addict & moonlight, wanting & timeless forgotten
bright grasping fear
vultures of mind, forever circling
embracing transient form
ecstatic revulsion, wanting

1:47 am
translucent flesh, tender, inscrutable
unending mother ocean
biomass being, vital & vivid
all connected, empty, void
burning mind & self
ecstatic tender burning void

In both The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs and the polymorphic version of November Qualia, particular world-views provide the impetus for the expressive statement being made. Both polypoems suggest transcendental philosophies, yet the production of each polypoem was grounded in the medium in which it was created. This primacy of culturally grounded subject matter reflects the integrative character of African diasporic orature. The applications of GRIOT are grounded in particular cultural forms (such as prose poetry or haibun poetry), informed by cultural world-views (such as marginalized African diasporic or Tibetan Buddhist perspectives), and the role of these cultural influences is foregrounded in the authors’ statements about these poems. The simple act of foregrounding such concerns is uncommon within computing practices, but I feel it is not problematic because underlying cultural values are explicitly and critically addressed in their relationship to the computational system.

Performance and GRIOT

The polypoems implemented with GRIOT have most often been presented via performance. In Second Person, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2007) refer to such work as ‘performances [that] take place in both the real and digital worlds’. The most notable case of this was The Griot Sings Haibun polypoem, which was used in a live performance with free jazz musicians (Goguen and Harrell, 2005; Harrell, 2007). During the performance, the graphical user interface (GUI) was projected onto a large screen behind the performers for the audience to see. The GUI was mirrored on a plasma screen facing the performers so that the musicians and orator (Goguen) could see. The author acted as a polypoem system performer, improvisationally generating text output from the November Qualia polypoem and selecting corresponding multimedia imagery based on what the musicians played. The musicians could also respond improvisationally to the text visible on the plasma screen. In this sense the performance was a collective improvisation. Using the GUI for The Griot Sings Haibun, the system performer selected the desired clause type using buttons arranged in a row at the top of the screen. The user selected a clause by clicking on one of the keywords (e.g. ‘self’, ‘empty’, or ‘other’) on the bottom one-third of the screen. This selected use of particular ontology related to the authors’ Buddhist themes of self, other, emptiness, and related concepts. At various times, clauses of only particular types would appear on the screen and would be regenerated on-the-fly. Thus, during performance the discourse structure was much more dynamic and variable than in the pure LISP interface. Several examples of haibun poetry were implemented, and buttons along the bottom of the screen allowed the performer to shift from one haibun polypoem to another. This also shifted between background images composed by the author (some of the backgrounds were created using photographs taken by Joseph Goguen as raw images).

Such a performance consolidates many of the characteristics of orature presented by Ngugi (1998). The performance took place in a particular architectural environment (on stage), with performers arranged in a circle (including the plasma screen feedback to the musicians as a ‘performer’. The lighting was controlled and focused audience attention on different performers at different times. The performance featured real-time generation of output from the polypoem. The timing of particular utterances and musical phrases was orchestrated by the collective improvisation of the group. The polypoem was used improvisationally as well, generating lines at a pace determined by feedback from the orator, musicians, and perceived audience response. Finally, the projected backdrop served as a type of performative mises-en-scène. All of these aspects of the performance reflect a concern for the performance conditions of architectural space, time-frame, performer-audience relationship, and mises-en-scène

Conclusion, Troublesome Spectres, and Future Directions

If any point is to be made by the discussion above, it is that new expressive and technical possibilities of computing can be rooted in diverse cultural values and practices. This is not new to computing, indeed computational artifacts are ubiquitous within the worlds many cultural contexts. However, computer science research typically renders cultural values only implicitly, and when they are made explicit they typically reflect a privileged value system within Western culture such as the rationalist tradition so well articulated by Winograd and Flores (1986). African diasporic orature provide one interpretive frame for considering the GRIOT system, the cultural value that may be implicit within its architecture, its intended areas of application, and the performative deployment of computational narratives created with it.

In constructing my argument, I have tried to anticipate a wide range of criticism, especially criticism based in a set of heinous and haunting social constructs. I am haunted by ghosts of an essentialising ‘African primitiveness’ exemplified by the ‘savage mind’ critiqued by Mudimbe in the Eglash quotation above, or the linguistic determinism in the binary view of culture put forth by Ong and others. I am haunted by critiques of essentialist cultural buttressing (against oppressive and disempowering alternatives) exhibited by a subset of African diasporic cultural or performance theory such as that of Kwesi Owusu (described above in subsection 4.1). Furthermore, I have risked the same criticism by invoking Ngugi and his nuanced argument that differentiates between explicitly shared value systems that inform cultural practices, and essentialist value systems that posit intrinsic characteristic of individuals or groups as the sole bases for cultural practices. I certainly risk the perception that I conflate my own identity with an idealized form of cultural production. Any of these concerns could potentially overshadow the core argument being made here. Nonetheless, I have attempted to capture a careful, if preliminary, argument of the value of making cultural concerns explicit in computing practice, and, in the case of African diasporic orature, very specific analytical and productive gains that can be made.

One quite promising future direction is to explore, develop, and adopt methods for making the often implicit values within technology and its uses explicit. Toward this end, Callon and Latour’s Actor-Network Theory seems promising. It is an alternative sociology focused upon tracing associations between agents as opposed to reductive explanations based solely upon quantitative data. It emphasizes examining the roles on non-humans (e.g. computational technology) and the construction or reassembling of new social concepts and procedures (Latour, 2005). In Actor-Network Theory there is also an emphasis on tracing the ‘diversity of agencies’ at once operating in the world, assembling and reassembling social networks. It suggests following statements such as Owusu’s from subsection 4.1 above: ‘this state of consciousness, a reflection of African and Asian attitudes to creativity, is what is called orature’, and avoid to explain them away in convenient social terms such as ‘essentialism’. Instead, it is far more telling to trace the exchange of values between such actors, their artifacts, and associates via such statements. In the case of African diasporic orature, a cursory tracing of associations revealed a unique conception of the ‘oral’ in which medium is not the primary consideration that underlies a wide range of artistic creations. When computational media are considered in this light, a systematic and clarifying approach to making cultural foundations explicit is necessary and could help to further push the aims of this paper: diversifying the range of innovative computing practices.

Author’s Biography

Fox Harrell is a researcher, author, and artist exploring the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He and his laboratory, the Imagination, Computation, and Expression [ICE] Lab/Studio develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, and related digital infrastructures and technical-cultural media with a basis in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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What is Ambient Video?

You are enjoying yourself at a cocktail party, engrossed in discussion with a colleague you have just met. He excuses himself to visit the hors d’oeuvres, and you turn your attention to the large flat-panel television display on the wall. Your eye is caught by the beauty of a sublime mountain landscape, and then you are surprised when a waterfall explodes between two of the high peaks and tumbles down to a lake at the bottom of the frame. The splash of the waterfall spreads in circles across the lake, and as it spreads, it gradually transforms the shot into a completely different scene. You gaze is caught by both the magic realist aesthetics of transformation and by the sheer beauty of the visuals themselves (see Figure 1 below) (Bizzocchi, 2004). Then, your companion returns, and you return your attention to the living human and the pleasures of conversation.

That is ambient video, an emergent form of video expression that is supported by the newest video production and display technologies, yet firmly rooted in the history of video art and experimental cinema. The prime characteristic for this type of programming is that it be visually interesting and capable of supporting close viewing at any time. It should change, but not too quickly, and the details of any particular change should not be critical. This is ambient video–the “slow-form” reversal of forty years of intense development of the fast-paced television “short-form”.

Some work in this genre will be algorithmic, and closely linked to a screen saver aesthetic. This will include purely graphic abstract designs and geometrics, naturalistic CGI motion graphics such as water and fire, and quasi-narrative artificial life environments. It will certainly include visual creations that are driven by music (such as the light shows built into Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player).

Other work in this stream will be more cinematic, and this paper will concentrate on this form. This variation will stress rich and compelling visuals, making full use of the size and resolution of the new video screens. Like the purely graphic screen-saver form, the aesthetic imperative for the cinematic version is visual ambience. The size and beauty of the visuals will capture a casual glance at any moment. The resolution and detail of the image will enable the subtle details that can sustain a more concentrated gaze. The incorporation of slow change and metamorphosis will support still longer and closer examination. This form will privilege the use of nature sequences (fire, water, cloud, foliage, geology), slow motion, gradual transitions, visual effects, layered and convoluted imagery and subtly embedded secondary visual artifacts.

The nuance of this direction will be the seduction of visual sensibility. The archetypal situation is a background visual playing on a flat-panel display in the home – another term for this form is “video painting”. As we go about our domestic business, the beauty of the visual will capture our attention in the whim of the moment, precisely as a painting might. The glance will be compelling, for a moment, or a minute, or several minutes. Then daily life reasserts itself, and we withdraw our attention–until the next pause in our personal flow. When we are again ready, the screen will be there, revealing rich and living imagery at any given moment of our choosing.

The ambient video aesthetic echoes Brian Eno’s phrase about ambient music: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Eno, 1978). Eno’s own moving image work is part of the history of ambient video. He produced two of the earlier pieces that consciously situate themselves within this genre: Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan[1] , and Thursday Afternoon (Eno, 1984). He wrote then that both cinema and television force a “rigid relationship between viewer and screen – you sit still and it moves” (Eno 2005). Eno called for a video art that was more akin to a painting – you moved around, but the work was waiting for you to view it upon your pleasure.

This concept of ambience breaks with the foregrounded experience of the film theater or the standard concept of the television show, but it is consistent with the conditions of reception for many mediated experiences. Again, Eno’s ambient music is a harbinger for ambient media in general. “Music for Airports” instantiates his vision of extending the lightweight and formulaic Muzak concept into a creative art form with its own aesthetics and dignity (Eno, 2005).

Television and the Home

Anna McCarthy has written about the history of television in public spaces in her book Ambient Television (2001). She describes the use of television in group venues such as taverns, airports, stores, shopping centers, and waiting rooms. However, her detailed account of public video surprisingly misses Eno’s concept of what it means to be “ambient”. In general, she sees the viewer as a consumer who is useful to the purveyors of content (and to McCarthy’s argument) only when they are paying attention to the screen. It is possible to bypass her leaning towards media effects analysis, and consider the role that a truly “ambient video” art form might play in public spaces. At the same time, domestic space is as likely a venue for this new video form as is public space, and this paper will generally concentrate on the consideration of ambient video art in the home. However, the analysis of the form holds true for a range of spaces: domestic, corporate, public, and curatorial.

Many analyses of television have overlooked the ambient nature of much of home television experience. Raymond Williams correctly identified “flow” as a powerful concept for the analysis and understanding of television (Williams, 1974), but Spigel’s introduction to the 1992 edition of Williams’s seminal work points out that the flow of programming is often interrupted or overridden by the flow of domestic life. “[Williams's methodology] didn’t at all account for more everyday viewing procedures. It didn’t account for someone preparing a sandwich, answering a phone, putting a child to bed–in short the flow of human activities that interact with the flow of television programs” (Spigel, 1974: xxvi). John Ellis points out that the flow of television experience is made up of “segments” – which he cites as the basic organizing principle of television content. Ellis sees the segment as the appropriate content strategy based on his analysis of the average viewer: “someone who has the TV set switched on, but is giving it very little attention…” (Ellis, 1992: 162).

Television experience may be pleasurable precisely because it can be a casual activity. Fowles sees selective attention as a basic characteristic of home television viewing that adds to the enjoyment of the experience. He cites a study of actual television usage which showed that 20% of the time when the television was on, there was no one in the room, and another 20% of the time, potential viewers were in the room, but not paying attention to the screen. (C.L. Allen, qtd. in Fowles, 1992). Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found consistent results in their survey of actual viewing practices. In that study, 63.5 % of the time that the television was being viewed, people were also doing something else. 28,3 % of the time, the television viewing was the secondary activity, not the primary one (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, 1990: 74-76). A robust understanding of the range of possible options for video creation should take into account the variable attention actually paid to domestic television.

It is not surprising that the home television set has been used as an ambient visual device. It often shares the living room space with two other ambient devices: the fireplace and the picture window. Spigel connects the post-WW2 introduction of the picture window with the parallel conception of the television as a domestic “window on the world” (Spigel, 1992). The fireplace is the classic archetype for ambient visual entertainment. Along with its predecessor, the campfire, it is probably programmed into the genetics of our cultural heritage. A trope increasingly seen in the photo layouts of the “Home” sections of newspapers is the living room’s “visual triple”: the fireplace, the picture window and the large-size flat-panel video display unit. Given the implications of Fowles’ analysis, it seems that this marketing ploy taps into the comfort and the functionality of three readily available sources of domestic visual ambient pleasure. This also helps to explain the durability of the classic example of ambient video: the video log. Since its inception at WPIX New York in 1966, the televised yule log has developed into a well-established cultural phenomenon. Different examples of the log have been distributed for decades on various formats: VHS, DVD, computer file, and now HD. Last Christmas Eve, our local cable service had five different yule logs merrily burning at the same time on different channels of my hundred-station-universe.

Video Ambience Defined

What does the video yule log share with Brian Eno’s and other artist’s ambient video works? A video piece should meet the following four criteria to qualify as a truly ambient work:

• it should be visually engaging the first time you view it
• it shouldn’t require your attention at any time
• it should renew its engagement at whatever moment you choose to return to viewing
• it should sustain visual pleasure over a great number of repeated viewings

The video log, along with its domestic cousin the video aquarium, remains popular precisely because – like their real world originals – they share these four characteristics. Ambient video artists extend this sensibility – and the satisfaction of these same criteria – beyond the yule log’s kitsch limitations into a form of moving image art. Later in this paper, we will consider in more detail the provenance and the current state of ambient video as an art form. Before we do that, however, let’s turn to the relationship of ambient experience with other forms of mediated experience.

The starting point for the understanding of media ambience is to consider the relationship of foreground mediated experience to background experience. Foregrounded media experience commands our attention. This is the paradigm of the cinema, the dominant media form of the last century, and our current benchmark for immersion and deep mediated attention. The cinema has its own dedicated location, a darkened room where the magic images play on the wall in front of us in a representation that is literally bigger than life. We are seduced into a state of deep attention. If that is not enough, we are explicitly reminded not to talk, in order to respect the sanctity of the mediated state we are expected to share. The cinema is a shrine to immersion and Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”.

However, immersion is a complex mediated phenomenon, worthy of a closer look in the context of this argument. Cinema, in particular the classic Hollywood narrative cinema, is an archetype for what Bolter and Grusin (1999) term a state of immediacy. We forget where we are, “look through” the window of the screen, and become lost within the mediated story world. This state of seamless immersion is the goal of decades of finely-honed mainstream cinematic craft and convention. There are, however, other traditions of mediated immersion. The oldest cinematic tradition is not the Hollywood “cinema of narrative”, but rather the earlier “cinema of attractions” (Gunning, 1986). This form, consistent with the aesthetic of the vaudeville, the circus, and the theme park, leads to a different type of immersive experience: the immersion of astonishment and spectacle. In Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) model, this is a phenomenon distinct from immediacy, one which they term hypermediation. In the hypermediated state, we are aware of the mediation that is occurring, and we stare “at the screen” in attention. In the early days of cinema, simple acts such as the arrival of a train or the demolition of a wall were innovative and exciting enough to “attract” and engage our rapt attention. The cinema of attractions expanded to include such diverse spectacles as a sneeze, the onscreen kiss, the arrival of a train, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and the electrocution of an elephant. The cinema of attractions eventually lost out in marketplace competition to the now-dominant cinema of narrative, but Gunning points out that it has never disappeared. Pure spectacle, visual effects, and visceral shock remain as ongoing subthemes within the hegemony of the narrative cinematic mainstream. Further, despite a recent turn to mainstream narrative features, the spirit of the hypermediated cinema of attractions has long dominated the largest of cinematic screens – the Imax theaters.

Ambient video is fundamentally inconsistent with the cinema of narrative. Narrative commands attention – we are drawn to story, we have a need to see how the story plays out, and we will continue to want to watch until the end. However, ambient video is in many ways consistent with a cinema of attraction – if the attraction is carefully modulated. Astonishment and awe are not conducive to ambience, so the visual pleasures should be seductive, not demanding. We should want to look at them, but we should not feel compelled to do so.

Ambience can therefore be situated within this complex of immersion, immediacy and hypermediation. An ambient video piece can offer a state of enjoyable immediacy, where the visuals seem natural, and we look through the screen at a well-composed and pleasurable scene. Conversely, it could offer to us a state of enjoyable hypermediation, where the hand of the artist has manipulated the visuals in such a way that we both recognize and appreciate the creative manipulation. The tricky part is that an ambient piece, whether meant to be immediate or hypermediated in flavor, cannot require that we become immersed. It must always provide the opportunity, but never the imperative, for immersion.

The patterns of domestic television consumption are consistent with this dynamic for the presentation of ambient experience. As the high-culture saying goes: “Theater is life. Cinema is art. Television is an appliance.”[2] We have seen that, as an appliance, the television must compete for our attention with the other appliances and vicissitudes of everyday life. Cinema, on the other hand, is relentlessly immersive, whether it involves the immediate pleasure of story and suspension of disbelief, or the hypermediated pleasure of spectacle, effects and cinematic attractions. Television remains a perceptual chameleon, sometimes commanding our attention, sometimes fading into the background of our lives, but always there. Ambient video can build upon this foundation a distinct form of artistic expression and viewer pleasure.

The Role of Technology

This new form is intricately tied to the ongoing development of new video technologies for production, post-production, distribution and display. Consider the changes we have seen in the last five years alone. First, HD cameras at all levels (broadcast, prosumer, consumer) are much cheaper and therefore more wide-spread. Second, we have increased ability to manipulate these images in post-production. Every Macintosh now comes equipped with base software to edit and post in HD. Serious videographers can go much further with medium-level consumer workstations and powerful packages such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, and After-effects. Third, we have an increasing array of options for the distribution of the moving image: cable, satellite, tape, video files, and disc. All of them now include a certain amount of HD material, and this will increase as technological capabilities become more and more robust. MIT’s Technology Review argues for the continuation of Moore’s Law, and ongoing parallel extensions in the equally important related technologies. The journal predicts continuing “multiples in storage capacity, sequencing speed, and wireless range and bandwidth” (Technology Review, 2004). Finally, the size and resolution of domestic video display technology has reached unparalleled levels of quality. The box in the corner with the small fuzzy screen has been replaced by an elegant frame on the wall, with a large-scale high-definition image that supports a level of visual beauty never seen in the domestic moving image. The cumulative effect of all these changes is to increase tremendously our cultural capacity to capture, manipulate, distribute and display high-quality video imagery.

This account is not a reversion to a technological determinism that Raymond Williams (1974) correctly derides. It is rather a recognition of the facts about the technological capabilities within the world of the moving image. The actual development of the new video forms will depend on complex and inter-related dialectics of art, commerce, critical discourse and popular culture. However, as Gene Youngblood noted in his seminal work Expanded Cinema, “new tools generate new images” (Youngblood, 1970). It is certain that video artists and students will use these production and post-production tools to push the limits of the moving image in a wide variety of directions – including the exploration of purely visual slow forms of video expression.

Forms of Ambient Video

What is the nature of this form of ambient video? We can start with what it is not. As noted earlier, it is not a fundamentally narrative form. Neither can it include fast-cutting, the staple of the video short form (commercials, series openers, rock videos). It is not the classic cinema of attractions of astounding spectacle, nor its current manifestation of gratuitous violence. All of the forms above command our attention, and are fundamentally inconsistent with the presentation of ambient experience.

Ambient video is, and will be, many things. Some of it will be algorithmic and computational, following the aesthetic of the screen saver. Another variation will be the play of pure graphics, building on a long tradition of non-representational expression in the art of the moving image. This tradition includes the earliest artists such as Fischinger, Eggeling, and Richter (the Rhythmus films), and flowered in the era of Jordan Belson, the Whitney Brothers, and the later hand-drawn works of Stan Brakhage. Related to this will be sound and motion displays, where the cinematic quest for the “color-organ” finds a current instantiation in the musically-driven abstract screen displays that come packaged with iTunes and the Windows Media Player. These and similar developments are consistent with theorist and film historian William Moritz’s dictum: “I believe mankind has an innate urge towards Visual Music” (Moritz, 2007). The new form of improvisational VJ visuals draws on this aesthetic, as well as the history of ONCE concerts, “Happenings”, and performance video art. Other ambient video works will be personal, photographic, and kitsch: the use of various video displays to exhibit the collection of family photographs.[3] Still others will draw on the well-established tradition of the web cam, which finally realizes the earlier vision of video as a “window on the world”. Some of these web cam visuals are based on nature, including everything from landscapes to multi-day close-ups of eagle’s nests waiting for the moment of hatching.[4] Other sites in this genre concentrate on human imagery, ranging from individual lives (the pleasures of the voyeur)[5] to busy urban wideshots (the flaneur’s pleasure in the bustle of the and the occasional slight hint of incomplete narrative).[6]

This paper concentrates on yet another set of options within the family of ambient video experience. The focus here is on work that is representational in form, visual in essence, and non-narrative in content. We have mentioned two of the existing staples of this form: the video log and the video aquarium. Numerous examples of both have been available for decades, first on VHS tapes, now as DVDs and digital files. We have noted that the ambience of these works reflects the ambient visual quality of their referents. However, the natural world is full of deep visual pleasures that we never tire of viewing, ranging from the widest of landscapes to the close-up examination of foliage and fauna. All of these are candidates for ambient video, especially when rendered with the full capability of high-definition video. Particularly strong will be those subjects that move, but do so in a way that the camera can easily capture: water, clouds, and fire being the archetypes. A look at contemporary trends in HD television programming confirms this. Initial HD programming packages all carry dedicated movie channels, dedicated sports channels, and the standard major network television channels (in North America this means ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox). However, they also include the specialty channels that rely on nature documentaries as a staple of their programming: PBS, Discovery and National Geographic. It is not a great leap to combine the ubiquity of this early programming vector with the implications of the Fowles statistic – that 20% of the time, the TV is on, people are in the room, and nobody is actively watching. One can reasonably conjecture that for some, these specialty nature channels are being used at least part of the time as ambient video backgrounds.

Creativity and Ambience

This does beg a critical question. Elemental imagery of earth, air, fire and water may be beautiful, and it may easily lend itself to ambient visual experience, but how is it art? On first glance, this form could appear to be closer to kitsch than art. One answer to the question is that raw ambient visuals can become a form of video art when they are transformed by the hand of the artist. I believe that there are three junctures where ambient video is particularly amenable to creative intervention: the selection and the quality of the picture, the treatment of time, and the manipulation of the image – in particular the use of visual layers and layered transitions.

The first intervention is that of the cinematographer’s hand, or rather, eye. Natural images rendered in high-definition video and displayed on large flat-panel displays are an opportunity for the visual artist, analogous in many ways to the opportunities the large-format view camera offered Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, or the dye-transfer printing process offered Eliot Porter. The relevant aesthetic variables in this photographically-inspired video practice are subject choice, composition, the discovery of patterns and textures, the treatment of color values, and always the play of light and shadow. As a non-narrative and supremely visual form, ambient video requires the highest standards in cinematographic vision and craft.

The second juncture for creative intervention is in the treatment and the manipulation of time. In general, slower subject speed is more consistent with the ambient aesthetic. Water and fire move beautifully, but this beauty is multiplied when their natural motion is slowed down. Clouds, on the other hand, can be sped up several times, and still retain a feeling of slowness and grace. This imperative towards slowness carries over to the basic rhythm of the editing. Fast cutting is not consistent with the ambience aesthetic because it commands attention. Slower editing allows the viewer the luxury of switching their attention away from the screen, and also affords an easy understanding of context whenever attention is switched back.

This orientation towards the slow form of video expression increases the pressure on the cinematographer’s skills. In a standard televised nature documentary, what passes for “slow” cutting results in screen times of three to five seconds for a typical shot. In the ambient works that the author has produced each shot remains on the screen for a minimum of 45 seconds. More common screen times are one to two minutes in duration. The cinematographer’s art must be of a high level indeed to sustain this length of screen time.

The third juncture for creativity is in the post-production manipulation of imagery, and in particular in the use of visual layers for image fragmentation, recombination, and shot transition. In many ways, collage will replace montage as the fundamental sequencing skill. The new technologies afford the ability to break original images down into discrete components, to arrange them in layers, and then to combine and recombine these components in any number of new combinations. Used in this way, a combination of Photoshop masks with video editing and compositing software such as After-Effects is an opportunity to revisit the aesthetic of Picasso’s collage or the Dada Photo-montage artists such as Hannah Hoch or John Heartfield in a time-based medium. An aggressive video use of the new photo-montage aesthetic can do away with the cut entirely, and substitute a series of partial wipes based on visual components that gradually replaces one shot with the next.

Relation of the Ambient Aesthetic to Film and Video Art

These creative interventions – the cinematographer’s eye (especially on the landscape), the treatment of filmic time, and the post-production manipulation of image – have deep roots in the history of avant-garde cinema and video art. Underlying all of them is a passionate commitment to the fundamentals of the moving image itself, and an ongoing questioning of both the style and the relevance of narrative-driven mainstream cinema. This perspective reaches back to the pioneers of the art of the moving image. Germaine Dulac (1978) stated that the profound meaning of the cinema resided in image, not story. Maya Deren agreed, arguing that cinema must relinquish the narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature, and instead develop the vocabulary of filmic images and the syntax of filmic techniques (Deren, 1978).

The landscape is a worthy subject of study for moving image artists who question the standard cinematic paradigms. Landscape is at the same time highly visual and essentially non-narrative. Noted film critic and theoretician Scott MacDonald sees the landscape as a bridge that joins the world of documentary cinema with the avant-garde (Sicinski, 2007). The avant-garde landscape film has been particularly robust in England, where the form has been used by a great number of film artists, including Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, and Chris Welsby. The Tate Gallery dedicated a program to the Avant-Garde British Landscape Films, where Deke Dusinberre noted that these artists “assert the illusionism of cinema through the sensuality if a landscape imagery, and simultaneously assert the material nature of the representational process that sustains that illusionism” (Dusinberre, 1975). Chris Welsby has worked in this genre from 1972 to the present, using trees, waterfalls, rivers, lakes, fog, clouds, estuaries, and the sea as his subject and his inspiration. Welsby works from a deep commitment to the relationship the art of the moving image and the study of the landscape. He is interested in “creating work based on the interconnectedness of these systems, where landscape was not secondary to filmmaking process or filmmaking process to landscape, but process and structure, as revealed in both, could carry information and communicate ideas” (Welsby, 2006).

The creative treatment and manipulation of time is another important variable for ambient video – one that it shares with avant-garde filmmakers and videographers of all eras. For structuralist filmmakers, the exploration of time is a central theme – whether the film’s speed is slowed down as Yoko Ono and other fluxus filmmakers did, sped up as with Godfrey Reggio (for the urban scenes in Koyaanisqatsi), or has its duration extended as with Andy Warhol (Sleep, Empire, and Eat) and Michael Snow (Wavelength).

Time has been the theme for a number of moving image exhibitions featuring a variety of artists. Moments in Time: on Narration and Slowness examined the theme of slowness, including works by Bill Viola (The Greeting), Stan Douglas (Nu•tka) and Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho) (Freidel, 2000). In the exhibition catalogue, Matthias Gaertner discusses the three questions around slowness that the videos explicate: slowness and technology, slowness and man, slowness and the eternal. A second exhibition, Making Time: Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video and Film (Cappellazzo, 2000) was a comprehensive look at a variety of artists who saw time as a central question for the moving image. It included 29 artists, among them Vito Acconci, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, and Andy Warhol. In the catalogue, Peter Wollen argues that these artists consider variations on three aspects of time: tense (when things happen), modality (did or will they actually happen), and aspect (the relative temporal status of events – are they beginning, continuing, ending or ended). The curator, Amy Cappellazzo, notes that many of the artists seek to stop time, or at least to suspend it indefinitely. Her observation is instantiated in the number of works that rely either on the extremely long take or the recursive loop as a temporal organizing device. A third exhibition Time Zones: Recent Film and Video took place at the Tate Modern (Time Zones, 2004). This exhibition examined a range of questions, including notions of time across the globe, web-casting and the extension of mediated time, mechanized and industrialized time, and the localized relationship of time to particular spaces. In the context of the core argument in this paper, Peter Osborne raises the question of the relationship of art and distraction, particularly with respect to the gallery or the long-take art film (Osborne, 1989). He sees a dialectic at play here – we go to the gallery or we see the art film in order to find distraction from our lives. However, the act of attending to these works can become demanding in itself, and lead to a wish for other distractions to take us out of the works. This subtle yet active push-pull Osborne describes is in fact a critical aspect of the experience of ambient video works in any context – curatorial, public, or domestic.

The final connection of the ambient aesthetic to the art of the moving image is the creative processing of image. Le Grice argues that a characteristic of all the film artists he considers from the early days (pre WW II) is their “intention to treat film as a plastic medium” (Le Grice, 1977: 74). Film plasticity is often effected through the editing and montage, but it is also amenable through the manipulation of the image itself. This form of cinematic creativity is the art of the magician, and can be traced back to the moving image’s first great trickster, George Melies. The trick of double exposure was one of the most delightful of his bag of early cinematic tropes. His self-conscious delight in this visual magic successfully integrated the cinema of attractions and astonishment with the cinema of narrative and story. Later avant-garde filmmakers/tricksters such as Hans Richter (Filmstudie, 1925) and Harry Smith (Heaven and Earth Magic, various versions and dates from 1943 – 1962) used multiple exposures and visual layering to continue this tradition of visual magic. Outdistancing Richter, Smith, and everyone else as a prolific practitioner of the visual art in cinema is Stan Brakhage. Brakhage revels in the heritage of Melies, calling him the “supreme trickster” and “that marvelous man who gave the ‘art of film’ its beginning in magic” (Brakhage, 1978: 128). Brakhage’s own cinematic philosophy stresses a pursuit of knowledge that transcends language and is founded on visual communication. He felt that both the Saint and the Artist see more powerfully because they “allow so-called hallucination to enter the realm of perception”. He labels cinematic realism as either a (flawed) human invention or a myth (Brakhage, 1978). These convictions are instantiated in a voluminous body of work covering a wide range of technique, craft and cinematic art. His vision for post-production and visual layering is perhaps best seen in his epic Dog Star Man (1962-1964), and its even longer version The Art of Vision (1965).

Video artists have had an easier time with layering, superimposition, and transitions than film artists. The electronic signal through all its eras has provided easier and more direct access to special effects and visual magic. Strong early examples of a layered and transformative video aesthetic include Golden Voyage (1973) by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Newsreel of Dreams (1976) and After Laughter (1981) by Stan VanDerBeek, MercebyMerce (1978) and Lake Placid ’80 (1980) by Nam June Paik. A most haunting example is Sunstone (1979) by Ed Emshwiller. Ongoing advances in sophistication and steady drops in price for digital equipment have made this electronic form of post-production magic accessible to an ever-increasing number of moving image artists. It has also enabled the experienced artists to advance the magic realist flavor of their craft in satisfying ways, as evidenced by the later work of Woody Vasulka (Art of Memory, 1987), Zbig Rybczynski (The Orchestra,1990), Christian Boustani (A Viagem, 1998), and Michael Snow (Corpus Callosum, 2002).

All of this forms a considerable heritage and foundation for the contemporary practice of ambient video art. It draws on a range of art forms and practices: a photographer’s eye for landscape, detail, composition, and light; a filmmaker’s concern about time and interval; and a video artist’s ability to combine moving images into a dynamic collage that flows within the frame. This combination of arts is in the spirit of Higgins’s concept of intermedia – emergent but coherent media forms that are situated within and between other existing forms (Higgins, 2001: 49-54). Ambient video sits comfortably within a shared aesthetic space that joins photography, cinema and video. Spielman builds on Higgins’s model, and points out that intermedia manifestations in the realm of the digital moving image privilege the spatial, the collage and the morph (Higgins, 2001: 131-148). This is an apt description of the potential strengths of ambient video art.

The Beginnings of a Purely Ambient Form

The various components of a cinematic ambient aesthetic may be well-rooted in the history of photography, avant-garde cinema and video art, but the commitment to a fully ambient form is just beginning to emerge as a distinct and self-conscious artistic practice. Brian Eno is once again producing ambient visual works, although reflecting his interest in electronics and the digital, his latest ambient video (77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, 2006) is algorithmic and generative rather than cinematic in nature.

Eno’s distributor, Microcinema, markets an ambient brand called “Microambience”.[7] As of the writing of this paper the brand has thirteen titles, including both of Eno’s original cinematic ambient video series (Mistaken Memories of Manhattan and Thursday Afternoon) compiled on a single disk (Brian Eno: 14 Video Paintings, 2005). Of the thirteen titles, it appears that one is generative and algorithmic (Eno’s), one is a gallery of still images, and four are made up of abstract motion graphics elements. The remaining seven are cinematic in nature, and include HD versions of both the fireplace and the aquarium. Eno’s early video collection consists of two cycles of ambient films, one of urban skylines, and the other of a woman in her apartment. Subjects for the four other cinematic ambient videos include flowers, urban scenes from Baltimore, clouds, and African time-lapsed skies and landscapes.

There are a number of individual ambient video artists with one or two ambient titles to their credit. The most common subject is nature. Artists in this stream exploit the scenic beauty of landscape in a direct manner. They include Simon King (African Skies, 2006 – on the Microambience label above), William Kennedy (Algonquin Autumn, 2005), and Steve Lazur (Time of the Earth: a Desert Dreamtime Journey, 2001). The Souvenirs from the Earth collective, based in Barcelona, Spain, has an ambient DVD titled Souvenirs from the Earth v 1.0 which was produced in 2004 or earlier. Their disc has three pieces entitled “Camping”, “Skating”, and “Beach”. Their visual strategies include the use of soft focus with continual pans of medium shot campers, or overexposed wide shots of skaters or bathers. The results are pleasant, and give a liminal and filtered sense of character – just enough to tease you with the hint of narrative, but not enough to draw you in to any story specifics. Malcolm Daniel has produced a series of ambient videos (Firewater, Spirit of the Ganga, and Foliage are some of his titles). He uses nature imagery, and combines this with the use of stepped slow-motion and soft-focus. The Montreal video collective NomIg works on the borderline of cinematic recognition (O2, O3, Landscape, Ad Infinitum). They heavily process their original footage, and combine extreme slow motion with a blurred visual feel to create an image that is as much a pure color/motion graphic as it is cinematographic. In their words: “Integral to our work is the use of extreme slow motion. Upon a passing glance the work appears to be still – it is only after a returning glance or concentrated awareness that the motion of the piece reveals itself.”

The author is a practicing ambient video artist. My own works (Rockface, 2002; Streaming Video, 2005; Winterscape, 2007; and Cycle – currently in post-production) are inspired by and based in the Canadian Rockies and British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. The work reflects the visual beauty of natural landscapes and details, combined with a magic-realist post-production technique of layered visual transitions. I work closely with my collaborators Glen Crawford (D.O.P.) and Christopher Bizzocchi (post-production and effects specialist) in the creation of my ambient video art.

Other Directions

This paper is a relatively focused view on one aspect of the broader phenomenon of ambient video. It has concentrated on the visual and the cinematographic aspects of ambient video art. As mentioned earlier, other directions in Ambient Video are worthy of similar attention: the exploraration of purely graphic visuals, live improvisational ambient video performance, and the incorporation of generative and interactive models.

The role of sound in all aspects of ambient video experience is an overarching domain of enquiry that will reward further creative and scholarly work. There are two aspects to consider in this regard. First, a case could be made that to be truly ambient, these videos should be able to work without sound. This position is supported by a connection to the concept of “video painting” and a continuity with the tradition of painting and fine art photography. A further practical difficulty is that a gallery, or even an affluent home (Bill Gates being the most well known example), may have several ambient videos playing at the same time in close proximity. The addition of sound would either lead to an unanticipated cacophony (which admittedly may not be a problem for some audio theorists), or to the privileging of one video’s sound track at the expense of the others. However, despite these logistical considerations, it is difficult to maintain a serious opposition to the role sound can play in the pleasure of ambient video experience. On the contrary, it is probable that there are a wide range of sound styles and specific tracks that would add to the ambient experience of any given video. Options consistent with ambience could include a variety of music genres such as electronic (Brian Eno comes to mind), classical (such as Eric Satie), jazz (Brubeck), fusion (Jarre), or many others. Both representational and impressionistic sound effects tracks and soundscapes would also work with many ambient pieces. Clearly there is a great deal of work to be done in this critical area.

Author’s Biography

Jim Bizzocchi is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Arts at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is a filmmaker who has taught media production and analysis for over thirty years. His current research interests include the emergent production poetics privileged by large-scale high-resolution video display technology, the aesthetics of interactive multimedia experience design, and the role of New Media within innovative teaching/learning environments. He is active in educational technology, and is the Past-president of the Canadian Association for Distance Education. Bizzocchi did his graduate work in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.

Acknowledgements

The author’s scholarly and artistic works are supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, and the Banff New Media Institute. My research agenda into the future of video has benefited from ongoing dialogue with my colleagues Belgacem Ben Youssef and John Bowes. Finally, I wish to thank both Ron Burnett and the anonymous DAC peer reviewers for their insights into the development of this paper.

Notes

[1] “Video Painting” is the name of the form preferred by the Montreal video collective NomIg
http://www.videopainting.ca
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[2] A variation on this is attributed by Anna McCarthy to Mark Fowler, the Reagan-appointed commissioner of the US FCC, the regulator of American television: “Television is just another appliance. It is a toaster with pictures” (McCarthy, 2001: 117).
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[3] There are a variety of such devices, ranging from self-contained digital desktop “photo-cubes” and “electronic picture frames”, to the built-in ability of the Macintosh and Windows OS to display and cycle through digital images from dedicated folders.
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[4] “Webcam records birth of B.C. eagle chick”. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060428/eagle_eggs060428?s_name=&no_ads=
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[5] “R.I.P. Jennicam” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3360063.st
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[6] Horizontal, in Issue 4 “Touch”, http://www.horizonzero.ca
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[7] http://www.microcinemadvd.com/microambience/
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Introduction

In digital, networked culture, we spend our lives engaged with data systems. Although our experience is shaped by interfaces, friendly surfaces, we are inevitably aware of their functional undersides. The web is increasingly a set of interfaces to datasets. In 2004 Alan Liu observed the page-based paradigm of the web being interrupted by database incursions — what he called ‘data pours’ (Liu, 2004). On the contemporary web the data pour has become the rule, rather than the exception. The so-called ‘web 2.0’ paradigm further abstracts web content into feeds, real-time flows of XML data.

In the background of these developments — what Liu characterises as the post-industrial rationalisation of networked culture — is data itself. In this context it is not surprising that new media art has in recent years turned towards data as both subject and material. In 2001, exhibitions such as the Whitney Museum’s Bitstreams and Data Dynamics and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 010101 signalled the emergence of data practice as a key element in new media art. Data art has also attracted some theoretical attention since it came to prominence. Lev Manovich’s 2002 essay ‘The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art’ (Manovich, 2002) has largely set the theoretical agenda, especially in its focus on issues of scale and the sublime (or not) aesthetics of this practice (Jevbratt, 2004). Others have deployed theoretical frameworks from conceptual art (Sack) or postmodern theory (Simanowski, 2005a). While it is informed by these approaches, this paper considers a more basic question.

Data art involves a creative grappling with the nature of our now ubiquitous data systems. It draws data out, makes it explicit, literally provides it with an image. It also probes data’s constitution, potential, and significance. In the process of working pragmatically with data — using it as a generative resource, a way of making — data art is involved in the culturally crucial figuration of data and its contemporary domain. This practice is a concrete exploration of what data is, does, and can do, but it also involves a set of assumptions, narratives and ontologies that construct data as an entity in the cultural imagination. That construction is at the core of this analysis.

Data vs Information

Coming to grips with the figure of data is made more difficult by a basic ambiguity in the way the term is used; particularly in relation to art, ‘Information’ and ‘data’ are often used interchangeably. Warren Sack’s paper on ‘Aesthetics of Information Visualisation’ also uses the phrase ‘data visualisation’ (Sack); Simanowski (2005a) uses ‘data’ in general, but interposes ‘information’ without explanation; Manovich’s (2002) analysis of ‘data art’ occurs in the context of a wider project on ‘info-aesthetics’.

This blurring of data and information obscures a fundamental distinction — and in turn, a fundamental relation — between the two terms. As Wikipedia’s entry on information states: ‘Information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it’. A recent text on data mining describes that task as ‘discovering useful information in large data repositories’ (Tan et al, 2006: 2). Some data artists recognise the same distinction: Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, creators of the installation The Listening Post (2003), describe their sonification work as ‘exploring the information hidden in data’ (Hansen and Rubin, 2001). This distinction draws on a sense of information as related to context and meaning; following Donald MacKay (1969) and Gregory Bateson, information here is a ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson, 1973: 428) rather than the structural, mathematical formulation of Claude Shannon’s information theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949).

Prising these terms apart, we can begin with a notion of data from empirical science, as a set of measurements extracted from the flux of the real. In themselves, such measurements are abstract, blank, meaningless. Only when organised and contextualised by an observer does this data yield information, a message or meaning. The concepts are converse, two sides of the same thing: data is the raw material of information, its substrate; information is the meaning derived from data in a particular context. This distinction is a central tool in the analyses that follow. In deploying data, these artworks inevitably involve its flip-side, information. Often, data art actively resists, or defers, information; it aims to somehow present us with the data ‘itself’. The implications of that drive, and its manifestations in these artworks, offer a useful critical perspective on data art practice.

In the following sections data practice is discussed through a series of labels — indexical, abject, material, and anti-content — and clusters of related work. These labels are discursive devices, rather than exclusive categories; rather than define or delimit this field, they propose aspects of the common project here: the creative figuration of data.

We Feel Fine and The Dumpster: Indexical Data

Recently a cluster of works have appeared that deal with visualising networked society. Drawing on data from the new ‘social’ web, or blogosphere, they offer us a sense of the unimaginable crowd that now inhabits the network. The Dumpster (2006), by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, is an interactive visualisation of teenage romantic breakups (Levin et al, 2006) (Figure 1). The artists harvested and classified some 20000 blog posts, analysing them to allow comparison; the work’s interface follows the metaphor of the title, as hundreds of coloured circles, each representing a blogged breakup, drop from above and jostle each other. Browsing the breakups displays excerpts of the blog text, and alters the colours of the display to indicate the relative similarity of each breakup to the one currently selected. Sidebars to the interface provide more information on the selected breakup, including date, the gender and age of the author. The Dumpster is engaging and dynamic; simulated physics makes the breakup-circles jiggle and bounce; the interface is packed with detail, and the context-based display allows the user to investigate the multivariate relationships between breakups. As Manovich writes in his essay on the work, it encourages an interplay of attention between the individual and the group; ‘The particular and the general are presented simultaneously, without one being sacrificed to the other’ (Manovich, ‘Social Data Browsing’).

Figure 1. The Dumpster (2006) (screenshot)

Along similar lines We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar (2006), bills itself as ‘an exploration of human emotion’ (Figure 2). It constantly harvests hundreds of individual ‘feelings’ from blog posts, analysing them for content and visualising them as a swarm of tiny, independent entities. The work offers six interfaces to the dataset, including relatively conventional statistical devices such as breakdowns by age, location, gender and feeling; as in The Dumpster (Levin et al, 2006), the data points remain ‘live’, linking the user to the harvested text and (unlike The Dumpster) to the source blog itself, allowing the user to delve further into the context for a particular ‘feeling’.

Both these works use their datasets as indexes of reality — specific individuals and events. Both aim to visualise and portray not merely data, but the personal, emotional reality that the dataset refers to. This is made clear in the language used in the works: The Dumpster describes itself as ‘a portrait of romantic breakups’ and ‘a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers’; the dataset for We Feel Fine is described as ‘a database of several million human feelings’. This approach begs a dull (but necessary) critique: that these works do not provide an interface to feelings, or breakups, but to texts that refer — or seem to refer — to them. In both cases the datasets are constructed in ways that shape what is included and excluded. We Feel Fine searches blog posts for the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’, then attempts to identify the ‘feeling’ in question. This analysis works well for simple statements, but seems easily fooled; texts involving negation, equivocation or speculation are often misinterpreted. This blog excerpt was identified as feeling ‘better’: ‘I just start to have these looming feelings of inadequecy and fear that in a year, I will be no better off and have nothing else to offer to the professional world’ (Harris and Kamvar, 2006). The Dumpster, which uses a fixed, pre-analysed dataset, hits the mark more consistently, but includes texts referring to dreams of breakups, past breakups, and so on. These are critiques of the automated analysis that the works use; but even if the analyses were perfect, the more fundamental representational issue remains. These works rely on a long chain of signification: (reality); blog; data harvesting; data analysis; visualisation; interface. Yet they maintain a strangely naive sense of unmediated presentation.

Figure 2. Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine (2006), “Madness” interface (screenshot)

The interface design reinforces this; data points are rendered as swarms of simulated physical entities. They are personified (literally animated) so as to conflate (real, ‘human’) data source with (textual, harvested, analysed, mapped) data point. Along the way the interfaces also create a powerful impression of the nature of their collapsed datasets/referents; as teeming multiplicities displaying what might be called uniform diversity. Data points are ontologically equal but vary within a fixed set of axes or parameters. These systems encode a kind of idealistic humanism of equality and diversity, harmonious multiplicity, and fundamental (emotional) commonality. A process of data harvesting and analysis literally drafts in thousands of participants, as the constituents of this narrative. In both works the artists downplay their own roles, emphasising the data itself as content; as Jonathan Harris writes ‘We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone’ (Harris). Both works present the user with a set of tools for navigating and analysing the datasets (and their collapsed referents), also turning over the process of extracting information and meaning from that data. However both works are already rich with information, in their interface surfaces and in the background processes and systems that constitute them.

These works construct a notion of data — of its capacities, qualities, and significance — in the ways that they use it. Data here is first of all indexical of reality. Yet it is also found, or to put it another way, given. These works gather existing data from the network, drawing together thousands of elements that are already, unproblematically, ‘out there’. This reinforces the sense of collapsed indexicality; these data points have causes (authors) of their own that in some sense guarantee their connection to reality, or at least defer the question of that connection. Data’s creation — in the sense of making a measurement, framing and abstracting something from the flux of the real — is left out.

Alex Dragulescu: Abject Data

In the indexical paradigm, data is tightly linked to reality, to the ‘real’ of its source. If we maintain faith in that link, or at least accept it pragmatically, data visualisations and interfaces promise new insights into that reality. However another creative possibility is to cut data loose, to explore its self-contained abstraction, and its inherent malleability. This approach is generative — a way of making — and in that sense pragmatic; but it also constructs a quite distinct sense of what data is, and can be.

Figure 3. Alex Dragulescu, Structure 11 (2006) (from the Spam Architecture series)

In Alex Dragulescu’s spam works, junk email is processed to generate rich three dimensional forms. The Spam Architecture series (Dragulescu, 2005) presents jittery, origami structures; although cleanly virtual, they do have an architectural sense of weight and rectilinearity (Figure 3). It might be significant that they resemble architect’s models: possible buildings, conceptual structures untroubled by pragmatics. The forms are full of legible structure and familiar variation; there is a sense of genre or family that reinforces the architectural allusion, a language of elements and relationships (wall, roof, piercing shard). Yet with no sign of human scale or activity (doors, steps, windows), and broken, angular planes, they also seem somehow corrupt, vaguely menacing. They might be described as uncanny in the Freudian sense; in German unheimlich or ‘unhomely’.

Dragulescu adds to the mystery by not revealing the mapping — the process by which the forms are generated from email text. He leaves us to contemplate the artefacts, reading what we can into their structure. Their consistent architectural language could be a product of the spam sources — in which case, we are witnessing the visualisation of the related qualities of those texts, their own ordered alterations, variations on pharmaceutical themes and filter-fooling tricks: somehow seeing spam as a genre. But it’s impossible to tell; that familial quality could be as much, or more, a product of the artist’s own processing. The structure may be given, and the data controlling something more subtle — variation of variation, ineffable statistical properties. Gathering information from these data artefacts is a more speculative process.

In the absence of a map, an interpretable process for decoding the forms back to their spam origins, Dragulescu emphasises the juxtaposition of the source and the generated artefact; the two hang together in a kind of cognitive dissonance. To resolve them, conceptually, involves a kind of poetics, a metaphorical relationship. Finding coherence here, drawing together source and artefact, is only too easy: as one reviewer writes, Spam Architecture‘s forms ‘clearly evoke the underhand and violent nature of the spam’ (Tanni, 2006); junk structure, automatic style, cardboard housing. Spam is both a literal and figurative resource here: it is a cultural and a digital dataset. It embodies the failures (or perhaps the cost) of frictionless connectivity and techno-libertarian ideals. Unmanageable as content — partly because of the content, but mostly for its sheer quantity — we treat it as a substance, a flood of pollution, a pile of dirty things: sex, drugs, scams. Dragulescu performs a poetic transubstantiation on spam, not to clean it up or purify it, but to draw in, and recast, those associations.

Spam Plants (Dragulescu, 2006) uses a similar process, but here the poetics seem, if anything, more barbed. The plant forms are luscious, multicoloured, translucent, organomorphic (Figure 4). They fall in line with the tradition of organic generative art and its hedonistic, glowing multiplicity. The images are immediately and accessably beautiful. The juxtaposition of source and artefact is, as a result, more dissonant. On one side is the organic paradigm of ordered variation, richness and coherence. On the other, the digital sludge of hypermodern culture, what the artist refers to elsewhere as ‘abject data’ (Dragulescu, Respam). Again junk turns into structure.

Figure 4. Alex Dragulescu, Untitled I (2006) (from the Spam Plants series)

There are two, correlated implications. Either junk is structure, or structure is junk. The former is a relatively familiar proposition. There is a rich artistic tradition in drawing attention to the beauty of the discarded or unwanted. An apprehension of structure involves attention, framing, selection: beautiful forms lie waiting all around us, even in the most abject data. Structure as junk is the darker alternative: that what we appreciate as order, form, and coherence is not only ubiquitous and immanent, but mundane, valueless, empty. Dragulescu’s work also suggests a third implication, in which both of these are true: anything is anything, or everything is everything. Dragulescu’s work is a powerful performance of data malleability, its susceptibility to transformation, mapping and munging. As one commentator imagines, in response to this work: ‘You turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into architectural structures; your Ph.D. thesis, exported as an inhabitable object; every bank statement you’ve ever received, transformed into a small Cubist city’ (Manaugh, 2006).

Taken together, Spam Plants and Spam Architecture evoke a sense of data as both structurally rich and substantially, vertiginously empty. In this figuration data is an abstract set of potentials, an array of values waiting to be mapped. A dataset feeds a process, which produces an artefact; the process doesn’t care what the dataset is, or was; whatever it was, now it’s just input: the process (the map) reconfigures the dataset completely, arbitrarily, rewrites it not by altering values but by reprogramming them, altering their potential. The process takes the data as whatever it wants (a wall, a shard, a petal, the difference between this petal and the last), irrespective of what it once was (a word, number, number of characters in a word, difference between this word and the last). Anything is anything.

Lev Manovich (2002) has made the same observation about data art: he calls this polymorphism the ‘built-in existential angst’ of both data art and the digital medium in general: ‘By allowing us to map anything into anything else … computer media simultaneously makes all these choices appear arbitrary – unless the artist uses special strategies to motivate her or his choices’. He also hesitantly proposes arbitrary mapping as a criterion of judgment: ‘Maybe in a “good” work of data art the mapping used has to somehow relate to the content and context of data’. Yet as Dragulescu’s work shows, and as already argued, some relation between mapping and data context — or between input and output — inevitably emerges, even when no direct or intrinsic relation exists. The spam/architecture relation becomes part of the new information the work creates. The poetry in Dragulescu’s work indicates that although an infinity of mappings are possible, it is the multitude of choices involved in the crafting of specific mappings that is significant. Even as it points towards the abject polymorphism of data, Dragulescu’s work shows how the data art process (or performance) steps in to generate meaning and information.

Lisa Jevbratt: Data Material

Lisa Jevbratt’s work constructs a very different sense of data. In projects such as 1:1 (1999/2002) and Infome Imager Lite (2002-2005), the mapping of dataset to image is straightforward and transparent. Jevbratt seeks to use visual displays to reveal structures inherent in the dataset. In 1:1 databases of sampled web IP addresses are mapped simply to pixel colour values. Several different interfaces or maps are provided, using different rulesets: the ‘top’ interface visualises top level domains (.com, .gov, .mil, .edu, etc); ‘every’ visualises every IP address (Figure 5). As a result we ‘see’ the dataset from several angles, through different filters. We gain a sense of the dataset as separate from the mapping, and the possibility of alternative mappings and their capacity to reveal different structures. Jevbratt articulates this transparency: ‘the visual “look” … is very plain. It is strict and “limited” in order to not impose its structure on its possible interpretations and meanings’ (Jevbratt, 2004).

Yet Jevbratt’s work is quite unlike conventional information visualisation: like Dragulescu’s work it is anti-information, in the sense of information as a formed message. Rather than transform data into information, Jevbratt transduces one form of data into another — symbolic or logical into visual. The image artefacts are visual data, prior to information: Jevbratt (2004) writes, ‘they are real, objects for interpretation, not interpretations. They should be experienced, not viewed as dialogue about experience’. Unlike the data-nihilism of Dragulescu’s model, where any information in the data is arbitrary or unreachable, Jevbratt maintains the viability of information, though like many artists she turns its construction over to the audience.

Figure 5. Lisa Jevbratt, 1:1 (1999/2002) – “Every” interface

Infome Imager Lite pushes the transparency of 1:1 a step further, turning over the data gathering and visualisation process to the work’s audience (Jevbratt, 2002-2005) (Figure 6). Visitors can control and launch new web crawlers, and manipulate the mapping used in the visualisation. As in 1:1 the visualisations are themselves interfaces, linking back to the sites crawled. As a result the user is even more tightly bound into the process; at a minimum, the work confronts the user with its parameters and options, and requires an initial URL or web search: an impetus, a context or target. Potentially, the software offers a platform for in-depth experimentation, exploration and visualisation. Where 1:1 is explicitly global and macro, IIL is micro, local, contextual. While no less dense, these visualisations are potentially more meaningful than those in 1:1, since they offer more hooks, more connections with a user’s experience and intention. Set a crawler loose on your home page or blog, and the visualisation that returns is, in Jevbratt’s words, ‘abstract reality’, an image that reads as pure pattern, but has a direct correspondence with personal link networks. Other recent visualisations have focused on connectivity in the new social web (see for example Ben Fry’s blog link visualizations (Fry, 2006). While it hails from a previous web era, IIL can present similar information, as the loops, webs and fans of link topology are flattened into sequences and patterns on the image surface; the whole becomes a rich visual texture and a local, concrete ‘abstract reality’.

Yet this textural quality also leads back to the inevitable choices involved in mapping data. In IIL and 1:1, one extrinsic structure dominates, to the extent that patterns in the data are literally wrapped around it. The structure is the rectilinear picture plane, a central obsession of twentieth century visual art and a given in digital media culture. In Jevbratt’s visualisations tiles or pixels, corresponding to individual data points, fill in a rectangular grid. The dimensions and proportions of the grid are unrelated to the dataset; and in fact some structures in the data are obscured by that grid. In IIL for example, the crawlers gather multiple data points for each web page visited, depending on features of the page’s HTML code; each page may correspond to five, ten or twenty individual tiles. This page-by-page structure is wrapped around the picture plane, row by row, or tiled spiral-wise from the center outwards, in IIL. Of course other tiling methods are possible: each URL could be rendered on a single row of the grid. This would distinguish pages and their features more clearly, and make recurring pages and patterns easier to spot. This might be a ‘better’ visualisation; would it be a ‘better’ artwork? Jevbratt’s picture plane mapping is not based on an information visualisation rationale. It is a cultural structure, highly functional information in itself. As the artist says, it connects these works with a whole tradition, it literally frames the data and offers it up to be read in a particular way, as an abstract ‘picture’ (rather than a graph) and also as an artwork. Of course this mapping does ‘impose its structure’, but that imposition only underlines the functional differences between art and data visualisation.

Figure 6. Lisa Jevbratt, Infome Imager Lite (2002-2005) (screenshot)

This wrapping of data around the picture plane resembles the techniques of ‘data bending’ practices, where data from one media form is transcoded into another, disregarding inherent differences in file format (Whitelaw, 2004). Like databenders however, Jevbratt’s sense of what is significant — what the data contains — is untroubled by this transformation. That content is immanent, and elusive: Jevbratt presents network data as a reservoir of unknown potentials and patterns, hidden information. At its core, Jevbratt’s work pursues the revelation of reality. As she writes, Infome Imager Lite ‘glances down into the subconscious of the Web, hoping to reveal its inherent structure and create new understandings of its technical and social functionalities’ (Jevbratt, 2005). The datastructures of the web, and the data-images that depict them, are substrates for emergence. Jevbratt writes of ‘finding something unexpected’; ‘slowly something emerges that draws attention to itself; something reveals itself … lets us know it has meaning’. We arrive here at Jevbratt’s own data-cosmology: the Infome. The artist uses this term to refer to the totality of ‘all computers and code’ and their (at least potential) network. This complex entity constitutes a dynamic reality that is textual and recursive (self-shaping, self-manipulating). Jevbratt (2005) calls it an ‘environment/organism’, a figure that seems to be more than analogy; she writes of seeking ‘something that shows signs of an awareness’ within it; of hints and traces, ‘openings’ in the data.

This data cosmology is presented in strikingly material terms; here too data appears as a substance. Instead of using ‘known visual forms’ or metaphors, Jevbratt (2005) proposes, ‘data can represent itself by being a slice … or “smearing off” on something. The visualisation is an indexical trace of the reality, an imprint, a “rubbing”’. In the same paper she writes of her visualisations as ‘nets’ or ‘webs’ in the sense that they catch or entrap something and make it available to observation. The Infome is real, concrete, not a Platonic ideal or a cyberspace of pure thought, and it is tightly coupled to the societies, cultures and technologies that create it; as Jevbratt shows we apprehend it by working, concretely, in it; writing code, initiating processes that themselves inevitably alter the Infome’s terrain. Jevbratt avoids the epistemological traps of indexicality by treating data as a concrete, but perhaps mysterious trace; the (social, political, institutional) forces that shape that data must somehow be reflected in the ‘abstract reals’ her work produces much as, as Jevbratt suggests, echoes of the Big Bang are present in TV static.

Borevitz And Salavon: Anti-Content and the Artist’s Squint

Figure 7. Brad Borevitz, State of the Union (2006-) (screenshot)

In Brad Borevitz’s State of the Union (2007) the artist takes as his dataset the texts of all 217 State of the Union addresses, and makes an interactive visualisation that is also an interface to the texts themselves (Figure 7). The visualisation is dominated by a text cloud, an array of words that correspond to the most frequently occurring words in each text. The size of a word’s font corresponds to how often it occurs in that address. A word’s position is determined by its location in the document (along the horizontal axis); its vertical position corresponds to its distinctiveness in the entire corpus of addresses, so that more distinctive words are higher. The result is a cloud with a shape and content that conveys a rich and (in one sense) legible impression of each text and its relation to a (historical) corpus. Flicking through the years we seem to see issues, crises and rhetoric come and go; Harry Truman’s 1953 speech forms a cloud headlined ‘communist’, ‘Soviet’ and ‘atomic’; ‘world’ and ‘free’ nestle immediately below, larger (more frequent in the speech) but less distinctive in the entire dataset. Bush’s latest speech is topped by a familiar cluster including ‘Qaeda’, ‘Iraq’, ‘terorrists’ and ‘Shia’.

The clouds are striking, but there is nothing aesthetically compelling in the surface of Borevitz’s work; it downplays visual presentation in favour of a dense interface that is functional rather than slick. In most respects the work is a straightforward and transparent — even diligent — data visualisation. It offers a wealth of detail; it makes mappings that reveal patterns intrinsic to the dataset, and explains those mappings and statistical methods clearly; it links directly to the source data. More than most comparable works, State of the Union begs the question of the role of the data artist. Borevitz’s answer is explained in his own writings, and is tied to his motivations in making the work. Borevitz adopts data visualisation in response to contemporary politics. Faced with what he calls iconic language — political speech as unarguable assertion and constructed buzz-phrases — the artist turns to quantitative methods looking for clues. Again, what is sought is hidden information, though here what is hidden is the urgent but impossible question of the causes of what Borevitz calls ‘the sorry state we’re in. He writes:

There is something compelling in the urge to empirically examine this particular corpus for clues as to how things have gone horribly wrong. Maybe we can no longer bear to listen to the address, or maybe it has become impossible for us to read it. There are certainly few who would be willing to scrutinize all 3000 pages of our legacy of 214 messages from the president. Perhaps counting is a defense against the spell of iconic language. It may be that counting is simply the automation of a practice that we participate in already, as we measure unconsciously our saturation in the messages of the media–as they work us over completely (Borevitz, ‘The {Sorry} State We Are In’).

In treating these texts as a dataset, Borevitz neutralises them as content. As content they tell a story that is all too familiar; historicised, debated, thrashed out in public discourse, they lead to the contemporary dismay that underpins the work. Borevitz uses data practice as a way to abstract or distance this story, and in the process open it up, seek alternative meanings or clues. The process is a double movement: information — data — (prospective) information. Quantitative analysis, the ‘defense’ of counting, is a way to tunnel under the established information contained in the texts. Textual information is turned it back into data: underdetermined and open, it forms the raw material for the prospective construction of new information. Like other artists, Borevitz leaves this construction to the users of the work; the emphasis is on the first half of the movement, on underdetermination. Not in itself, or for its own sake, but directed and targeted at the language of power.

Data practice here is a kind of artist’s squint. This technique is used in painting and drawing as a means of perceptual abstraction. Squinting blurs detail, so that recognisable objects are abstracted into visual forms: shape, tone, line. The artist’s squint overturns visual information in order to access its ‘raw data’, before transcribing that data onto paper or canvas. Ironically the aim here is most often realism, the accurate transcription of visual data. To see ‘reality’, discard information and observe data.

Much data art follows the same process. Many of Jason Salavon’s works use quantitative methods to decimate information; in Everything, All at Once (2001) each frame of a real-time video input is reduced to its single average colour. Well-formed mass media content is decimated to a single, huge pixel, flickering with the rhythms and patterns of televisual language. The soundtrack remains intact, reinforcing the juxtaposition of source and abstraction. In Everything, All at Once (Part III) (2005) the same input generates radiating concentric rings of colour, turning those temporal patterns into spatial structures (Figure 8). In Salavon’s amalgamation works (such as 100 Special Moments (2004)), collections of images are analysed statistically, creating a blurry but recognisable ‘average’ image; again detail is lost, but a concrete, overarching reality is revealed. This process is a kind of post-human artist’s squint, a computational extension of visual perception.

Figure 8. Jason Salavon, Everything All at Once (Part III) (2005)

Like Borevitz, Salavon uses overdetermined content as source material: the too familiar, the most highly produced, the most redundant and banal. In a deadpan generative strategy, Salavon’s abstractions extract aesthetic pleasure from the mundane. The Top Grossing Movie of All Time 1×1 (2005) is a compiled colour average of Titanic; as one reviewer comments, ‘a useless blockbuster movie had been transformed into something rare and beautiful in its own right’ (Salavon, 2000; Hall, 2002). Yet it also reflects its data sources — the underlying ‘real’ — as an abject, and ultimately empty, mass of generic content. Jevbratt and Borevitz seem more optimistic on the potential for new information to emerge from their data abstractions. Like the squinting painter they seek realism, though in a less immediate or verifiable form: not a reproduction or resemblance, not (yet another) representation; Jevbratt and Borevitz seeks clues, traces, hints of some unknown but imperceptible, immanent reality.

Data Immanence, Data Agency

This work pursues data, more than information. In several different ways it defers, stops short of, or works against information, the formed message or answer, directing us instead to an experience of the data. We Feel Fine and The Dumpster allow us to browse, sift and sort the dataset, encouraging a mode of exploration and contemplation; they turn their datasets over to the user’s questions and speculations. Dragulescu’s work obliterates or conceals any information in its data sources. Jevbratt presents her images as ‘objects for interpretation, not interpretations’, as data representing itself (Jevbratt, 2005). Borevitz uses statistical methods to grind ‘informative’ political language into data that once again, the user can take as raw material for new information.

Data art’s resistance to information is not unique. Underdetermination is a contemporary artistic staple; much recent visual art works to defamiliarise the cultural vernacular of images and objects, undermining their known ‘information’ in order to make them available anew, as data. Ricky Swallow’s wood carvings and Paola Pivi’s inverted readymades come to mind. Like Borevitz and Jevbratt, they allude to something inarticulate and mysterious, but immanent within the material and mundane.

Data art reflects a contemporary worldview informed by data excess; ungraspable quantity, wide distribution, mobility, heterogeneity, flux. Orienting ourselves in this domain is a constant challenge; the network exceeds any overview or synopsis, so we construct local subsets and contexts, drawn together with RSS feeds. Social web services like Digg and del.ico.us help provide some overall sense of what is happening ‘out there’. Data art seems to answer the same desire for context, but by different means. If Digg offers a crude transcendence (top ten) approach to data excess, data art moves in the other direction, towards the many rather than the few. It turns towards immersion and sensation; it emphasises openness and intuition, rather than the extraction of value or meaning. Most of all it confronts us with immanence itself, a multiplicity of relations; with structure as potential, latent, and emergent, not given and named. This stance is in turn a kind of self-referential affirmation of the networked society.

Manovich uses the notion of ‘data-subjectivity’ to describe the position of the individual in this society: the personal, everyday experience of data immersion and navigation (Manovich, 2002). In part data art contributes to an articulated or overt data subjectivity, offering us figures, images, and narratives of data. But these artists also provide models of what might be called data agency: more than browsing and navigating — being subject to the data flows — data agents munge, analyse, map and display. In some cases this mastery is cryptic, verging on magical: Dragulescu’s works are bravura performances of data transubstantiation. In others the tools of the data agent are literally transparent: Borevitz provides the entire dataset, much of the source code, and complete accounts of the statistical methods used. Jevbratt’s Infome Imager Lite is a skills transfer project for data agents: the user is drawn into processes that in 1:1 were the sole domain of the artist. This propagation of data agency is now well underway, supplemented by the data feed ethos of Web 2.0 culture; a growing culture of data practice is evident in communities around the net (Haque; IBM).

This nascent data agency will be shaped, inevitably, by the narratives and figures implicit in data practices; and these figures are often problematic. The fundamental issue is the notion of data ‘in itself’, and opposed to information. As much as this work pursues data, it cannot escape information. The data is unreachable in itself, always inflected, at the very least, by its particular, concrete manifestation, no matter how plain. These artists seek to turn the data over to us to explore; yet it arrives already shaped, metaphorically primed, conditioned by the processes that created it, informed by the contexts and genres of its presentation. This is not to say that data art should be somehow more pure or faithful to its datasets, only that it should embrace, and acknowledge, its impurity. Information leaks in, however slight the artist’s intervention; even (or especially) cultural defaults, like the rectangular picture plane of Jevbratt’s visualisations, shape our interpretation of the work in ways that are extraneous to the data.

A related problem is the sense of data as pre-existing or given. The prominence of networked data, and the increasing availability of data from social web services, contribute to a sense that data has an independent being and existence. Because it comes from somewhere else, typically in real time, its creation is abstracted: it is naturalised. Yet data always comes from somewhere: it is produced by the process that generates it, and as such it encodes that process, as much as anything else. This severing of data from its creation leads to two related figures. The first is a notion of data as matter or stuff. This figure bizarrely inverts the specific attributes of digital data, as argued previously in relation to tropes of data material in experimental music (Whitelaw, 2003). The second is a sense of data as concrete and objective, rather than contingent and relational. More than a decade ago Phil Agre criticised digital data as ‘obsolete’ and ‘dead, and proposed that ‘we should bring it to life by thinking through all its relationships — both with other data and with the circumstances in the world that it’s supposed to represent’ (Agre, 1994).

Agre’s proposal also addresses a third concern, which is the tendency towards data mysticism. Data here becomes a reservoir of potential, a field of the unknown and emergent. Again it seems self-sufficient, rather than part of a wider set of processes; it also slides away from discourse and critique, which are too prosaic to gain any traction. The openness, the deferral of information, and the exploration of immanence that characterise data art can play into this mysticism, though they need not. It must be possible to maintain data’s critical and aesthetic underdetermination while maintaining a sense of its concrete properties, its constitution and context.

Finally, the question of the artist’s role is unavoidable here. These works present several alternative constructions of that role, with varying degrees of viability. The general tendency for artists to minimise their agency is questionable, as already argued; but this work does show the value of a practice that selects, frames, and maps data, while seeking to make those processes transparent (as opposed to omitting or erasing them). George Legrady’s recent commission for the Seattle Central Library is a case in point (Legrady, 2005; Simanowski, 2005b). Yet how far can we extrapolate this approach? Does data art become simply an aestheticised (and perhaps functionally impaired) form of scientific data visualisation? Work such as Dragulescu’s indicates another alternative, in one sense a more conventional model of artistic agency, where data is a plastic, abject substance and its creative and poetic transformations come to the fore. Yet that malleability also threatens any significance (however conditional) that the data might have, especially when (as in Dragulescu’s work) data and map are opaquely interwoven.

Perhaps we can imagine a middle ground, a contextual approach to data practice that avoids idealising its object or effacing its own process. Manovich (2002) suggests that one of the roles of data art is to reflect on data subjectivity; I would go further and say that data art is involved in the construction of that subjectivity. It involves a practical exploration of data’s potential uses and meanings; it literally offers us images, figures, for data itself. It pulls us away from information, from the well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital media. By directing us instead towards data, it opens spaces for potential, for the distributed reconstruction of information. Yet in the process it inevitably encodes its own specific metadata — data about data — that can be read out through the artists’ processes, as this paper has demonstrated. This metadata must in turn inform us data subjects, if we are to move past immersion and navigation to a more critical, and active agency.

Author’s Biography

Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist interested in new media art and culture, especially generative processes, data aesthetics and audiovisual practice. His writing has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity and Contemporary Music Review. In 2004 his work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). His current research, spanning data sonification and visualisation, live coding and generative art, is documented on his blog The Teeming Void [http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com]. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra.

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Introduction: Towards Produsage

2005 and 2006 saw the popular recognition and commercial embrace of a phenomenon which is set to deeply affect the intellectual life of developed and developing nations for years to come. Yahoo! bought Flickr. Google acquired YouTube. Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace, and declared the future of his NewsCorp empire to lie in the user-led content creation spaces of such social software Websites more than in its many newspapers, broadcast channels, and other media interests (Murdoch, 2005). Finally, TIME broke with its long-standing tradition of nominating one outstanding public figure as ‘person of the year’, and instead selected ‘you’: all of us who are active in collaborative online spaces (Grossman, 2006).

However, the significance of the user-led phenomenon lies not in such (ultimately hollow) honours, or even only in the central spaces of YouTube and Flickr – instead, true to its underlying principles (which will be further explored in this paper) it is found dispersed across the World Wide Web; what is important about the new phenomenon is not only the success of its most visible exponents, but instead also the ‘long tail’ (Anderson, 2006) of other user-led spaces which have emerged at every juncture of cyberspace, and are beginning to spread into offline worlds.

But it is not these spaces alone which have driven the rise of user-led content creation approaches: just as crucial has been the emergence of a new generation of users who have the skills, abilities, and above all the interest and enthusiasm to use them. PR industry watchdog Trendwatching.com has described this new generation of users as ‘Generation C’ (trendwatching.com, 2005a) following previous constructs such as X and Y but adding its own unique attributes to the mix. ‘C’, in this description, stands in the first instance for ‘content’ and ‘creativity’ – but as a result of the models of content creation and content sharing employed by this new group of users also contributes to the ‘casual collapse’ of established media and other industry models (from Murdoch’s NewsCorp to the proprietary software production models increasingly under threat from open source projects, or to the bitter rear-guard action fought by the Encyclopædia Britannica against its upstart rival Wikipedia (Giles, 2007)). As old models decline, then, their absence presents opportunities for Generation C to exercise their own ‘control’ over content, and gain ‘celebrity’, as well as – as Trendwatching adds in a 2007 update to its original descriptions – generate ‘cash’ from its activities (trendwatching.com, 2005b).

The social dimensions of the Generation C idea are mirrored on the technological side by another recent buzzword – ‘Web2.0’ (O’Reilly, 2005). While accusations of boosterism may be levelled against both terms, it is nonetheless true that like Generation C, Web2.0 describes the technological framework for a notable (if perhaps more gradual than implied in the ‘2.0’ version numbering) shift from static to dynamic content, from hierarchically managed to collaboratively and continuously developed material, and from user-as-consumer to user-as-contributor. Tim O’Reilly, originator of the term, offers this definition for ‘Web2.0’:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”) (O’Reilly, 2006).

Neither Web2.0 nor its chief users, Generation C, should be seen as having emerged suddenly and without precedent. Instead, they are in line with a long tradition of models which describe the gradual rise of the informed and active consumer or user, a line reaching back at least as far as Alvin Toffler’s work in the early 1970s on the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1970) who utilised the increased amount of information and advice at their disposal to become an expert consumer, and touching on Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller’s description of the ‘pro-am’ phenomenon, which highlighted the increased advice and feedback of consumers on the production of goods and ideas (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004) and John Hartley’s focus on the ‘citizen-consumer’ (ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2007) exercising their citizenship through the process of active and informed (media) consumption. Most recently, the work of Yochai Benkler on ‘commons-based peer production’ must be noted, which outlines in detail the environment in which today’s Generation C participate in content creation (Benkler, 2006).

However, it is arguable that none of these models fully and sufficiently describe the collaborative content creation undertaken by Generation C members in Web2.0 environments. The core problem in this context is the persistence of a description of this work as content production in a traditional, industrial-age sense; the suggestion that this term may no longer be applicable is best demonstrated using the example of open source software development or of Generation C’s foremost achievement to date, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not a product

Indeed, it is useful to contrast the process of content production in traditional encyclopaedias with the collaborative processes in Wikipedia. While tracing their origins to pre-industrial times, the former are firmly built on industrial-age approaches to the production and distribution of goods, regardless of whether such goods are physical or informational (that is, tangible or intangible) in nature – a one-way value chain from production through distribution to consumption which at best allows for explicit (through direct responses) or implicit (as gathered through market research) feedback from consumer to producer (fig. 1).

Figure 1: Industrial Production Value Chain

In this model, control over content rests squarely with the producers: they decide upon the nature of the content itself, including any changes or updates from previous versions of the encyclopaedia, and upon its packaging as a complete product – that is, the definition of discrete (annual, full, condensed) versions of the product, the timing of version releases, and the nature of their distribution to the buying public. (Distributors play a subordinate role in this process – while able to choose whether or not to carry the product, and how to promote its sales, they have no direct influence on content and packaging itself.)

Much of this approach was established in direct response to the need to distribute information efficiently in material form (in print, or later also on physical carriers of digital information): in particular, material distribution introduces a need for careful versioning in order to avoid the unsustainably frequent distribution of updates and additions to an existing product, or (worse) costly product recalls to correct content errors. A key downside of versioning, however, is the loss of immediacy: even though the emergence of new information may demand immediate changes to published content, such changes will have to wait until the completion of the current product cycle (e.g. through the exhaustion of existing stock), at which time a new version of the encyclopaedia is released to the public.

The introduction of network-based product distribution channels partially addresses such problems: with their help, content updates can now be distributed to registered customers immediately. At the same time, however, such inter-version updates (that is, revisions) also undermine the version system the more often they are offered: constant service updates both undermine consumer confidence in the quality of the originally purchased product, and introduce confusion over how exactly one revision is distinguished from another. (Obviously, this applies just as much in the field of software development, where the need for frequent updates to products such as Windows has contributed to many customers’ love/hate relationship with Microsoft.)

Further, increased networking also enables consumers to coordinate more effectively. Where traditional distribution networks were largely inaccessible to consumers other than as ‘end customers’, networks which are used for product distribution and for open communication (such as the Internet) allow consumers more visibly to highlight product shortcomings, lobby for content changes or additions, or dispute the veracity of specific content details, as well as speculate on the nature and timing of future product versions and revisions. In the first instance, this gradually strengthens the feedback loop from consumers back to producers, and in the process undermines producers’ control of the overall production value chain. But as users take an ever more direct role in the development process, we will see that it also has the potential of fundamentally shifting the core business of producers away from the sale of copyrighted products, and towards offering value-added services around these products.

It is perhaps already obvious that the content creation model of Wikipedia differs in a number of significant areas from the traditional, industrial-age model of production and distribution adhered to by traditional encyclopaedias. To begin with, the role of the distributor has disappeared altogether – the Web and its underlying carrier medium, the Internet, perform this function now. But more importantly, the producer as a distinct category and agent in the value chain has also been transformed – users themselves are now also potentially producers of content in this encyclopaedia (which is why we will soon describe this as a hybrid produser role), and the value chain as experienced by each user has been condensed to a single point (fig. 2), which connects with the experiences of the other participants in the Wikipedia to form a network of collaborative content creation.

Figure 2: The Produser as Hybrid Producer/Consumer

Text Box:

The networked nature of users (and thus, potential producers) of the Wikipedia also means that responses to content are further amplified – and far from struggling to cope with such responses, or actively discouraging them (as may have been the case under a traditional industrial model of content production), Wikipedia has of course introduced the (wiki-, and thus Web2.0-based) means for users to themselves enact their responses and change, extend, and correct existing content where this is perceived to be necessary, as well as to engage with fellow users to discuss and coordinate these efforts.

This, then, fatally undermines what is perhaps one of the most lasting assumptions of the industrial age – that products exist in discreet versions and revisions, able to be controlled by their producers. Constantly updated and revised, to apply the language of versions and revisions to the Wikipedia makes virtually no sense – what is immediately visible to visitors of any one entry in this encyclopaedia is simply the latest edit of that page (with previous edits also available for comparison), and this edit is replaced immediately with the next once any further changes have been made.

In other words, then, a description of Wikipedia (or even of any of its pages) as a ‘product’ in the traditional sense is no longer appropriate, if by product we understand a distinct, defined, fixed entity which is packaged and distributed to its users as we have discussed it above. Instead, Wikipedia pages and the encyclopaedia in its entirety are at any one moment simply artefacts of their continuing and continuous content development processes, temporary outcomes which are likely to be revised again soon. It is no more appropriate to describe these artefacts as products than it is to describe a single television image as a complete programme. At the same time, however, in spite of its continuing provision of content over time, Wikipedia content is also not a service similar to broadcast content, since the temporary artefacts of the continuing Wikipedia content development processes can be used in much the same way as the products of traditional encyclopaedia production. Thus, Wikipedia content constitutes a continuing process just as much as, when isolated from the process and thus frozen in time, a product-like artefact. Wikipedia content development itself is therefore neither production nor service provision, then, but a hybrid process which – as it is carried out by users who are also producers – can be described as produsage.

Produsage

Very similar observations to those made in the context of Wikipedia apply also to informational content creation and development processes in a number of other key areas, ranging from open source software development through to multi-user online games. Indeed, it is possible to outline four fundamental characteristics of informational produsage as distinct from industrial production.[1]

Community-Based

Produsage is based on the collaborative engagement of (ideally, large) communities of participants in a shared project. This represents an important shift from industrial production which mainly relies on the existence of dedicated individuals and teams as content developers. Whether in open source software development, citizen journalism, or creative projects, produsage assumes that the community as a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, will be able to contribute more than a closed team of producers, however qualified. This combines the logic of both Eric Raymond’s appeal to the power of eyeballs in open source software development and debugging (Raymond, 2007), and Chris Anderson’s ‘long tail’ of diverse knowledge, abilities, and interests outside of a narrow recognised mainstream of knowledge workers (Anderson, 2006). The success of this approach can be seen, for example, both in the strong performance of open source software over past years, and in the turnaround from the failure of Wikipedia predecessor Nupedia to the success of Wikipedia itself once its operators abandoned their expert-based small-group quality assurance approach Goetz, 2003).

Basing produsage on community does not preclude the participation of corporate or other institutional interests, however – as is obvious from the existence of commercial operators in the open source market (and indeed from the existence of an open source market in the first place). However, to ensure the sustainability of produsage environments requires non-community participants to accept and respect the rules imposed by the community – protracted and significant infringement of these rules is likely to undermine both the organisation’s standing with the community, and even the long-term survival of the community itself.

Fluid Roles

The reliance of produsage on (often unpaid) community involvement also creates the necessity to allow for a relatively fluid movement of individual produsers between different roles within the community and the produsage project. Such movement is also predicated by the nature of the produser as a hybrid user/producer in themselves, of course. Ideally, produsers in a community of produsage participate as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and knowledges; such participation further changes as current points of focus for the produsage project change. Active content contributors on one aspect of a project may participate in quality assurance processes on another, or may at times act ‘only’ as users (yet returning to active duty as produsers if in the course of their usage they identify the need or potential for further improvement or extension). Indeed, the very act of usage itself may also make an active contribution to the ongoing produsage project, for example where access statistics are gathered and evaluated in order to draw automatic connections between related content items. (In this sense, users of Amazon or Google act as co-produsers of these services even without having chosen to do so, as their usage generates information which helps to further refine the performance of these sites.)

Importantly, then, the community structures upon which produsage is based are usually heterarchical rather than hierarchical – while leaders may exist for aspects of the overall project, or even for the project itself, due to the project’s dependence on the community their power is strictly limited, and their roles may themselves shift as project work continues. Produsage is based in the first instance on collaboration and consensus, and rules are generally enforced by the community rather than by individual leaders. Communities are also highly permeable for newcomers with appropriate skills and interests (as long as they are prepared to accept the community’s overall rules and values).

Again, any offence against these principles of openness and consensus is likely to undermine the standing of the offender in the community, and even the sustainability of the produsage community itself. Community leaders who attempt a too autocratic approach to leadership, or community members who actively work against the established values of the community, are usually ousted very quickly, or (in a number of cases) have led to communities abandoning existing projects to start afresh.

Unfinished Artefacts

As noted above, the artefacts of produsage are no longer products in a traditional, industrial-age sense. Instead, they are thoroughly well suited to an informational age in which distribution is instant and operates on an on-demand, content-pull basis – a model which in the current technological context finds its basis in the database-driven online environments of Web2.0.

Open to the input of users as produsers of content, content artefacts in produsage projects are continually under development, and therefore always unfinished; their development does not follow the discrete versioning and revisioning processes of traditional content production, but instead proceeds along evolutionary, iterative paths (often also involving trial and error processes where new iterations are made available – as alpha or beta versions – for community testing and feedback, and are further revised or even revert back to previous iterations if such testing produces unfavourable results). Content produsage, therefore, is palimpsestic – content artefacts (with their ancillary change histories and community discussions on how further to develop them) resemble the repeatedly overwritten, erased, restored and further overwritten pages of ancient texts which hold both the latest (and most complete) version of the artefact, and the history of examination, discussion, and alteration of the artefact which has led to the present point.

Such artefacts, then, require not so much a different approach by their user – after all, the products of traditional production processes should also be seen as unfinished, temporary approximations of the ultimate goal of content development (whatever it may be), even though industrial producers do their best to avoid this perception of imperfection at least until the next version of their products becomes available. Instead, they simply make visible and accountable the content development processes which have led to the present artefact, enabling the user to review the choices made by the produser community in the process, and inviting them to participate in the continued further development of the artefact. This is an extension of open source philosophy to areas other than software development.

Common Property, Individual Merit

The community-based development of any form of content necessarily requires members of the produsage community to adopt more permissive approaches to legal and moral rights in intellectual property than is the norm in traditional, corporate content production. While content producers by legal default hold copyright in their work, this is not feasible for content produsers, who after all are participating in a collaborative, ongoing, and iterative process of content development which explicitly requires its participants to work on the content already contributed by their predecessors.

In other words, a palimpsest cannot be created on the basis of existing, standard copyright law, unless extensive permissions for re-use and redevelopment are granted by each participant. In most produsage environments, such permissions are instead handled on a generic basis through the adoption of open source- or creative commons-based licence schemes which explicitly allow the unlimited use, development, and further alteration of each user’s individual contribution to the communal project. Often, contributors in such environments give away the rights to non-commercial use of their intellectual property, yet retain the rights to direct commercial exploitation, and the right to be attributed as the originator of a specific contribution.

As we will see, such schemes are not in place in all environments which could otherwise be said to operate under the principles of produsage, however. In some environments, intellectual property rights remain largely ignored, raising a risk of potential legal action in the future; in others, the operators of the produsage environment have instituted blanket licence agreements which explicitly or implicitly require participants to sign away their rights well beyond what is required for produsage itself, thus opening a pathway to the commercial exploitation of intellectual property without remunerating or otherwise acknowledging the produsers who contributed to it. Neither model is likely to be sustainable in the long term, and Second Life operator Linden Lab’s decision to break with standard industry practice in allowing its community to retain copyright over its contributions is a first sign that such issues are beginning to be recognised.

Where intellectual property rights have been sufficiently addressed, on the other hand, the community model generally operates on the basis of merit rather than remuneration: users’ motivation to participate as produsers is found in the community recognition of individual participants (sometimes explicitly calculated in user statistics or ‘karma’ scores) more than in the generation of income through participation in produsage. However, especially in those produsage projects which are by now well-established, recognised contributors have now also managed to generate income from merit by offering their skills and knowledge, as developed through long-time participation and documented by their merit scores, to commercial clients. Where such commercial activity does not otherwise infringe against community rules and values, it should be seen as benign – and indeed, such indirect income from produsage participation can now also be seen to subsidise the produsage communities themselves.

A Produsage Value Chain

In spite of the community-based, open source-inspired principles of produsage, the ability to develop commercial activity around produsage projects is nonetheless likely to be an important factor in ensuring the long-term viability of such projects. Indeed, the emergence of an open source software industry even in spite of the fact that open source is of course freely available to users and developers clearly shows that produsage and commercial activity are by no means mutually exclusive; at the same time, however, the nature of possible commercial activity will necessarily also depend on the object of the specific produsage project. It is useful, therefore, to examine the produsage ‘value chain’ once again in some more detail. In the first instance, it is important to distinguish between the value chain as it may be experienced by the individual produser, and a value chain which recognises the produsage environment as a whole. As noted above, for the individual participant, the traditional value chain of producer-distributor-consumer has condensed to a singular point, the produser, interacting with and potentially enhancing existing content (fig. 2). A multitude of these individual produsers, however, combine to drive the overall produsage process, interacting with one another in fluid roles as described in the previous section; for this overall process, a different value chain with a variety of potential inputs into and outputs from the produsage environment can be described (fig. 3). This value ‘chain’ does not necessarily substitute directly for the traditional production value chain; indeed, in some cases its internal processes may well be sufficient to sustain the produsage community without a need for the existence of prior or subsequent links in the chain at all.

In the first place, then, produsage takes place simply and obviously within the produsage environment itself, according to the principles outlined in the preceding section. This describes the inner workings of the Wikipedia as much as it does the open source software development communities from Linux to Firefox, the community discussions, deliberations, and publications of Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and many sections of the blogosphere (Bruns, 2005), or even the collaborative storytelling and virtual reality development of many multi-user online gamespaces.

At the same time, however, such produsage environments are also embedded in a wider context of intellectual and commercial (including non-profit) activity: some projects build upon existing intellectual property (such as original content, or the technological framework for their produsage spaces), and from this basis generate intellectual property of their own, adding value to these original inputs. Other projects generate content from scratch, which can itself be directly or indirectly commercialised, and may even give rise to further value-add produsage projects (and between these two points lies a continuum of mixed approaches).

Figure 3. The Produsage Value ‘Chain’

Value-Adding Produsage Projects

Even the Wikipedia is based in part on legacy encyclopaedia content from the late 19th and early 20th century which had already fallen into the public domain; to the extent that its participants have extended and updated such content even Wikipedia could be said to perform a value-adding function. However, better examples of produsage as value-addition can be found in a number of other cases. So, for example, some 90% of content in The Sims has been produced by its users, rather than by game publisher Maxis (Herz, 2005) – this can be seen as a clear instance of produsers adding a significant amount of value to the underlying Sims game platform, which without such produser activity indeed would likely have been far less successful.

A further example is provided by NowPublic, which enables its users to highlight news articles from anywhere on the Web which are then listed, with user commentary, keyword tags, and other additions, on its own pages (nowpublic.com, 2007). One of the most distinctive features of the site could be described as ‘citizen photojournalism’ functionality: here, users extend highlighted articles by adding explanative photo, audio, and video galleries related to the topic of the articles. Indeed, the content for such galleries is in good part also drawn from produsage environments including Flickr and YouTube, and so NowPublic’s activity could be seen as adding value to each of the content sources it combines and interweaves on its own pages.

What remains questionable in this context, however, is the extent to which such value addition is desired by the original content sources, or is indeed legal. While clearly invited by The Sims producer Maxis, in the case of NowPublic the situation is less obvious, and the site may well operate in a legal grey area at least according to some applicable legislative frameworks – its addition of value to content from produsage environments like Flickr may be acceptable under the content licences applied to their content by Flickr participants, but the same may well not be true where the site deals with articles from the mainstream (online) media.

Value Creation and Commercialisation

Where produsage projects rely solely on the content created by their own participants, without prior input from commercial or other sources, such considerations clearly do not arise. However, here the question of how the outputs of produsage projects are further utilised, and potentially even commercialised, gains greater importance. As examples from Wikipedia to open source software to the collaborative, folksonomic Web filter del.icio.us show, produsage projects can generate significant and valuable intellectual property in their own right. Such material remains subject to the content licences employed during its development, of course, but this does not necessarily preclude it from being commercially exploited.

While some such exploitation is benign, and may even lead to greater exposure for the produsage project, and hence to subsequent growth of the community in numbers and abilities, the extent to which such exploitation is compatible with the underlying characteristics and principles of produsage as outlined in previous sections will ultimately determine its impact on the produsage community and project. Produsers must continue to feel in control of their participation, and in control as participants in the wider community; any perception of undue influence of commercial interests on the produsage project is likely to undermine it.

Exploiting Produsage

In an extension and partial reconfiguration of JC Herz’s work on The Sims (Herz, 2005), it is possible to identify a number of key models for the commercial (including non-profit) engagement with produsage environments. Each model necessarily exists in a number of variations to account for the specific characteristics of individual produsage communities, but important lessons can nonetheless be learnt from each approach. Any further development and proliferation of produsage approaches across all fields of information and knowledge production will necessarily require commercial organisations to choose amongst these models of engagement – and the future development of produsage ultimately depends to significant extent on choices which are in keeping with the underlying principles of produsage as we have encountered them here.

Harnessing the Hive

While Herz describes The Sims as a case of ‘harnessing the hive’ (Herz, 2005), more appropriate examples for this form of utilising of produsage may be found elsewhere. Overall, it describes the non-commercial or commercial use of produsage artefacts by organisations inside and outside the produsage community, while respecting applicable content licences and cooperating with the community.

Because of the care for community concerns implied in this description, such harnessing of the produsage ‘hive mind’ is usually benign in nature; it includes, for example, the increasing utilisation of Linux and other open source software in mission-critical environments. Organisations engaged in such projects often also interface with the produsage community directly, even becoming (or allowing individual employees to become) part of the community themselves.

The reciprocal nature of such arrangements therefore tends to benefit both community and company. In some cases, indeed, organisations may even find that due to the strong performance of produsage communities as content producers, their own core business slides further towards the provision of services rather than of products; this has been observed for example by software companies operating increasingly with open source software (here, installation, maintenance, and customisation services often become more lucrative options than the development of proprietary software in competition with open source packages). A related example can be found in the comparison of the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia, with Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. – any opening out of the Britannica editorial process to the participation of users as produsers would likely also lead to a gradual shift of that company’s core business away from the distribution of contents in various physical and digital formats, and towards the provision of an online space for produsage, much as is already the case with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Harvesting the Hive

Closely related to the idea of harnessing the hive is the process of harvesting it: here, the content developed by produsers is collected by a commercial organisation in order to distribute it further to non-participants in the produsage environment. Such approaches are found for example where companies such as Red Hat bundle a number of open source projects for distribution on CD- or DVD-ROM, or where content from the Wikipedia or other collaborative knowledge management sites is gathered for topical information packages in online or offline versions. In this approach, produsage is used to replace the production stage of traditional industrial value chains.

Pace Herz, The Sims can also be included in this category, to the extent that Maxis selects the best of user-contributed content for games extension packs or related products. Similarly, the activities of NowPublic which we have described above can clearly be seen as a form of harvesting the hive (even though this harvesting process is itself again reliant on produser labour). The process of harvesting almost always constitutes an activity which adds value to the artefacts of produsage, often through the very process of harvesting and ordering them for further distribution outside the original produsage environment.

However, a consideration of applicable content licences and any other conditions for content re-use established by the originating produsage community becomes crucial here, as well as – beyond such explicit conditions – of their moral rights and of the ethics of content re-use. So, for example, many common content licences in produsage environments preclude commercial utilisation without express permission from the copyright holders; while an argument can be made that, if sold at low cost, ‘best of’ compilations of prodused content raise revenue not from the content itself, but only from the service of packaging content in a convenient format, questions over the acceptability of such justifications remain especially if the resulting product is distributed in large numbers.

Any sense that their moral and legal rights are systematically infringed, however, is likely to lead participants in produsage projects to be less enthusiastic about their participation, and may well undermine the projects overall – harvesters should therefore take great care to work with the community as much as they are working with the community’s content.

Harbouring the Hive

While entirely decentralised or itinerant produsage communities do exist (the blogosphere itself can be seen as engaged in produsage, for example; open source software projects may utilise multiple community sites to organise their work), many if not most produsage projects depend on the existence of a central space for community coordination and engagement, and for the development and display of its artefacts. Depending in part on what form of content is the object of the produsage process, and in part on the technology used for the produsage environment, such spaces frequently cannot be interchanged without causing massive disruption to produsage community and project itself; this bestows a significant deal of responsibility and power on the operators of the environment, or in other words, on the entities harbouring the hive.

So, although the wiki system and even the current content of the Wikipedia are readily available to any Web user, for example, enabling them to set up a mirror Wikipedia site virtually within minutes, to do so would do nothing to duplicate the community of Wikipedia produsers as well – and without that community, any mirror site would remain only a rapidly outdated snapshot of the encyclopaedia at a random moment in time. By contrast, while it is conceivable – perhaps even likely – that competitors to Flickr and YouTube will offer extended features and additional tools, the amount of content stored on such sites by many users will serve as a strong deterrent against moving to a rival site: to move hundreds of images and gigabytes of videos between such sites would consume a significant amount of time and effort. Other produsage projects have a lighter content footprint, and more mobile communities, but even here, the disruption caused by a change in location may be considerable.

Hijacking the Hive

Harbouring the hive is therefore a critical activity, and produsers (and produser communities) would be well-advised to check closely the credentials and track record of any potential harbouring service. Where such harbouring services abuse the trust placed in them, we may describe them as hijacking the hive: exploiting the lock-in of content and/or community to extract a continuing rent of one form or another.

Such tendencies were seen by some for example in recent controversies surrounding the YouTube end-user licence agreement (EULA), which appeared to grant YouTube the rights to commercially exploit the content uploaded by its users, without a need for remuneration (Jardin, 2006); they exist in an even more pronounced fashion in the realm of multi-user online gaming. While many or most recent games have moved away from the provision of strong quest-based narratives and instead allow user communities to produse their own narrative content, users generally do not gain any benefits from this shift – instead, while their labour has thus become even more central to the success of the game, they continue to have to pay a monthly subscription fee for the privilege to contribute such unpaid labour. Further, the EULAs of some games also prevent users to on-sell the ‘tangible’ (in the realm of the game) outcomes of their labour through third-party services like eBay (Sandoval, 2000).

The logic of this approach is obvious, then: produsers are drawn into the produsage hive by the quality of content and community, and develop strong relationships with both, investing significant amounts of labour in their maintenance; this investment is hijacked by the provider of the hive space by locking it into that specific space, enabling the provider to extract continuing access fees from the produser community. Though perhaps legally acceptable, the morality of this model must be questioned in strong terms.

Pathways to Produsage

In the face of such potential disruption from deliberate exploitation or misunderstood attention, then, it becomes particularly important to examine some of the key issues for produsage, and to outline what are the most important conventions to be observed by produsers, produsage communities, and those who engage with them (possibly for commercial or other gain) from the outside.

To begin with, it is particularly important for organisations working with produsage communities to understand and respect the characteristics, principles, and conventions which apply to produsage processes, as they have been outlined here. While some of the fundamental aspects of produsage make short-term exploitation of produsage processes possible and perhaps even attractive and lucrative, it is important to understand that to engage in such actions must eventually have negative consequences in the long term – both for produsage communities and content, which are discouraged and undermined by such interference, and for the offending parties themselves, whose actions are likely to become well known throughout produsage communities (quick damage control by the likes of Microsoft, Sony, and YouTube in response to various controversies with their produsage communities is instructive here).

But produsage communities themselves must also strive to better understand the processes by which they operate, and by which they generate content. While open source has begun to theorise its software development processes, Wikipedia has developed detailed guidelines on content creation and editing, and a number of others have instituted strong intellectual property management mechanisms, such normative projects have yet to be generalised across the wider realm of produsage environments; especially in more recent produsage projects, the very act of participation in collaborative content creation remains critically under-theorised.

This, then, is also a crucial task for individual produsers themselves, who must develop a better understanding of what, how, and why they contribute as individuals to produsage projects, as well as of how and why such projects operate on a larger scale. The growth of Web2.0 as a general model will certainly help generate a broader technical understanding of how Web-based produsage environments work, and those produsers who are already members of Generation C are likely to have a working understanding of the motivations for Web2.0 and produsage environments in opposition or as an alternative to Web1.0 and traditional industrial content production. However, if communal produsage is indeed seen as a worthy alternative to industrial production, the aim must be to encourage more participants to become deliberate – not just accidental – members of Generation C. (The very question of whether produsage should be encouraged, and whether participation in produsage environments creates tangible beneficial outcomes both for the community at large and for individual participants, also remains open for debate, of course: however, convincing arguments from both social – Lessig (2002), Jenkins (2006) – and economic perspectives – Benkler (2006), von Hippel (2005) – which indicate the benefits of engagement in produsage are now readily available.)

Educating Produsers

Much as they have played a crucial role in preparing citizens for their participation in the post-industrial economy by developing their technology and information literacy skills, then, educational institutions must now also take up the challenge of developing produsage skills. This requires a focus on what can be described as the C4C (Bruns et al, 2005): the capacities of graduates to be

• creative – gaining the ability to act as collaborative co-creators in flexible roles, participating as one amongst a number of creative produsers rather than as a self-sufficient creative producer;
• collaborative – being able to collaborate effectively and understand the implications and consequences of collaboration;
• critical – maintaining a critical stance both towards potential collaborators and their work as well as towards one’s own creative and collaborative abilities and existing work portfolio;
• communicative – engaging in effective and successful communication between produsage participants, and of ideas generated in the exercise of one’s capacities as a produser.

To develop such capacities in their graduates, educators and educational institutions must necessarily themselves embrace produsage, for example by simulating real-life produsage environments or by participating in existing produsage projects. (In this context it is worth noting that produsage-style educational projects need not run into the same problems with rewarding contributions and avoiding freeloading as have past forms of student group work: some of the key tools of produsage in online environments, such as the wiki, also provide detailed information on the contributions made by each student, enabling a very direct assessment of individual work even within a collaborative context; see (Bruns and Humphreys, 2005) for a practical example. This, of course, is simply a reflection of the ‘common property, individual merit’ principle outlined above: that principle necessarily requires produsage environments to provide the means of assessing the merit of individual contributions and contributors, and wiki spaces, for example, do so by providing page edit histories which make visible the individual contribution of each produser.)

Beyond this, and as a further extension of this approach, it may also be necessary to investigate the potential for a reconfiguration of education itself along more strongly produsage-based lines – in essence, transforming the overall system from teacher-led and teacher-generated to user-led and user-generated education (see Bruns (2007) for a more extended discussion of this question).

On a smaller scale, produser education must also address a number of other, more specific aspects of produsage processes. Chief amongst these is the need to provide graduates with a strong and nuanced understanding of intellectual property regimes: graduates must be able to both track and where necessary defend their own intellectual property, and respect the intellectual property of others, as these become part of larger produsage projects. They must also be able to identify and understand the overall intellectual property schemes (if any) which are applied to the content collaboratively developed by produsage communities, and be able to make an informed choice on what content licencing schemes to choose for their own work.

Intellectual Property

The question of intellectual property also raises more fundamental problems, however. Modelled on physical property, intellectual property legislation has long struggled to encompass digital content which does not obey the laws of traditional physics (its use is non-exclusive, and it is not depleted through consumption, for example); many copyright amendments, and indeed the alternative licencing schemes of open source and creative commons (amongst others) have been developed to address such problems.

However, for the most part, copyright law also continues to assume the existence of a single originator of the work; where copyright content is the result of a collaborative effort, common solutions are the assignation of all contributors’ rights to a single representative entity (such as corporate holdings or royalty collection agencies), or the institution of licence contract schemes which grow in complexity proportional to the number of contributors. Copyright in a Western legal framework has no means to deal with truly communal content ownership (in Australia, this has been demonstrated repeatedly also by cases dealing with the communal ownership of ancestral designs by indigenous groups, for example).

Key to this problem is an equation of intellectual property with intellectual products in copyright law. The idea of content as a product no longer applies in the context of produsage, however, as we have seen here – it may therefore be necessary to develop a fundamentally different form of intellectual property legislation able to cope with collaboratively prodused, always unfinished, evolving and palimpsestic content. Such legislation would need to be able to account for and balance the rights of individual contributors and those of the overall community, assigning for example the right to attribution to individuals while empowering the community in toto to prevent or legally respond to the unauthorised exploitation of its work.

Produsing Democracy

The balancing of individual and community rights in such a revised model of intellectual property legislation has overtones of the balancing of individual and societal interests in democratic systems of governance, too. Indeed, this points to the potential which produsage may have to revitalise democratic processes overall.

The decline of popular participation in Western democracies has been long lamented. As we have seen here, on the other hand, public participation in other collaborative projects is growing, and it is possible that this newfound enthusiasm for making an active contribution to the common good can also translate to a reinvigoration of political processes. However, this is likely to lead to substantial changes to those processes as well.

A first glimpse of such changes may have been seen in the campaign of Democrat candidate Howard Dean in the 2004 U.S. primaries: Dean managed to generate a significant public following through his blog campaign, with supporters produsing the campaign as much as media advisors producing it. (Dean’s subsequent demise also demonstrates the strong hold which industrial production-style political models still exercise over U.S. politics, however.) Other social movements, from the world-wide opposition to the war in Iraq to the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign, are now similarly harnessing and harvesting the produsage hive, and some suggest that we are on the brink of the emergence of a new ‘collective intelligence’ enabling the introduction of more direct-democratic models [27]. As Pierre Lévy describes it, this could constitute a shift

from democracy (from the Greek démos, people, and cratein, to command) to a state of demodynamics (Greek dunamis, force, strength). Demodynamics is based on molecular politics. It comes into being from the cycle of listening, expression, evaluation, organization, lateral connection, and emerging vision. … Demodynamics [implies] a strong people, one perpetually engaged in the process of self-knowing and self-creation, a people in labor, a people yet to come. (Lévy, 1997: 88)

This is thus a people, as we might say, continually re-produsing themselves and their democratic environment. Even in the absence of truly fundamental changes in the immediate future, however, it is very much possible to suggest that like other areas dealing with content and ideas, politics too is shifting from an industrial production to an informational produsage model. In the age of mass media power, the political system was organised along industrial production lines: politicians, media advisors, and journalists produced the content of politics, which was distributed to the masses by way of the media. In spite of standard rhetoric, audiences as consumers of political content had little role other than to consume – much as in other forms of industrial production, the feedback loop back to the producers of politics was relatively poorly formed.

This has changed with the rise of networked, peer-to-peer media, however, which have enabled the consumers of politics to respond to the producers at an unprecedented degree. As this trend continues and the balance between mass and networked media shifts further in favour of citizens, it is increasingly likely that the traditional model of politics is no longer sustainable. Instead, citizens now have a chance to claim a greater share of participation – they have a renewed chance to become active participants in the produsage of democracy.

Author’s Biography

Dr Axel Bruns is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the currently paradigm shift towards user-led forms of content production which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. His new book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage will be published by Peter Lang in February 2008. More information about the book and other work can be found on Bruns’s Website at http://snurb.info/

Note

[1] These characteristics represent a further extension and clarification of the key characteristics first outlined in Bruns (2006).
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References

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In the early 1990s, the very term ‘digital’ was novel. Yet over the past several decades it is apparent that applications and innovations in e-mail, the Internet, mobile media, complex data systems and computational practice, video games and networking software have become an essential and dynamic part of contemporary art and culture. Increasingly, research in new media (and ‘newer’ new media) interprets the arrival of these emergent forms, addressing the sometimes unexpected social, cultural and aesthetic uses and implications of developing digital technologies and interfaces.

The eleven papers presented here from the perthDAC (Digital Arts and Culture) 2007 conference offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on the future of digital media art and culture, speculating on recent trends and developments, presenting research outcomes, describing works in progress, or documenting histories and challenging existing paradigms of digital media use, creation and perception. They range in topic from the participatory culture of Web 2.0, video art and electronic literature, biological art and emerging art practices in online environments, to the compound relation between art, data and computation, the gendered poetics of game space and evolving character of game culture.

In his paper Axel Bruns identifies a unique type of media experience to emerge from the user-led Web 2.0 environment – that of produsage. As he insightfully notes, the boundaries between media producers and consumers are currently breaking down to enable ‘the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement’. Jim Bizzocchi’s paper also considers an emergent aesthetic and cultural phenomenon – ambient video – which includes video art works and living video paintings that reside on buildings, the walls of our homes and offices, and in an increasingly array of public spaces. Such artworks, he argues, play ‘in the background of our lives’, yet paradoxically they must be at-the-ready to reward a glance or more sustained contemplative gaze; Bizzocchi reflects upon the creative and receptive implications of such a phenomenon. The artistic potential of online virtual environments such as Second Life is the topic of Caroline McCaw’s paper; she adopts her own Second Life avatar in a deep engagement with the work and ideas of DC Spensley (aka Dancoyote Antonelli in Second Life). In discussing the relation between this new aesthetic space and the values and methods of traditional art practices and histories, McCaw suggests that at the very least emerging art practices in online environments invite us to critically examine ‘the way we think and talk about art’.

Simon Penny examines the ‘theoretical crisis’ that exists at the nexus of computational technologies and artistic endeavour, where the rationalist Cartesian values of the hardware/software binary are antagonistic to the creative aims of the artist. He argues convincingly that such a crisis ‘demands the development of a critical technical practice’. The legacy of Cartesian dualism embedded in our understanding and interpretation of language, computer code and the physical world is also the focus of Kenneth Knoespel and Jichen Zhu’s paper. They suggest that the notion of ‘continuous materiality’ can effectively capture the complexity of the relation between materiality and immateriality, and they effectively deploy this idea through the diagrammatics and design morphology of architectural practice. On a connected yet divergent theme, Fox Harrell makes the case that when computational systems are made to intentionally and critically engage with cultural values and practices – for example, in the representation and manipulation of semantic content – new, invigorated and expressive computing practices can result. In this context he describes the GRIOT platform which implements interactive and generative narratives ‘deeply informed by African diasporic traditions’. In ‘Art Against Information’, Mitchell Whitelaw examines the way in which artistic practice might break away from the representation of information; he suggests that data art can effectively work to separate ‘information’ and ‘data’, to create ‘figures of data as unmediated, immanent, material and underdetermined’, and speaks of the importance of critically reflecting on the potential of such practices.

Scott Rettberg explores the legacy of the Dadaist avant-garde upon contemporary new media artists and digital writers, arguing that there is a close correlation between Dada ‘anti-art’ practice and the methods deployed by new media artists and digital/electronic writers. Such an association, Rettberg claims, can be used to critically contextualise the properties and artifacts of contemporary new media literature. Brian Degger considers another arena of cutting edge artistic practice, the sometimes controversial arena of mixed reality and biological arts which are deeply enmeshed in technoscientific and biotechnological innovation and experimentation; in his paper he deliberates upon issues of access, affordability and technology transfer through the work of SymbioticA, Blast Theory and FoAM.

Finally, two of the contributions chosen for this special issue attend to aspects of computer game culture and game space. In ‘A Game of One’s Own’ Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie and Celia Pearce critique the predominantly male sensibility of game space in first-person shooters and massively multiplayer games. Via feminist writings and literature, contemporary game studies and Bachelard’s theory, they explore the possibility of rethinking and re/degendering the spatial poetics and cognitive models at work within the ‘virtual playgrounds’ of computer games. In his article Jaakko Suominen turns to an interesting emergent phenomenon in game culture – that of retrogaming. Retrogaming can include the appropriation or remediation of older games, devices and applications into present-day games, or more broadly the nostalgic collection and playing of first and second generation games and consoles. Suominen investigates both the increasing popularity of such practices, and the way in which the culture and content of retrogaming becomes incorporated into the latest game devices and gameplay.

We hope that you find this to be both a thought-provoking collection and a worthwhile sampling of the perthDAC 2007 conference.

Andrew Hutchison (Curtin University, Western Australia) and Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University, Western Australia)