Note: This text was created for a special project in which I participated for several months. Now that the content had been exposed elsewhere, I thought it would be no longer a classified one. Nevertheless, the project is still referred to as XXX here.
What in the end makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says ... but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.
---Walter Benjamin
Traditional public spaces (city squares, plazas, streets and boulevards) nowadays are undergoing profound changes.
When public spaces first emerged, city dwellers stay and dedicate a substantial part of their time socializing. Today under the warning of “no loitering” everyone (with the notable exception of the homeless people and street artists, whose presence is considered illegal and need special permit) is constantly in motion and can only be briefly mobilized by public media event.
In former public spaces, communications rely on natural means (face-to-face conversation, body contact, collective activities like dance and public speech etc.) and focus on oral and body language. The new public space features intensive visual information and almost completely discards the use of other languages. As Paul Virilio pointed out, the public space has yielded its place to public image.
Formerly, the model of communication is extremely distributive and each participant is able to contribute to the construction of a public experience. Now the prevailing model is mass participation under highly centralized broadcasting from a few specialized media giants. Individual participation is reduced to passive, voyeuristic observation.
Finally, the traditional corporeal public space is supported by concrete surroundings (cathedral, plaza, equestrian statue, monument, café, department store, etc.) and enveloped by stone façades, frescoes, stained glasses and marble columns. The new public space dematerializes this imagery of permanence and substitutes it with an ephemerality that is pervasive in 21st century urbanism. The new public space with its ever flashing media architecture constructs a virtual space where physical proximity yields to specifically channeled modes of communication through mobile devices.
All the changes listed above are partly brought by and in their turn contribute to the emergence of screens. We know that the last two centuries have been identified as the epoch of images. But never has the dominance of images over our culture been manifested clearer until in the last two decades public screens proliferate in big cities around the world. Omnipresent and omnipotent in a contemporary society that is ours, screen has become the new symbol of urbanism, the definite characteristic of a futuristic cityscape and the most reinvigorating factor towards a new form of public space.
The history of screen presence in modern city can be traced by to 150 years ago, where the luminous effect created by large scale electric lighting can be understood as a forerunner in some respects to the large screen. The screen technologies in modernity, particularly the way they have been integrated into the spatial dynamics of the modern city, has been dominated by the production of new forms of spectacle on the one hand, and new forms of urban policing and surveillance on the other. Between spectacle and surveillance, the modern city dwellers struggle to navigate in a media-architecture complex and negotiate with its hybrid contents: stock quotes, news headlines, commercials, and, possibly, some ambiguous “artistic” footage. This struggle with the mediatized production of urban space has become the constitutive frame for a new mode of social experience, characterized by a virtual space that has been stripped of inherent qualities such as stable dimensions and appearances and accordingly, stable social meanings. It is meant to be experienced as constantly shifting, variable and contingent, slicing open the visual horizon not so much with its meager content, but its immense spatial presence and the environmental effect generated by this presence.
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In the following we list ten public screen projects that are representative for this new digital aesthetics. By briefly describing each one of them, we aim to explain how these various approaches effectively delineate the contour of the future of urban screen uses and how we position ourselves in this blueprint.
The Fremont Experience (Las Vegas) is a huge arched LED screen capable of showing specifically designed digital footages. What makes this experience singular is that it combines the traditional spectacular of cinema and the power of immersive lightshow (i.e. disco). FE represents a digitized theater space where technology and narrative conventions dictate and passive participation prevails.
The 59th minute (Time Square, NYC), Facsimile (Moscone Center, San Francisco), Sleepwalker (MOMA, NYC) and People in Motion (Centraal Station, Amsterdam) can be categorized as television in the streets or mediatized architecture. Regardless of the content—one minute of art or sixty minutes of art—the reaction of the spectator is limited to stare & go. Sharing the same passiveness (public voyeurism), this category differs mainly from the previous one by its business model (free with commercials, or only temporary installation) and technological implementation.
Body Movies (Rotterdam), City Wall (Helsinki), Touchme are different projects since the active participation here plays a more importance role than the technology itself and body becomes the new keyword. In all instances, the spectators are engaged in a playful act that will imprint their personal images or presences to an otherwise impersonal public space.
Untitled 5 (Camille Utterback), Inter/ Face (David Rockeby) and Raffi (Jean-Claude Bustros) are projects where the screen (or the system behind them) responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibition space. Both systems feature complex yet completely algorithmic visual responses that acknowledge the presence of the spectator.
Slowly Turning Narrative (Bill Viola) explores the possibility of having both the screen the image move. This installation does not track the movement of the spectator but does acknowledge his presence by constructing a space where different viewing positions can produce different results. Also, the explicit presence of mirror incorporates the image of the spectator into the narrative (can be better done by a camera feed).
Obviously, the diversity of these projects shows that screen is not a mere content provider, commercial or otherwise, but rather, exemplifies an ideal format of the digital visual aesthetics. For if moving pictures (cinema and television, particularly) have been traditionally exclusively voyeuristic and rely heavily on narrative continuity, the emergence of immersive and participatory experience explorer new possibilities of visual communication and extend the artwork towards new forms of social relationships generated from its very presence.
The XXX project is conceived to reflect our current understanding of the key issues concerning the redefinition of art exhibition in public spaces, interactive narration and the body as the new star in electronic art. We expand the filmic experience beyond the boundary of cinema spectatorship into interactive art installation in public space. We offer our insights in regard to how screen can be used to construct not only a new visual experience, but a new form of social interaction.
In today’s art world, artists are experts in mysterious matters, who speak a different language that the public do not immediately understand. Hence in museums and art galleries the public are identified as "audience" or "visitor". They are not allowed to do anything by themselves other than marveling at the luminous wonder in front of them. By entering in to the museum or art gallery, the spectator signs an understated agreement that he or she will from now on give up his or her identity/individuality to become an anonymous “spectator”, who will not accomplish the artwork but instead verify its finished status.
What makes an artwork what it is, as perceived by many already, is not some concrete proof that the art work has “artistic value”, but rather the “concrete” fact that it is entrusted to places identified with art. In other words, the capacity to appreciate an artwork is substituted by a willingness to accept the judgment of art historians, art dealers and museum curators. They identify what is art before us and for us.
What we propose here is a direct and firsthand experience in front of the artwork. We believe that an artwork can be associated with places where the spectator feels more at ease, where he or she frequently pass by in a daily basis. We also believe that such a strategic placement of the artwork will serve its audience with a chance of tapping into the creativity of everyday life without ever stepping out of its routine (instead of encouraging people to go to the museum, you can just say, take the metro more often!)
Furthermore, the XXX provides the participator a possibility to play with and invest feeling in external images of the self. It generates its value from the recognition that it evokes from its spectator, from the narrative it helps the spectator to construct out of his or her own experience and individuality. Unlike many other interactive installations, where the spectator is enticed to respond but ultimately treated as a “machine” that must react in an expected way, the interactivity we propose is not limited to a matter of making choices from a predictable menu, but rather, opens up a new horizon of invisible mechanisms that are exemplified by the real world. The XXX project reaffirms a traditional stance on narrative by not making the paradigm explicitly presented. Instead of presenting icons on screen, we use motion detection technology that tracks down and analyzes the body movement. Here the interactivity relies on an interpretation layer that is hidden in the system, which the spectator is tempted to figure out, but is not always able to do so. In other words, we make the medium visible, not its algorithm.
Ultimately, contrary to most of the artwork which tend to adopt a visual appearance that provokes unfamiliarity and hence shock, we present an artwork whose shape is extremely familiar to everyone—the door. Due to its frequent presence the xxx has been neglected and rendered invisible. Yet it demands to be seen, and only allows passage on the condition that it be touched. As an object with a vast malicious potential, it forces passersby to observe a complicated ritual of gestures and etiquette. Complicated as it is, the ritual of accessing a xxx needs not to be introduced. The action prescribed by the art work (or rather, by the artist) coincident with the audience/visitor’s daily routine. The spectator is not expected to make a radical change in both his/her perception and behavior in order to catch a glimpse of the world presented by the artwork. The artwork avoids in this way a rupture, an interruption, a temporary exclusion or magic escape from the daily act.
"Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated."
-----Siegfried Zielinski[1]
We claim that the XXX project presents an interactive narration. What is an interactive narration? Let us take a brief look at interactivity and how it can be introduced to the artwork.
Interactivity means that the interrelations between entities have the potential to be realized. In a very broad sense, interactivity is the sustaining forces behind the structures of life. When interactivity is involved, an artwork is no longer an extraterrestrial object bearing mythological or religious origins, or to be solely understood as the expression of the artist’s inner creativity, but instead becomes an intrinsically dynamic process where the spectating process is taken into account and new genres of social relationships are formed. In many ways, interactive new media allow us to suspend existing cultural figurations of the self (race, class, and gender) in order to forge new cultural forms, new politics of universal address that have the potential to change the position of existing groups in unforeseeable ways.
If an artwork in the classic period bears all the traces (agony and ecstasy) of a struggle between the artist and his medium, modern art shifts to a dialogue between the artwork and its audience. Interactivity becomes a fundamental aspect of art in the modern time for it acknowledges the presence of the spectator; it enables the medium to see the human form in front of the artwork and, by this very gesture, makes the spectator sees the medium.
In a conventional interactive narration scenario, the spectator is often explicitly asked to change the course of the narration. This is done by menu style choice making. Most often, the complex dynamic mechanism of the real world (i.e. do you love me?) is stripped down to a simple choice of “yes or no.” If in “reality” our concepts, models and abstractions are always projected onto a complicated reality that never fully yields to our logic, simulated experiences, on the other hand, are built up from models that we have ourselves defined or already understand. By making the choice explicit, the system denies itself all possible subtleties. And all possibilities will be exhausted after a few tries—the branching structure becomes so clear and limited that the narration is deprived of its mysterious openness and exposed as a closed system. Finally, the possible interruptive points where a choice can be made are also problematic—too many interruptions will make the narration losing its pace, and too few would not induce significant variance...
Instead of burdening themselves with the tedious task of making meaning out of the sequences, the creator of interactive narration has another option: mask the input and leave the meaning-construction job to the spectator. The narration we present in the XXX project is by nature fragmentary. It is so because it is conceived for a circumstance that is totally different than the movie theater where we devote our full attention for a substantial period of time. Apparently, we do less in front of a television set, and even less when we encounter a screen on street. Under such a circumstance, the amount of time and attention that can be allocated to any certain image is limited. It is impossible, for any passerby, to conceive a narrative continuity out of the traditional way of sequencing images and events through a timeline. The medium, therefore, has to adapt to its environment and the narrative has to be divided into its tiniest units (syntagma) which function on repetitive occurrence and autonomous meaning construction.
What is our interface to reality?
--David Rokeby
Interactivity is essentially reflexive. Yet in contrast to the existent mode of contemplative reflexivity, a truly interactive installation actually prohibits passive contemplation and provokes active participation. What interactivity signifies for art is, then, more substantial than most people are willing to believe: it is more than an interesting feature that you can add to the artwork, rather, it radically changes the traditional scenario of passive spectatorship.
If the act of looking can be interpreted as light projected on the retina, watching images on the screen, then, involves a double projection (or even a triple, if we regard the image recognition an electro-chemical ‘projection’ onto the brain). And since we are not able to adjust our eyes to different perspectives and focuses (as we can in real world), we are not in control of our vision—our eyes are just a pair of passive screens absorbing whatever that is projected onto them. Likewise, if the screen is not able to change the image (and narration) projected onto it according to the eyes that behold, then the screen is also reduced to a state of absolute passiveness.
In our new spectatorship scenario, instead of the eyes, the body emerges as the counterpart of the display device (screen). The body emerges from its traditional role of absolute invisibility and absolute indifference to the cynosure—what the screen acknowledges is not the eyes, but the body--while the eye remains to be a passive absorber of visual information, the body is to be meticulously tracked down and analyzed. This drastic change has made the public media, hitherto merely a passive and consuming event, taking off with new directions.
In order to explain why we consider the involvement of body in a visual event radical, let us examine briefly the trajectory of visual communication for the last century. Throughout the century, the constant increase of representational images has permanently changed its receptor’s perception of the world. In the beginning of the century, even for a hardcore filmgoer, the exposure to moving pictures is far from enough to interfere with the real world experience. But the advent of television and computer has made a steady progress in raising the average time spent on electronically produced images. Today it is not unheard of that a person can spend a major part of his/her daily life in an entirely artificial world, participating in video-conferences at work, seeing movies at theaters, watching news, TV shows and playing video games at home. The contact with real world, in a sense, becomes brief episodes interspersed between these major media events. More interestingly, even in these already brief entr’actes, we seek the company of images. Not only do we feel more comfortable with the constant display of images (watching TV while preparing or eating dinner), we seem to understand the world better through images, through the way they capture and manipulate reality. And we feel/fear that we might lose the contact with the real world if we turn our eyes away from the images. If, in the future, we are provided with a possibility to be completely surrounded by a world represented other than presented, would we prefer former to the latter?
Whether or not the above issue needs to be identified as a problem is debatable. But the way most visual media used to be produced does contain a deficiency. Varied in content as they may be, one assumption persists: it is meant for a voyeuristic consummation. The images provoke emotion and action, but do not register them. The viewing of image distinguishes itself from our daily act in that it is essentially a voyeuristic behavior where actions are not taking consequence. On the one hand, Actions are prohibited, so to speak, since they are unnecessary[2]; on the other hand, there is a perceivable “safe distance” between the image and the viewer so that the viewer will not be held responsible for the action[3]. By contrast, the real world not only provokes actions, but also receives them. Since for the task of survival in a real world, actions need to be taken; and actions need to make an effect. The viewing of images, in this context, can be perceived as having weakened, if not severed, this animal instinctive chain between visual input and physical responses produced by the body. Therefore, the reengagement of body in a new spectator scenario can be perceived as compensating for this undesirable effect and reaffirming the integrity of individual existence.
Another point we try to make in the XXX project is: if indeed the body input has been granted by the available technology, are there more possibilities beyond the already “habitual” playfulness in many interactive installations? Is it possible to make interactivity contribute to a narrative mode that is other than that of the video game? As we have mentioned above, in the XXX project, the way in which body is tracked and responded is not transparent to the spectator. Contrary to what many interactive installations propose—the spectator will play with his/her own image projected in front of him/her—we do not offer anything to play with. We deny the spectator this absolute dominance over the images—even if it is only symbolic—which prevents the true interaction to take place. For if the spectator is able to manipulate, to command the image, all that remains is a matter of coordination. Indeed, the body is engaged. But it is perhaps engaged too much, in a too unnatural fashion. David Rokeby confessed, in his “the construction of experience”, that when he was intensely immersed in his Very Nervous System, he substantially evolved his behavior according the interface of the system:
“I was moving in a completely unusual and unnatural way, full of jerky tense motions which I found both humorous and distressing. In my isolation, rather than developing an interface that understood movement, I’d evolved with the interface, developing a way of moving that the interface understood as I developed the interface itself.”
By defining a way of sensing and a way of acting in an interactive system, the interface defines the “experience of being” for that system. Through their design of the interface, the creators have in large part predefined the user’s “position in the world” while they are interacting with the system. Naturally, when a man engages himself in a similar circumstance and gradually put all the gears in the right place, a sense of empowerment arises. Once again, human being is able to conquer Nature and turn it into a machine that responds to his needs.
The interactivity professed in the XXX project refuses both the absolute passiveness of body under image and the absolute dominance of body over image. It seeks instead a middle point (a healthy one, to be sure) between these two extremes where the interactive experience resembles that of the real world. The interactivity we propose does not change the world, it preserves the world in the age of mass produced electronic images.
[1] Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice).
[2] When an early audience of a western picture draws his gun in front of the image of villain on screen, he is only acting natural. Yet when he realizes that the act is regarded as inappropriate, he withdraws his action and consequently suppresses this specific input-output link under the cognitive context of cinema.
[3] Think, for example, the various masturbatory uses of the image.
