Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

Context Providers:

Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

Edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul,

and Victoria Vesna

First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect,

The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press,

1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Lesley Williams

Typesetting: John Teehan

Index: Silvia Benvenuto

ISBN 978–1–84150–308–0

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Introduction

Part One:

Defining Conditions For Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience

Margot Lovejoy

Missing In Action: Agency and Meaning In Interactive Art

Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken

Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art

Sharon Daniel

Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges

Mary Flanagan

Part Two:

Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production

Christiane Paul

Aesthetics of Information Visualization

Warren Sack

Identity Operated In New Mode: Context and Body/Space/Time

Marina Gržini

Game Engines As Creative Frameworks

Robert F. Nideffer

Mapping the Collective

Sara Diamond

Part Three:

Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios

Victoria Vesna

Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

Anna Munster

Working With Wetware

Ruth G. West

Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications

Ellen K. Levy

Art and Science Research: Active Contexts and Discourses

Jill Scott and Daniel Bisig

Index

Biographies

INTRODUCTION

One of the main goals of this book is to provide context for an understanding of art that uses current technologies as a medium and to examine the multiple contexts that inform conditions of meaning in this medium. Using the term context providers as the title for a book, one cannot avoid invoking the term content provider and its connotations. Rather than setting up an opposition between context and content, this book aims to examine the relationship between the two, and the shifts in meaning that digital technologies may have brought about in understanding the interplay of content and context.

The term content provider had become a catchword in the times of the booming dot com industry, suggesting that the task of cultural producers in general and artists in particular would be to fill technologies with ideas, themes, and meaning. The terminology and concept seemed to suggest a return to a pre-McLuhanite age, ignoring all previous discussions about medium as message and the interconnectedness of form and content. One has to wonder if this seemingly deliberate neglect of previous critical discourse was brought about by the new technologies themselves, which, in their infancy, may have appeared as a mere commercial tool without inherent aesthetic qualities.

It was just a few decades ago that humanity saw the earth in context. Through development of technology, driven by the cold war, we landed on the moon and for the first time saw the planet we live on from a distance, in relation to the universe. This was a televised event, a live transmission that was watched by a record number of people globally. Those of us old enough to remember sat transfixed by the grainy black-and-white images and listened attentively to the broken voice signals. Buckminster Fuller referred to our planet as Spaceship Earth and Marshall McLuhan inspired many with the idea of the global village.

In 1957, roughly a decade before the moon landing and at the height of the cold war, the United States responded to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR) launch of Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DOD) in the United States to establish the lead in science and technology. In 1964, a proposal by the RAND Corporation, the foremost cold war think tank, conceptualized the Internet as a communication network without central authority that would be safe from a nuclear attack. By 1969, four nodes of supercomputers (at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Stanford Research Institute; and the University of Utah) formed an infant network, named ARPA Network (ARPANET) after its Pentagon sponsor. ARPANET was born in the same year Apollo landed on the moon. Telematic and computer culture emerged out of military interests and remain directly connected to it—more than any other art form to date.

Many artists immediately responded to the cultural climate of their time and early on experimented with video Porta-Packs, networks, and satellites. In 1977, Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp in New York and Sharon Grace and Carl Loeffler in San Francisco organized Send/Receive, which employed a communication technology satellite (CTS) and featured a fifteen-hour, two-way interactive transmission between the two cities. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Educational Television Center (Menlo Park, California) organized the world’s first interactive composite image satellite dance performance between performers on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States. The performance included the first satellite feedback dance, a three-location, live-feed composite performance accompanied by flutist Paul Horn playing his time echo. These artists were very consciously striving to create context to expose others to the wonders of connectivity. Of course, this all had been anticipated by earlier generations of artists—the Dadaists, the Futurists, and even the Surrealists. Indeed, many performative and interactive contemporary works can be traced back to conceptualist work (as the authors in this book frequently point out).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the context for artistic creation has again fundamentally changed. The 1990s were a crucial decade for the development of digital art and constituted a digital revolution, delivering an unprecedented amount of affordable computer power and software tools and making computers almost ubiquitous. The World Wide Web took the notion of connectivity to new levels. Media artists started moving into academia. There, many saw biotech and increasingly nanotech as the next space for exploration, and they used labs as an entirely new creative context.

Information usually is of little value if it cannot be contextualized and filtered, and digital technologies are the perfect tool for creating a referential framework that supports these tasks and processes. The way data and information are processed by means of these technologies—particularly within a communications network such as the Internet—again requires a renegotiation of polarities, such as text/context and content/context. As a multilayered informational system that is in constant flux and reorganization, the networked digital world seems to perfectly embody the notion of unstable contexts.

In the networked environment, links make it possible to connect texts and visuals to the contextual network they are embedded in, to visualize the network of references that would normally be separated by physical space. Digital culture is based on the absence of structures that are common in the offline world, which is saturated with hierarchies that do not make much sense online. Offline events, places, or objects situate themselves within a field of relations, most of which are kept out of sight, separated by space. The immediacy of transition that is made possible by hyperlinks erases the perception that we have moved between blocks of information that—in the offline world—would be pages and shelves, or even cities and countries apart. The order of the elements is no longer a reliable indicator of hierarchies. The spatial distance dividing the center from the margin or text from context is subordinated to the temporality of the link.

Context was traditionally understood as subordinate and supplemental. The hyperlinked structure of the Web undermines the distinction between a central text and its supplemental context: without any hierarchical structure, every context is yet another central text or vice versa. Digital media make relations and connections accessible and incorporate what we usually understand as context; they constitute a denatured context, enriching the context even as they contribute to making the very notion of context redundant.

Similar to the interconnectedness of form and content, medium, and message, the relationship between context and content can hardly be set up as a simple dichotomy. At least conceptually, content provides context for a related thematic area, and every context can become content, depending on the thematic lens under which it is examined.

Reading Context

At least since the 1960s, critical theory in the humanities has thoroughly analyzed the relationship between text and context. Deconstruction and poststructural theories, in particular, have profoundly influenced our understanding of the relationship between text and context. Postructuralism and Derridean deconstruction questioned notions of linear developments, hierarchies, and dichotomies (such as presence/absence), emphasizing the noncenter as a starting point for a playful exploration of meaning. Derridean deconstruction tries to dismantle the hierarchizing or totalizing effects of binary structures and to inverse binary opposition; it attempts to preclude the emergence of a synthesizing term that would produce a new hierarchy or totalization. Jacques Derrida distinguishes between logocentric writing, based upon a phonetic–alphabetic script conveying the spoken word, and écriture, grammatological or poststructuralist writing that concentrates on the primary processes that produce language. These theories provided the basis for many central characteristics of Postmodernism as a cultural, social, political phenomenon—among them decentralization as well as self-reflexivity and metafictionality, which manifested themselves in the emphasis of the text on its own form and medium: language. In Postmodernism, the world became a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems. Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on multivocality, Michel Foucault’s conceptions of networks of power, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of rhizomatic, nomad thought all testified to the concept of a networked textuality.

Poststructuralist theory argued that textuality is by nature open-ended, and the reading process is never sequential. Readers do not progress from word to word, line to line, page to page until they have finished the text. Rather, they perform a text within referential frames and make multiple connections while reading. This understanding of the reading process had previously been outlined by reader-response theory. Wolfgang Iser asserted that the textual object is virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text [as a physical artifact] or to the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it achieves its dynamism (Iser 1987: 21). In Iser’s theory the interaction between text and reader is a purely mental event—it remains internal. The physical, stable presence of the printed, linear text tends to deny the intangible, psychological text the reader attempts to construct.

Of course, a reader’s or audience’s experience with any work (be it a text or an artwork) is always a negotiation with the work itself, the author, society, and self; it is always context-dependent. However, context itself is hardly a stable construct. Derrida states that the field of equivocality covered by the word communication permits itself to be reduced massively by the limits of what is called a context and asks, But are the prerequisites of a context ever absolutely determinable?…Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of the context? Does not the notion of context harbor, behind a certain confusion, very determined philosophical presuppositions? Derrida comes to the conclusion that context is never absolutely determinable or at least, its determination is never certain or saturated. The effect of this nonsaturation is the theoretical insufficiency of the traditional, stable concepts of context (Derrida 1982: 310).

Theorists of hypertext and hypermedia—among them George Landow, Stuart Moulthtop, and David Bolter—established a critical framework for understanding hyperlinked environments, even before the advent of the World Wide Web as we know it. According to these theorists, hypertext (and any hypermedia environment) creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment of the theoretical work of poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Derrida (Johnson-Eilola 1994: 205). It includes the same range of internalized responses to a text, but it abandons the physical stability of the object by adding technologized conventions (Moulthrop & Kaplan 1994: 221): because of the mechanism of links, it is not predominantly the reader’s interpretation of the text that changes but the text itself. Even poststructuralist theories could not fuse the role of reader and author or recipient and creator in the visible manner experienced in hyperlinked environments. Where Barthes’ transformation of reader to collaborative writer takes place in the psychic world of the reader, hypertext makes the intertextual, networked text visible and active for the reader–writer (Moulthrop 1989: 18–27). Networked environments emphasize the very qualities—the play of signs, intertextuality, the lack of closure—that deconstruction poses as underlying and largely overlooked processes of literature and language.

The Internet is a contextual network where a different context is always only one click away, and everyone is engaged in a continuous process of creating context and recontextualizing. The process of creating meaning is influenced by an awareness of shifting contexts, and the construction of meaning in the networked, digital environment relies on a continuous renegotiation of context as a moving target.

Producing Context

Obviously, the producer and recipient of art are always defined by their personal, cultural, and aesthetic context. However, the interactive or networked artwork significantly changes the role of both the artist and the spectator, and it requires an understanding of the interface mechanisms of the work. To comprehend the full scope of changes that interactivity can induce, one has to distinguish between some of the basic forms that interactivity can take. Ultimately, any experience of an artwork is interactive, relying on a complex interplay between contexts and productions of meaning on the recipient’s end. However, this interaction remains a mental event when it comes to traditional art forms: the physicality of the painting or sculpture does not change in front of the viewer’s eyes. Although openness to a user’s or participant’s intervention has been explored in performance art, happenings, and video art, we are now confronted with complex possibilities of remote and immediate intervention that are unique to the networked digital medium and did not exist before or without digital technologies. These possibilities are not necessarily opened by the simple point and click interactivity that offers nothing more than a sophisticated form of browsing or by the type of interactivity in which a user’s act triggers one specific response. These forms of interactivity may be new in the sense that we have never experienced them before in this specific form, but they do not fundamentally change our experience of an artwork. The more fundamental changes take place with virtual (art) objects that are open-ended information narratives with a fluctuating structure, logic, and closure in which control over content, context, and time is not only a mental event but shifts further to the side of the respective recipient through the possibility of interaction. These types of works can take numerous forms with varying degrees of control over their visual appearance on the artist’s or audience’s end. In some artworks, viewers interact within the parameters that have been set by the artist; in others, they set the parameters themselves, or they become remote participants in time-based live performances. Depending on the openness of an artwork, the boundaries between the self and a virtual art object can appear to collapse, and the artwork is not necessarily perceived as an otherness, but rather as a silent partner. The process of experiencing interactive, networked art often is less other directed than the experience of a traditional work of art, such as a painting or sculpture. The interfaces of interactive works reflect a constantly shifting context that is dependent on the navigational choices we make.

If artists (and audiences) are context and content providers, then how does the media artwork change as a result of shifting contexts? Artists working with digital technologies are often creating parameters for an interplay of context or creating situations in which contexts become the content of an artwork. Olia Lialina’s early net art piece Anna Karenina Goes to Paradise (http://www.teleportacia.org/anna/), for example, sets up three acts—Anna Looking for Love, Anna Looking for Train, Anna Looking for Paradise—whose content is provided by the results that search engines returned for the words love, train, and paradise. The results for love include items such as the home page of the band Love and Rockets or Aphrodite’s Love Palace. The content of Lialina’s piece (which is already contextualized by Anna Karenina) is undergoing constant shifts of context, which ultimately are the focus and content of the artwork.

In the end, every producer of information is a context provider, and when it comes to the context of and for art in networked environments, one cannot neglect either commercial mechanisms—be they producers of tools or information brokers—or institutions and portals that provide context for art.

However, the Internet as a potentially open system and archive of reproducible data invites or allows for instant recontextualization of any information. The virtual real estate of a company or institution can easily be cloned and reinserted into new contexts, a tactic that many artists, net activists, or hacktivists pursued in the early days of the Web. When Documenta X decided to close down its Website after the end of the physical exhibition, the artist Vuk osi cloned the site, which remains available online until today. The project Uncomfortable Proximity by Graham Harwood, the first piece of net art commissioned by the Tate for its Website, is a perfect example of shifting institutional contexts: reproducing the site’s layout, logos, and design, Harwood tells a history of the British art system that may be less than comfortable for an art institution.

If one poses the question how digital art may have influenced the relationship between context and content and the production of meaning, then the term digital art itself needs some clarification. Although definitions and categories are helpful in identifying certain distinguishing characteristics of a medium, they can be dangerous in setting up predefined limits for approaching and understanding an art form, particularly when it comes to a medium that is still constantly evolving, as in the case of digital art. Nevertheless, there are some basic distinctions that can and need to be made.

When it comes to digital or media art, one can distinguish art that uses digital technologies as a tool as opposed to a medium. There are artists who use the technologies as a tool for production of a more traditional art form, such as a sculpture or print, or as tool for storage and delivery, such as distribution of a digitized version of a painting over the Internet or delivery of a video on a DVD. The use of digital technologies as a medium implies that it is produced, stored, and presented in digital format and makes use of the inherent possibilities of the medium. However, art that uses digital technologies as a medium can manifest itself as everything ranging from an interactive installation to an installation with network components or purely Internet-based art.

Networked digital art exhibits distinguishing characteristics of the digital medium—none of them a necessity and most of them used in varying combinations. It is interactive, allowing forms of navigating, assembling, or contributing to the artwork that go beyond the interactive, mental event of experiencing it. It often is dynamic, responding to a changing data flow and real-time data transmission. The art is not always collaborative in the original sense of the word but often participatory, relying on multiuser input. Another distinguishing feature of the digital medium is that it can be customizable, adaptable to a single user’s needs or intervention.

Even the term Internet art by now has become a broad umbrella for multiple forms of artistic expression that often overlap. There is browser-based art, art that has been created for and exists within the browser window; there are telepresence and telerobotics projects that establish telematic connections between remote places (for example, through the use of webcams) or that allow manipulation of remote places through robotic devices; there are performance and time-based projects that take place as actions within a specific time frame during which they can be experienced by Web visitors worldwide; there is hypertext that experiments with the possibilities of nonlinear narrative, consisting of segments of texts that are woven together through electronic links and that allow users to choose multiple paths; there are netactivism or hacktivism projects that use the network and its possibilities of instant distribution and cloning of information as a staging platform for interventions, be they support specific groups or a method of questioning corporate and commercial interests; and there is software art, sometimes coded from scratch and distributed over the network or existing on a local computer and using data from the network.

Context Providers

Context Providers explores the ways in which media art and culture—specifically digital and art/science collaborations—are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning. In the media world driven by digital technologies, creators of information spaces, and artists in particular, are commonly referred to as content providers. However, they also have to be understood as context creators: by generating multiuser environments and nonhuman entities such as intelligent agents and datamining engines in a highly collaborative creative process, they blur boundaries between many disciplines and establish networks of information. Digital technologies have changed the cultural and economic fabric of societies, and art, as always, has been reflecting on these changes. Although networks, connectivity, participation, and process are intrinsic aspects of media arts, contemporary art in general has begun to incorporate and reflect on these elements. Grant Kester has pointed out that numerous contemporary artists and art collectives have made the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities a focus of their practice, using a performative, process-based approach. Quoting British artist Peter Dunn, he points out that these artists are context providers rather than content providers (Kester 2004). At the same time, the commercial construct of Web 2.0 with its social networking tools has created a new, contemporary version of users as content providers who fill contextual interfaces with data.

Part One: Defining Conditions for Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience

Edited, with a Foreword, by Margot Lovejoy

Part One of this book provides both a context and a rationale for discussing the shattering of visual arts traditions brought about by technological change since the development of photography, cinematography, and video and especially with the increasing momentum brought about by digital means. These shifts have affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions can be created and disseminated to increasingly dispersed audiences. These changes alter the way meaning is constructed. Audiences may now become part of creating content for artworks in the context of the increasing diversity of contemporary cultural structures powered by the development of new digital forms of representation.

Part Two: Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production

Edited, with a Foreword, by Christiane Paul

Part Two addresses the fluctuating contexts established by networked environments. Communication networks are based on a continuous recycling and reproduction of information in ever-new contexts and have increased the need for flexible information filters. This mapping of data flow, as a framework for establishing meaning, is inextricably interconnected with the issues of how we define our identity in networked virtual spaces and how we form our cultural networks as well as collaborative models for networked media.

Part Three: Media Artists in Scientific Contexts

Edited, with a Foreword, by Victoria Vesna

Part Three considers the work of media artists who are directly engaging the scientific community, through collaboration, active dialogue, and creation of work that poses questions and creates different viewpoints for the scientific work that has such a powerful effect on our societies. Moving from the realm of technological networks that are wireless and invisible to biological networks and the invisible realm of nanotechnology, artists are confronted with a series of new challenges that directly affect our understanding of ourselves and that shift viewpoints of the scientists involved in the scientific research. When artists move into the scientific laboratories and the blur between established science and sci-fi is difficult to distinguish, the context for the participating audiences radically shifts.

Computers started pushing the limits of scientific interpretation and visualization and created a sudden need for artists, designers, and scientists to dialogue and work together. At first it seemed as if the artists were the ones who came in need, but we are seeing that there is an equal drive from the scientific community to work with artists on imagining the future possibilities (light and dark) of these twenty-first-century sciences that are bringing in a new paradigm.

When it comes to media arts, this book will predominantly focus on artwork that uses digital technologies as a medium (rather than a tool) in which paradigm shifts in the understanding of context will be more obvious.

Throughout the book, we are striving to address a range of general questions surrounding the ideas of context and the conditions of meaning in media art. Although we do not claim to provide definitive answers to these questions, we hope that they may be useful as points of orientation for navigating through the book itself:

• How are the content and the context of an artwork related?

• Do the complexities of our media-driven environment add or diminish our ability to create meaning in today’s cultural climate?

• What is the history of participatory forms of art?

• How is representation changing?

• Has the function for art changed?

• Is art a system or a field within which participants actively construct meaning?

• What is the role of the artist in these works?

• What is the effect of agency on artistic practice?

• Are artists working in telecommunications becoming agents for change?

• How is today’s artwork changing as a result of new strategies influenced by data structures, intelligent systems, and information networks?

• Will agent systems that allow for autonomous existence and evolution create an art that is able to connect to the cultural mainstream?

• How are art institutions and society as a whole changing as a result of digital communication forms?

• Does an individual artist’s right to use poetic license outweigh broader social and ethical concerns?

• Should artists be trusted with biotechnology?

• Is life to be considered an artistic medium?

This emerging field, as is true in any field, is a network of people and ideas. Perhaps what differentiates and even defines media arts is the seeming hyperconsciousness of that network, and the need to deliberately point out this connectivity that is amplified by the artists’ use of networks as medium. There is also a need to end the perceived separation of the physical and the virtual, and much of recent work deals with the tensions of the multiple realities we have to face. Even the idea of the book is expanded and the very act of reading changes.

References

Derrida, Jacques (1982), Signature event context, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Iser, Wolfgang (1987), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan (1994), Reading and writing in hypertext: Vertigo and euphoria, in C. L. Selfe and S. Hilligoss (eds.), Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, pp. 195–219.

Kester, Grant (2004), Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art, http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~gkester/Research$$$20/copy/Blackwell.htm.

Moulthrop, Stuart (1989), In the Zones: Hypertext and the Politics of Interpretation, Writing on the Edge, 1: 1, pp. 18–27.

Moulthrop, Stuart & Kaplan, Nancy (1994), They became what they beheld: The futility of resistance in the space of electronic writing, in C. L. Selfe and S. Hilligoss (eds.), Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, pp. 220–237.

PART ONE

DEFINING CONDITIONS FOR DIGITAL ARTS: SOCIAL FUNCTION, AUTHORSHIP, AND AUDIENCE

Margot Lovejoy

A congruence of factors emerged in the last century that created conditions that broke down traditional concepts of art as object and forced the evolution of dynamic forms with new functions. These factors challenge authorship as well as relations between artist and audience in the construction of meaning, and they raise new questions about the relationship between theory and practice.

Once images could be captured by the machine eye, diverse ways of seeing and experiencing the natural world evolved along with methods of disseminating and transmitting them over distance into one’s home or work environment. The immateriality of these processes began to affect ideas about art as object in terms of time and space issues. Also, by the mid-twentieth century, it became clear that the computer’s capacity to process sonic, visual, or textual information as data objects created the potential for a vast new multidisciplinary direction for art. Data could be endlessly manipulated and stored in databases or archives to be called up for a myriad of uses within numerous contexts and disciplines, especially with regard to long-distance communications. These technological changes allowed for interactive exchange and participation to take place within an artwork, thus changing a work’s potential form and function. In the context of the cultural developments that have emerged as a result of these major changes in technological standards, a new consciousness has evolved in which art as an object for individual viewing became more and more challenged. Not only had the artwork become immaterial and interactive, but it could be seen or experienced simultaneously by mass audiences in different locations. Although harnessing the creative process is still the artist’s essential task, the loss of full authorship control in creating a digital work has become a reality for those artists who seek to create self-generating forms that allow for significant levels of participation and agency.

In the context of the early twentieth century, artists were already interested in the phenomenon of powerful, invisible, immaterial natural forces being discovered in science, such as electricity and the X-ray. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry attended public lectures on these scientific discoveries, which they interpreted in their own way. Later, composer, philosopher, artist John Cage’s explorations of hidden dynamics led to witty experiments with the randomness of chance operations. In the 1960s, the work of artists interested in happenings, performance, environmental works, sound, video, and independent film as well as new forms of public art led to the expansion and acceptance of the idea of art as an immaterial concept. Some of these interdisciplinary early forms had direct participatory aspects. A relationship began to grow as early as the 1940s between independent filmmaking and the use of projection in room-sized installations as experiments with time and space. The use of the film projector in these conceptual works was essential. This tendency led to the acceptance of the new medium’s use as spatial installation forms by early video artists, such as Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The simultaneous growth of the European Zero and Grav movements in the 1960s and 1970s with the art and technology movement in the United States created further acceptance of the use of technology in art making. With the widespread arrival of digital technologies at the turn of this century, new levels of participation and interpersonal communication have been achieved and have further emphasized the tendency through the use of media toward immaterial virtuality and the loss of the traditional object as art. Installations making use of multiple aspects of projection and sound have shifted the white box space of the gallery toward the black box of the movie theater. The complex potential of these artworks now often calls for interdisciplinary collaboration between visual and performance artists, programmers, designers, and musicians.

Audience and authorship

Interactivity, a keyword used to describe the digital, has become so loaded with meaning that it is by now virtually meaningless. It has been used to describe anything ranging from point-and-click navigation—a monologic approach—as opposed to an open dialogic system that creates the opportunity for a fully collaborative dialogue to take place. Although dialogism in electronic media is interactive, it should not be confused with the potential for collaborative exchange provided by telecommunications-based artworks that interactively make use of global network connectivity. In such open works, the artist’s intention is to introduce an audience to go beyond the type of interpretation expected of traditional work. The construction of digital artworks is specifically dedicated to create a desire for collaborative exchange with a wide public where the exploration of experiences in time and space has the potential to release new insights.

Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas intersect with the new media debate about interactivity (Holquist 1981). Writing in the early years of the twentieth century, he is one of the first to focus and explore the meaning and structure of dialogue as a collaborative rather than individual force. He believed that our individual acts of expression—whether visual, written, or oral—are the result of dynamic, difficult inner struggle, which may sift through one’s social knowledge to experiences with others’ dialogic interconnection or cooperative exchange.

Because digital media are often literally dialogic (as opposed to a dialogue that configures itself as a mental event), the position of making and the relations between artist and audience are altered. Their roles and identities are changed. The experience of the traditional art object is in the transposition from the look of the eye to the eye of the mind. All arts can be called participatory if we consider viewing and interpreting a work of art as reaching an understanding as part of a communicative monologic dialogue. In interactive digital works, however, the interface meeting point between artwork and viewer becomes an interplay between form and dialogue, similar to that which Bakhtin located in literature—that is, stratified, constantly changing systems made up of sub-genres, dialects, and almost infinitely fragmented languages in battle with each other. Such collaborative systems, with their inherent contradictions, are a force for forging new unpredictability in aesthetic territory in a process Bakhtin termed the dialogic imagination (Holquist 1981).

In this process the role of the artist/author changes from one who has total control of the artwork to one who designs a framing or ethnographic structure that invites a wide public to collaborate. Without audience participation, the work is incomplete. However, as Sharon Daniel points out in her essay, interactive systems sometimes obscure the relation of user input to system output. In addition, the prefix inter suggests a between that can be erased in digital arts, which sometimes collapses boundaries to a point where the elements and parties between which a communication was established merge into one system.

Digital technologies change the nature of interaction itself. Digital functionality—such as algorithmic calculations, databases, and telecommunications—transform a work of art into a dynamic environment. Here, viewers become participants in a space that is unlimited by clearly set boundaries, with the potential for the emergence of new events and insights that unfold as an active collaborative process. [Fig. 1.i.1]

The term interdisciplinary, also often used to describe a defining characteristic of the digital medium, raises similar questions. The connection between disciplines—aspects of the visual and performing arts, the humanities and social sciences, science and information theory, to name just a few—certainly plays a role in defining the dynamic nature of digital arts. New media works often are a product of complex collaborations between visual and performance artists, programmers, scientists, designers, musicians, and others. But the roles in this collaboration can range from that of a contractor or consultant to a full-fledged collaborator. Also, boundaries between disciplines are often erased, leading to a new form or field, or making a work equally important in the context of each field, such as art and/or science.