Robert Adrian on Fri, 10 Apr 1998 05:48:05 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Re: interactivity: |
When reading Felix Stalder's initial text I couldn't really identify his statements with "interactivity" - it sounded much more like "control that he was talking about. Press button "A" - get result "B" ... the old problem of man-machine interfaces with their suggestion of "interactivity" barely disquising the master-slave relationship. But interactivity surely implies a certain degree of symetry in the relationship ... not a hierarchy of control but a sharing of control. Give and take. Mechanical devices simply perform the tasks for which they are built and interaction with them is an entirely one-sided business. The machine is controlled by its operator. A device for measuring time is no different than any other machine in this respect. Interactivity would seem to imply a degree of loss of control - situations in which it might be possible for the machine to do something unpredicted by the handbook or make its own demand on the operator in some unforseen way. The machine would have to be understood as having some sort of intentional capacity for real interaction to be possible. But when mechanical devices become unpredictable they are simply broken - and are either repaired or discarded. ------ But what I really wanted to say is that, when working with the www or other communications media, "interactivity" is a condition (in the above sense) of the work. By this I don't mean that the artist, or whoever, intends their work to be necessarily "interactive" - it is simply inevitable that the viewer/receiver of the work will determine how the work will be experienced. That is the person looking at your work on line or on tv will make the decisions about how the work will be seen - by deciding on the size of screen, the amount of time viewed, the context (by zapping channels or surfing), browser type/configuration etc etc. People producing work for these media are obliged to share the decisions about the work with the viewers of the work. They must accept a loss of control in an environment which is determined by interactivity ... Genuine interactivity is therefore a serious problem for the traditional artist accustomed to a feeling of having total control over the appearance of their work. A great deal of so-called "interactive art" is actually more often a strategy for reasserting control by limiting the variables for the viewer or incorporating them into the work. Thats what makes so much of it so boring. --------- Living in Toronto, Felix Stalder must know the work of Norman White who has spent more years than he would care to remember building robotic devices of one kind or another. One was a bunch of wires and computers called, I think, "The Lazy Robot" which just lay there waiting for someone to press a button or come in range of its sensors ... it was designed to attract the attention of gallery visitors and put them to work activating its systems. Of course its apparent intentionality was a function of its program but it cleverly reversed the man/machine, master/ slave relationship - and gave "interactivity" a different twist. ------------------------- robert adrian wiedner hauptstrasse 37/69 a-1040 vienna, austria tel.++43 1 504 3110 fax++43 1 504 4849 --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl