These artworks invent a gift-exchange community involved in a more intimate sense of transactions that we usually consider impersonal. (Saper, 2001:x)

In 2005, The Australian Centre For the Moving Image promoted Intimate Transactions as follows:

An immersive, interactive installation unlike any other, members of the public can experience Intimate Transactions for one week at ACMI commencing April 25. The two participants, one at the ACMI Screen Pit in Melbourne, and the other 1700 km away at the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane, will enter a space at each location that is equipped with a touch sensitive physical interface called a Bodyshelf, embedded with sensors that detect body movement and shifting of body weight. Before getting on to the Bodyshelf, each participant puts on a wearable device that passes gentle vibrations into their stomachs, enabling them to sense vibrations of different frequencies and intensities. Each body movement influences an evolving world created from digital imagery and multi-channel sound, allowing the participants’ bodies to become aware of the other’s movements, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot actually see or hear each other (ACMI 2005).

Intimate Transactions at ACMI, (2005). Img. David McLeod

The Transmute Collective conceived and developed Intimate Transactions over a four-year period in phases from a single site, non-networked artwork to a multi-site, server-driven experience for two networked participants. In 2003, we showed a single site version to an invited peer group at the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts in order to garner feedback. This led us to better understand what type of computational architecture would be required for the work to function successfully within a networked, multi-site environment. We went on to design and build a dual site version that we previewed at the Performance Space, Sydney in 2004. After further development, it was made tour ready and publicly premiered in February 2005 in Glasgow, Scotland at the National Review of Live Art/New Moves Festival. In 2005, it received a prestigious Honorary Mention and major showing at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria It has also been shown simultaneously at the Australian Centre For the Moving Image, Melbourne and the QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane and later at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London [http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=14460] and BIOS (New Synthesis of Urban Culture), [http://www.bios.gr], Athens, Greece. In May 2006 it will be shown in Sydney, Australia.

The Final Bodyshelf Design, (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

As artistic director of the project, I was responsible for shaping and directing the entire project, in close collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of sound artists, programmers, electronic engineers, sound artists, performers and ecological scientists. To achieve this, I drew upon a mode of making work that I call ecosophical  which I have been developing since completing my doctoral thesis, ‘Towards an Ecosophical Praxis of New Media Space Design’ (Armstrong, 2003). I summarized the general thrust of this practice in my 2004 paper, ‘Investigating Ecological Subjectivity’.

We now live under the enduring mantle of a global crisis, a self-imposed act of unparalleled and seemingly irrational self-destruction, which we misname as ecological – WE are the crisis. Numerous contemporary theorists have suggested that this ‘problem of ecology’ indicates a crisis of human subjectivity and agency linked to a fundamental problem in how we image ourselves within the world.  Having observed how much new media art praxis operates largely without awareness of the homo-ecological implications of those practices, I began developing new processes for conceptualising and developing media art works, to which I applied the term ‘ecosophical’. My objective was to discover whether such works could be used to create contexts within which participants might reflect upon connections between the ‘problem of ecology’ and the proposed problem of humanity/human subjectivity (Armstrong 2004).

In this paper I continue to reflect upon the conditions leading to this praxis as well as the issues and implications of this approach to art making, explaining how it has underpinned the critical journey of the Intimate Transactions (yes) project – a work which I would describe as ecosophical, praxis-led, embodied and networked.

Intimate Transactions, (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

The term ‘practice-led’ is used by Carol Gray who describes a mode of research:

initiated in practice, where the questions, problems and challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners. ‘The research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as practitioners (Gray, 1996:3).

I use the term praxis-led to accord with this approach while emphasising an iterative, creative research practice where theory and practice are inseparable. I use the termembodied not only to stress the importance of the participants’ bodies in the work, but also to foreground the conversational, engaged sensibility that underpins its conception and production. This accords with Dourish, who describes embodiment as denoting ‘a participative status’ and:

the presence and occurrentness of a phenomenon in the world. So, physical objects are certainly embodied, but so are conversations and actions. They are things that unfold in the world, and whose fundamental nature depends on their properties as features of the world rather than as abstractions (Dourish, 2001:235).

I have drawn upon a method of making media artwork that I call ecosophical (Armstrong, 2004). This approach has evolved out of a long-term study of principles of scientific ecology and ecological philosophies and draws from ideas and concepts to create a practice deeply underpinned by eco-social and eco-political engagement. Although this content and approach is subtle and non-didactic, it ultimately influences many aspects of the experience. In this paper I summarise some of the issues that drive this approach and discuss their implications within this particular mode of practice.

Inside the Torment Creature (2005). Img. Benedict Foley/Cameron Owen

Conditions Suggesting Ecosophy

Although humanity is now an integral part of almost all life’s interlocking cultural and biophysical ecologies, our collective history of ecological sustainment is bleak.[1] We have a deeply ingrained perceptive image of ourselves as lording over, rather than interacting within, our worlds. Our long history of dominance and oppression of ‘the other’ parallels our history of dominance and oppression of biophysical systems. This has led to the ecological malaise that grips our planet today. Vandana Shiva reminds us that we have entered an era ‘dominated by violence, conflict, disharmony and terror… troubled times and troubled thinking’ (quoted in Merchant, 2004:310).

Theorists such as Guattari (1995), Fry (1999; 2000) and Conley (1997) have explored connections between the ecological crisis and a crisis of human subjectivity, deeply critiquing our homocentric conceptions of self and our perceived role within interconnected systems. Ecospsychologist Metzner suggests that ‘the most basic facts of our existence on this Earth …appears to be irrelevant to our psychology. Yet our own personal experience as well as common sense contradict this self-imposed limitation’ (1995). Similarly Felix Guattari suggests that the key question facing us today is how to produce, tap, enrich and permanently reinvent a subjectivity; a subjectivity which comprises our own attitudes, beliefs and emotions, in ways that might become comparable with a universe of changing values (1995:124). He suggests the deployment of a ‘four dimensional ecosophic object’ with the interrelations between them being in constant variation.

Ecosophy is a word initially coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1995) and subsequently developed by Sessions (1995). It is a series of guiding principles for thinking and acting – a lived philosophical position. Michael Heim describes how ‘ecosophy’ is derived from the Greek words ‘oikos’ and ‘sophia’, meaning ‘wisdom of the dwelling’ (1998). Founder of ‘deep ecology’ Arne Naess describes his own personal ecosophy, which he calls ‘Ecosophy-T’, as being a self-realisation, born both out of his development of and identification with the philosophical ideals of deep ecology and his evolving engagements with the world.[2] He suggests a series of broad, defining characteristics to which the ecosophical practitioner should subscribe, while also clarifying that an ecosophy is contextual, personal and therefore its definitions must remain open and fluid.[3]

Inside the Insatiability Creature (2005). Img. Benedict Foley/Cameron Owen

Ecology is popularly thought of as being just solely a scientific, biophysical discipline. However it is also a long established critical, philosophical discipline that theorises around the dynamic, dialogic relationships between multiple forms and manifestations of life. Correspondingly my ecosophical praxis is deeply engaged with the possibilities and qualities of conversational communication that either already do, or could feasibly exist, between forms of systemically located life, matter and technologically created forms. This praxis operates out of an embodied concern for breakdown and disjunctures within systems, particularly those skewed by human interference. Through my artworks, I aim to create discursive, artistic experiences inspired and focused by the possibility of metaphysical shifts in our understandings of place and role within dynamic, interlocking systems. One aspect of this approach leads me to favour interactive experiences that ask participants to reflect upon the implications of individual action and group collaboration within computational, aesthetic systems of which they become an integral part.

This approach is epitomised within Intimate Transactions by its interface design (the ‘Bodyshelf’) and the networked, computational system that underpins it. The ‘Bodyshelf’ requires full body contact and continual movement by two networked participants, allowing them to co-creatively control much of the work’s complex computational systems. Although there are many ways to approach the work, it ultimately rewards participants with a willingness to collaborate, based upon an understanding of their own place and role within a series of complex, shifting relationships (manifested in image, sound and vibration).

In my doctoral thesis (completed in 2003) and through subsequent works, I developed an approach to creating ecosophical work based upon a number of questions (considered as being always contingent and under development). This process of asking ‘ecosophical questions’ was key to Intimate Transactions’ conception, iterative design and development processes.

Ecosophical Questioning

Electronic networks are now an integral part of our human-material/cultural ecologies. They ‘seep into our consciousness, our everyday existence’ (Raqs Media Collective, 2005). The phenomena of the accessible electronic network arrived within my lifetime (courtesy of the US military) and the immaterial webs underpinning our networked society are now arguably the foregrounding ecology of interest within the media arts community. That network continually feeds us stories of terror, lost opportunity and collapse, information that we may often feel powerless to process or engage with. These increasingly urgent, seemingly intractable problems of dysfunctional ecologies demand our action and attention.

Ten years ago, I began to ask myself how I might best act as a media artist? What role might I play through my profession that could be of any consequence in engaging with the problems of ecology? Tony Fry advises that an act of ‘sustainment’ should be ‘considered, circumstantially appropriate action’ rather than ‘a stock “solution”’(2001). I resolved that my contribution should be to deploy the interactive, connective, popular aspects of networked new media arts to create contexts for conversation around these pressing ecological issues. This would be best achieved through a located, engaged praxis that avoided didacticism. I believed that other professionals were already engaged with such approaches.

At the start of the Intimate Transactions project, we began to pursue processes of ecosophical questioning around form, approach, modality and content. These specific questions are described in detail in my paper, ‘Investigating Ecological Subjectivity’ (Armstrong, 2004). This led us to design a durational experience for participants that required their active engagement. We resolved that physical movement would be central to the experience and that its effects would ripple through to affect all computational and experiential aspects. The two physical interfaces and their supporting environments should also have a strong physical presence, while not strongly detracting from the experience of the participants once engaged with the work. This led us to design the ‘Bodyshelf’ in collaboration with furniture designer Zeljko Markov. This unique hybrid of furniture and interface demands a particularly active physical engagement. Furthermore the work’s interactive, computational design was inspired by the energetic flows inherent within scientifically described ecologies (e.g. the flows of energy within ecological systems that originate from the sun/photosynthesis and that are subsequently exchanged via consumption and decomposition).

Room Setup, B’Tween Festival, Doncaster (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

This focus on ideas of energy transfer concurred well with the performance theory and practice of Transmute Collective’s performance director Lisa O’Neill who performs in the Japanese tradition of Suzuki Theatre. This actor training method focuses upon the energetic centre of each actor and explores the subsequent energetic relationships between other actors and their audiences. This led us to conceive Intimate Transactions as a personal, performative experience in which both participants become woven within its systemic operations and immersed within multiple processes of dialogue, exchange and transfer. This parallels Arne Naess’s ecosophy, which declares ‘a rejection of the person IN environment image’ in favour of a  ‘relational total field image’ (Naess, 1995:151).

Throughout these early design processes, my intention was never to attempt to mimic the sophisticated (and mostly mysterious) operations of biophysical or social ecologies, but rather to focus upon the connection-making and communicative features that these tools offered. This would involve recognising the potential these tools offer for creating simple energetic ‘transmission and reception paths’ metaphors.

The first stage of this research involved a number of pilot projects, which initiated theoretical and practical approaches to dual site and online installation and created single and multi-site networked infrastructures. These led to two publicly presented works: Liquid Gold(2001), a dual site and online performance/installation event; and Transact (Flesh, Skin & Bone) (2002), an interactive installation:

Setting up the Bodyshelf at the Ars Electronica Festival (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

Intimate Transactions, R&D Stage 1, Brisbane Powerhouse, (2003). Img. Sonia de Sterke

These works both had strong performance imagery created by Lisa O’Neill. As we better understood the role of performance within the interactive design process we decided to shift its role in the work, instead moving the participant towards a more actively performative context. This decision also recognized the power of choreography within the design of interactive systems, interfaces and virtual characterization. At that time, we also resolved to focus the work around what project mentor and sustainability scientist/mentor Elizabeth Baker named ‘ecological subjectivity’, a sense of self she describes in her writings as being intimately relational, embodied and embedded (1997: 261). We engaged Baker in a number of conversations around this topic and together highlighted three interlocking concepts, called ‘Me’, ‘Us’ and ‘Other’:

ME is…that bit the participant identifies as themself – as he or she.. US – for most people on the planet…is other people like me! Other PEOPLE like me. US is a more inclusive term…OTHER…is that stuff which is not like me, that stuff that is really other to me that I have no connection to. (Armstrong 2003)

Diagram of Ecological Selfhood, (1997). Img. Elizabeth Baker

We used this trio of concepts as core organizing factors for the work, both within the scripting methodology and the media design. Each artist interpreted these ideas within their own forms: interaction design, visual design, sound design, bodily movement of the participant and interface design.

The first iteration of Intimate Transactions (2003) was designed to give a single participant the opportunity to journey through three distinct movements within the work (‘Me/Us/Other’) using gentle body movements. These would all have different, but thematically related textural, textual and emotive sensibilities. The ‘Bodyshelf’ was designed not only to support the reclining body, but also to control the possible range of a participant’s body movements. These were choreographed to move between containment/compactness (envisaged as ‘Me’) through ‘Us’ towards ‘Other’ (increasing physical extension of upper body and limbs). This involved a physical shift from pressing arms and body backwards into the ‘Bodyshelf’ to reaching away from the ‘Bodyshelf’ and thus engaging with an overhead camera-controlled, gestural recognition system. This method of controlling the work was taught to participants before they began the experience.

The ‘Me/Us/Other’ conceptual progression was also designed into the imaging of the body-based media activated by these movements. The interactive soundscape by Guy Webster was similarly created from a spread of sounds interpreted as personal/close/spatially familiar, moving towards distant/unfamiliar and spatially abstracted. This version of the work also included a textual component with animated words and phrases similarly arranged in thematic groupings that would emerge and combine with the body based media. These were drawn from Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Smog’, a work with ecosophical relevance that tracks a man’s obsessive preoccupation with a physical/psychological pollution enveloping his increasingly fraught relationships (1971). In all of these ways, the work used a single participant’s bodily expression as the means for invoking and exploring mediatised relationships that were at times comforting and personal, but that could quickly shift to moments of great intensity and agitation.

It was my intention that this interactive structure would promote the metaphorical allusion to the aforementioned principles of ecological science and philosophy – alluding to a self re-imagining through navigational choices within this particular experience. Elizabeth Baker later wrote about her experience of this initial stage of the work:

The installation, I came to realise, is a way of exploring otherness, strangeness,  unknowability in a safe way: a physical / aural / visual analogy to storytelling.  Because it is safe, the individual is more likely to explore just that little bit further, to take themselves into unfamiliar territory…Its objectives are met through the experience of exploration. It helps us learn to push the boundaries of our familiar in ways that accept unknowability. In that, it is a small lesson in developing an ecological  consciousness. (Armstrong and Baker, 2003)

The Change Creature, (2005). Img. Stuart Lawson

This first version of Intimate Transactions was shown extensively to focus groups. Subsequent discussion and debate with each of the participants uncovered some key design problems. A key issue was the lack of agency experienced by some participants who were unable to easily locate themselves within the experience and thus comprehend how their bodily actions related to changes within the work’s image, text and sound. The consensus was that a direct, controllable representation of their presence within the work would make navigating the experience much easier.

It had always been our intention to avoid making each participant’s presence central to the work, situating him or her as one key, environmental force affecting the experience (e.g. their actions might affect changes in colour, speed, mixing, replication or processing rather than the direct motion of an on-screen or aural entity). However, despite our satisfaction with the initial design, we also acknowledged that our experience of using the work was skewed by the many hours we had spent with it in discovering the broad subtleties of the work. Furthermore we had intended to make a work that would be effective within thirtyminutes or less as our research had indicated any longer would simply make the work unpalatable for exhibition/gallery curators.

Therefore we decided at that stage to make fundamental changes to our design, ensuring it could work as a dual person, networked application. We decided that the structure required should be much closer to that of the multi-player game engine, which typically used avatars to represent the participants’ positions and activities, working in dialogue with other characters. Most importantly, this new approach would allow us to build upon and refine the ecosophical questioning that had led us to this point.

Developing an ecosophical networked praxis

In order to undertake this major systemic change at what was a late stage in the project’s funding cycle I brought together a new interdisciplinary team to work with our collective. At the outset, we resolved to capitalise upon the strengths of the ‘Bodyshelf’, retaining it as the work’s core navigational device because of its successes in establishing embodied energetic flows between the participant and the work. New team member Marcos Caceres brought with him the technical possibility of creating an underlying relational model for the work that would inherently encompass core aspects of ecologies, such as evolution, emergence and the exchange and transfer of objects/forms between two or more parties. This led us to imagine an entirely new computational model based upon transactions – exchanges between parties that would lead to change for all. We resolved to temper this formal idea of exchange by engendering a sense of increasing sensual intimacy between participants, particularly as acting remotely via a network had the potential to be an alienating experience. This involved collaboration with Pia Ednie-Brown and Inger Mewburn of RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Lab. On their research group’s website, they describe the sense of presence between participants that we were seeking as being ‘about ways that affective (qualitative, emergent) dimensions arise, move through and translate across different media, moments and spaces’ (Spatial Information Architecture Lab, 2005).

The Conflict Creature, (2005). Img. Stuart Lawson

Therefore we set ourselves the task of creating a new version of Intimate Transactions that was entirely networked, that would assure a strong sense of agency for participants and that would provide a more intuitive, navigational capacity for the ‘Bodyshelf’. Conceptually it would reinterpret the ‘Me/Us/Others’ idea whilst continuing to operate around ideas of energetic transfer and the performative role of the body. It would also use character-based avatars and icons for navigational ease and dual player familiarity and place transactive exchanges between them at the heart of the work in ways that necessitated collaboration. The work would attempt to also encourage a sense of increasing intimacy between participants and be welcoming and accessible to participants of different ages, cultures and body shapes.

The opening video for this new work states:

You have just begun the Intimate Transactions experience.

Someone in another place is doing the same thing right now. You are connected together and standing on identical Bodyshelves.

Both you and this person will experience your own world of unusual creatures.

You can take things away from your Creatures, but in order to return these, you must interact with the other person.

How you treat these Creatures will ultimately affect what you see, hear and feel and what the other person sees, hears and feels.

(Introductory Video, Intimate Transactions, Transmute Collective, 2005)

Intimate Transactions Technical Specification Card, (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

Intimate Transactions Technical Specification Card, (2005). Img. Stuart Lawson

Intimate Transactions comprises two sites, each with a ‘Bodyshelf’, controlled via a server. Participants use their ‘Bodyshelf’ to control their own body-shaped avatar moving within a virtual audiovisual space populated by a group of other avatars (creatures). The work’s exploratory, navigational and interactive structure was adapted from the prior ‘Me –> Us –> Other’ (familiar –> unfamiliar) progression. Navigating within the work without the intention to transact with another creature or the other participant implies operation within the ‘Me’ realm. Interactions between two participants are termed the ‘Us’ realm (that is, a place of relative familiarity/empathy), whereas interactions between participants and creatures indicate a shift into the realm of ‘Others’. During the experience of the work, these loose distinctions dissolve as participants integrate elements of creatures and exchange them collaboratively with the other person. Participants are therefore encouraged to explore ‘otherness’ (set up through the transactive process of taking away images away from the creatures and embodying them). This collecting process, commonly situated as the way to ‘win’ in computer games, is designed to slowly destroy the creatures and their constituent environment (indicated by a rapidly increasing, overall sluggishness, lessening brightness and inability to transact smoothly). The only way to restore the ‘health’ of the system is to work collaboratively with the other person to return these objects to the creatures and thus raise the overall energy of the worlds. This new design celebrates the possibility of individual exploration by suggesting roles that ecologists terms ‘keystones’: ‘those species having a large, disproportionate effect, with respect to their biomass or abundance, on their community’ (Piraino, 1999). However it also stresses the need for collaborative action and sensitivity to the entire system.

This model was achieved through the unusual design approach of creating two separate, local, parallel universes populated by two sets of creatures. Each participant’s local actions mean that the image and sound experience at each site may evolve and develop quite differently. However they are still able to view the position of the other person acting in their own local universe (but not actually observe what is also happening to their local creatures or the quality of their local environment). The shadow of the other person’s avatar implies ideas of ‘overshoot’, caused by ecological foot-printing and ‘entanglement’ whereby ‘quantum particles such as electrons’ remain ‘mysteriously linked even when separated by enormous distances.’ (Buchanan 2004:32).

Lisa O’Neill Performing for Motion Capture, (2004). Img. Keith Armstrong

Although participants are able to influence an almost infinite array of image, sound and haptic outcomes, they can never exert absolute control either individually or collectively. Furthermore, the effects of all their apparently private actions ripple through the system to increasingly atrophy both worlds.  Although participants may choose to disappear into their own local worlds and never transact with each other this will quite quickly limit their experiences. Hence participants who choose, instead, to transact frequently with each other begin to read a representation of the state of each other’s worlds and then choose to alter their actions within the work accordingly. This encourages a reflective, embodied state that capitalises upon the work’s slow, engrossing pace of interaction and the subsequent increase in sensory awareness that accompanies the deceleration of bodily activity.

The redesigned ‘Bodyshelf’ integrates navigational capacities for direction and intensity controlled via the feet or the back. These subtle, embodied navigational methods include a tilting floor, driven by body balance and weight and a pressure-sensitive backboard, driven by weight and position of the upper back, invoking subtle modes of body action that concur with the ideas of energy flow, centralisation and embodied focus developed for the initial version of the work. Vibrations were also incorporated within the ‘Bodyshelf’ structure, indicating subtle qualities of movement of the other remotely situated person. A further wearable device, located on the stomach (the haptic pendant) indicates the proximity and qualities of the other creatures, incorporating sensate responses at the core of the experience.

Two Participants See Each Other Via a Video Stream at the End of the Experience,

At Ars Electronica, (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

Intimate Transactions Proof of Concept, (2005). Img. Erika Fish

These outcomes both built and extended upon the original process of ecosophical questioning, leading to four refined questions attuned to ecosophical networked praxis. They are relevant as a guiding method for other media artists engaged in creative practices with eco-social/political concerns and are listed here:

1. Is the work part of a cyclical process of experiencing that shapes the way in which connected participants interface concurrently and co-dependently within networked new media spaces? Together, do these networked environments create a ‘living’ experience for which the work either initiates or provides the topological context?

2. Is a relational field experience being constituted by the work that progressively negotiates and aligns itself within its host environments both locally and globally and does this develop a distributed poetics of energy transfer?

3. Does each networked participant become enmeshed within the systemic experience of a work that alludes to the processes of energy flow within globally distributed ecological systems? Do participants collectively embody these energy exchanges in ways that integrate them within cycles of energy transfer, exchange and recycling woven together by the work’s server-based structures?

Opening Image for the Work, Signifying Two People Logged in, (2005). Img. Stuart Lawson

4. Do all networked participants become immersed within processes of a broadening dialogue involving each component of the work, the connecting networks and other participants?

Conclusions

This paper has presented an intertwined journey of practice and theory evolved through the development of a major new work. This was also the vehicle for better understanding how praxis-led, ecosophical embodied research might be pursued within the networked domain. These new questions listed above will form the basis for the development of subsequent works and are also offered here to other practitioners who might use them to establish similar engagements within their own modes of praxis. The development and production of this work, and these resulting questions, therefore mark a renewed place from which to continue ongoing processes of ecosophical exploration and reflection.

The significance of this journey for me is much more than simply the development of that vital tool kit of techniques, strategies, ideas and experiences or even an increasing body of artistic work. Such praxis is not simply undertaken, but lived and experienced in a way in which one’s own life merges into a desirable inseparability. Ultimately, ecosophical processes are integral to my personal, subjective investigation into what it might mean to think and act ecologically within a networked context.

It is my desire and aim that others will also choose to also take on this pressing challenge.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Transmute Collective of which I am the Artistic Director – Lisa O’Neill (Performer) and Guy Webster (Sound), my numerous creative co-collaborators (please refer to http://www.intimatetransactions.com/artists3.htm), The Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body & the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and The Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre (CIRAC), The Australasian CRC For Interaction Design, the Performance Space (Headpsace  Residency Program) and my partner, Dr. Julie Dean.

Zeljko Markov Working in His Canberra Studio, (2005). Img. Guy Webster

The Insatiability Creature, (2005). Img. Stuart Lawson

Intimate Transactions Signage, at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, (2005). Img. Keith Armstrong

Intimate Transactions at the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, (2005). Img. OK Centre for Contemporary Art

The Transmute Collective at the Intimate Transactions Premiere, Glasgow, (2005) Img. Gavin Winter

Author’s Biography

Keith Armstrong was formerly an electronic engineer and Information Technology specialist, later training in visual,
new media arts with a strong engagement with innovative performance practices. (For full details, see http://www.outlook.com.au/keith). He is an internationally exhibiting new media artist and is currently an Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow. He is the artistic director of the interdisciplinary Transmute Collective, and was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at CIRAC, Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Australia and a lead researcher in ACID (The Australasian CRC for Interaction Design).

Notes

[1] Tony Fry writes, ‘Sustainment is the result of whatever is necessary at any given place or time to counter the negations of the unsustainable. It essentially comprises of a collective giving value and acting. It cannot be reduced to a formulaic set of actions as it has to be conjuncturally responsive – in other words an act of sustainment is determined by taking considered, circumstantially appropriate action rather than applying a stock ‘solution’. Moreover, the act of sustainment taken is always one of addressing temporal consequence, it always produces change that, anthropocentrically, ‘gives time’. This expression of sustainment registers the highest order of species self interest, it fuses a recognition that ‘we’ cannot be response-able without being sustain-able, ‘we’ cannot secure the conditions upon which we depend without securing the condition upon which ‘that-which-is-not-us’ depends. No matter what we have come to believe, ‘we’ are not individuated entities but relational beings who have become eternally alienated from this condition – in this sense human centredness is being with an absolute blindness to the fact of our connectedness to both material and immaterial ecologies’ (2001).
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[2] ‘A philosophy that calls for a profound shift in our attitudes and behaviour based on voluntary simplicity; rejection of anthropocentric attitudes; intimate contact with nature; decentralization of power; support for cultural and biological diversity; a belief in the sacredness of nature; and direct personal action to protect nature, improve the environment, and bring about fundamental societal change’. (Cunningham and Cunningham, no date available)
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[3] Naess’ eight pointers to an ecosophy (listed at http://www.haven.net/deep/council/eight.htm) are

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population.
5. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
7. The ideological change will be mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between bigness and greatness.

Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.
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References

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, ‘Immersive interactive experience at ACMI, Intimate Transactions’, press release, (March 9, 2005).

Armstrong, Keith, M. ‘Investigating Ecological Subjectivity: Intimate Transactions (Shifting Dusts)’. PixelRaiders 2004, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK, (Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2004).

Armstrong, Keith M. ‘Towards an Ecosophical Praxis of New Media Space Design’. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis (Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre. Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology, 2003)

Armstrong, Keith & Baker, Elizabeth. ‘Keith Armstrong in Conversation With Liz Baker’, (2003), http://embodiedmedia.com/projects/intimate_t/Bakerconv.htm.

Baker, Elizabeth, ‘Ecological Being/Being Ecological: Self, Morality, and the Environmental Exigency’. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis (Faculty of Science, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia,1997).

Baker, Elizabeth. ‘Me, Us, Them’. (2005). http://www.embodiedmedia.com/projects/intimate_t/ConvLizBak.rtf.

Buchanan, Mary. ‘Mind Games: Quantum Tricks That Read Your Thoughts?’ New Scientist, 184 (2004) 32–34.

Calvino, Italo. Smog, The Watcher & Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 181.

Conley, Verena. Ecopolitics:The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Dourish, Paul. ‘Seeking a Foundation For Context-Aware Computing’, Human Computer Interaction (2001), 229-241.

Eldredge, Niles & Barnet, Belinda. ‘Material Cultural Evolution: An Interview with Niles Eldredge’, Fibreculture Journal, issue 3 (2004), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_barnet.html.

Fry, Tony. A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999).

Fry, Tony. ‘Know Your Enemy: Defining the Problem of Unsustainability, Shaping the Sustainable Millennium’,paper delivered at Shaping the Sustainable Millennium Conference, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, (2000), http://www.teamdes.com.au/pdf_files/Know%20Enemy.pdf.

Fry, Tony. ‘Openings Into The Ecology of Information Technology, Impacts of Information Technology Briefing Paper’, (2001), http://www.edf.edu.au/Pathfinding/Archived/IIT/BriefPart1.htm.

Gray, Carol. ‘Inquiry Through Practice: Developing Appropriate Research Strategies’ (1996), http://ww2.rgu.ac.uk/criad/cgpapers/ngnm/ngnm.html.

Gablik, Suzi. Conversations Before The End of Time (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995).

Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Heim, Michael. ‘Virtual Reality and the Tea Ceremony’ (1998), http://www.mheim.com/html/docs/vrtea/vrtea.html.

Spatial Information Architecture Lab, ‘The Liveness Manifold’ (2004), http://liveness.sial.rmit.edu.au/, (2005).

Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden, The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Metzner, Robin. ‘The Place and the Story: Where Ecopsychology and Bioregionalism Meet’ (1995), http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v12.3/metzner.html.

Naess, Arne. ‘The Shallow and The Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements’, in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, ed. George Sessions (Boston, Shambhala, 1995), 151-155.

Naess, Arne. ‘Eight Points’ to a deep Ecology, http://www.haven.net/deep/council/eight.htm.

Piraino, Stefano and Giovanni Fanelli. ‘Keystone Species: What Are We Talking About?’ Conservation Ecology, vol. 3(1) no. 1 4, (1999), http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol3/iss1/resp4/.

Robins, Brent, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, from What is Existential Phenomenology? http://mythosandlogos.com/MerleauPonty.html.

Sessions, George. Deep Ecology For the 21st Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1995).

Transmute Collective. Liquid Gold: The New Adventures of Ling Change, dual site media performance with streamed and online components, Brisbane, Australia and Sheffield, England, (2001).

Transmute Collective. Transact (Flesh, Skin and Bone), interactive installation, State Art Galley, Hobart, Tasmania, (2002).

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered … There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening … It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless, ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre … Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. (Calvino, 1997: 5-6)

Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. (Shannon, 1948: 48)

What would it mean if communication were exact? That, in spite of the real, material, spaces of message, channel, format, filters, modulations, mediation, and plain old error, it might be possible to exclude all noise and see through to some pure space of connection and transmission. Despite my curiosity, I suspect the result would be disappointingly dull, or simply redundant. The search for perfect communication is as pointless as trying to find an audio space not infected with electromagnetic waves, or a gallery space where only one work is apprehended at a time. Our communications spaces are always already determined by the varieties of noise that constitute their surfaces. In scientific and informatic models there are laws that repeatedly demonstrate the futility of any attempt to maintain purity as a static form. Key to these demonstrations is the role of entropy. Entropy is both a force and a probability measure. This essay examines shifting roles and definitions of entropy in two recent digital installations. What I suggest is that an understanding of the operations and implications of entropy helps us to unpack operations of noise and materiality in these works. The installations discussed here use the tools of distributed media at the same time as they locate themselves within the physical spaces of the art gallery. Furthermore, a focus on entropy and its role in digital installation acknowledges that both information theory and aesthetics are themselves impure and inexact.

In the two works discussed in this essay, the networked systems of digital media stretch the spatial and temporal coordinates of gallery installation. It is not possible for a viewer to stand before or within the work and see all of its elements. Instead, the works contain what Eco terms ‘intrinsic mobility’ (Eco, 1989:12). That is, the works can be understood as ‘elementary structures which can move in the air and assume different spatial dispositions. They continuously create their own space and the shapes to fill it’ (Eco, 1989:12). Operating across analogue and digital media, not necessarily located or contained within the physical spaces of the gallery, these works bring together a distributed model found in Eco’s ‘open work’ with the informational notion of entropy. Additionally, through their embrace of entropy these works extend our understandings of materiality in digital media and thus question relationships between aesthetics and media. This essay locates entropy and noise at a crucial juncture for digital materiality. A remapping of entropy is central to a discussion of digital installation for the very reason that the works themselves suggest the operations of noise as a force for distribution, and highlight a potential new aesthetic mode that focuses on mobility and transformation.

Entropy is a statistical measure; in particular, it is a measure of probability. When devising his mathematical model for information theory, Shannon (1948) borrowed the term entropy from thermodynamics.[1] What interested Shannon was the possibility for information to become a material quality which could be measured, rather than a vague medium through which meaning was conveyed. When examining the heat exchange processes of thermodynamics in 1865 Clausius coined and defined the word entropy to mean ‘transformation content’ (von Baeyer, 2003: 91-92). Entropy was used as a measure, not of the loss or gain of energy (for according to the first law of thermodynamics the sum of energy is always constant), but a measure of the energy that was dissipated and broken down into less and less usable packets within a closed system (Spielberg and Anderson, 1987: 108). Today, entropy is still used as a measurement of the speed and gradual increase of the energy in any given system that can no longer be transformed into useful work or heat. Whenever energy is transformed it becomes degraded. Without an injection of fresh differentiated structures a closed system will become fully dispersed, and as undifferentiated matter, it will suffer what has been termed ‘heat death’ (Spielberg and Anderson, 1987: 125). This tendency towards maximum entropy is the second law of thermodynamics. Over time, entropy at work within a closed system leaves more and more energy unworkable.[2] However, because there are so few truly closed systems, the statistical character of entropy means that entropy becomes more the ‘measure of that state of maximal equiprobability towards which natural processes tend’ (Eco, 1989: 48) rather than a finalizing statement. Entropy is itself not the tendency towards unworkable systems, but the measurement of that tendency.

Shannon, too, wanted to challenge the operations of a closed system, and overcome the different roles that noise held within information transmission. He saw a similarity between his probability function called ‘information’ and the probability function called ‘entropy’ (Shannon, 1948: 20). It was clear that both information and entropy were statistical measures. Shannon turned to thermodynamics for his terms, arguing that a mathematical discussion of information required a study of force and measure, rather than meaning and reception. For Shannon, both force and measure were about distributions and probabilities, something that the statistical measure of entropy proved. Although he presented us with a problematically linear approach to communication, Shannon also addressed the environmental impacts of communication by locating noise in two crucial places in his equation. Firstly, noise was defined as entropy found and encoded within the message itself. This for Shannon was an essential and positive role; entropy at the source invited continual re-organisation and assisted with the removal of repetition enabling faster message transmission. The second position he accorded noise was external, that is, noise introduced to the message channel whilst in transit. External noise confused the purity of the message, whilst equivocally adding new information. If it produced the same received signal every time, Shannon called the disturbance distortion. If the received signal changed constantly, the disturbance was called stochastic noise (Shannon, 1948: 19). In both external roles noise actually made additional information. Consequently, Shannon concluded that without noise there cannot be information. The two became intimately connected through the measure of entropy. In the absence of inherent meaning, noise was found to determine the existence of the very thing apparently determined to eliminate it. He wrote:

The first defining expression has already been interpreted as the amount of information sent less the uncertainty of what was sent. The second measures the amount received less the part of this which is due to noise. The third is the sum of the two amounts less the joint entropy and therefore in a sense is the number of bits per second common to the two. Thus all three expressions have a certain intuitive significance. The capacity C of a noisy channel should be the maximum possible rate of transmission, i.e., the rate when the source is properly matched to the channel. We therefore define the channel capacity by C Max H x Hy x where the maximum is with respect to all possible information sources used as input to the channel. If the channel is noiseless, Hy x 0. The definition is then equivalent to that already given for a noiseless channel since the maximum entropy for the channel is its capacity. (1948: 22)

Without noise and entropy there could not be a functioning channel. It is this dependant relationality that excited Shannon about entropy. In its first role, entropy could measure both noise and information. And in its second role entropy was the disturbance to these measures, entropy as noise was the material distortion, disturbance, or surface through which information traveled.

The relevance of Shannon’s model for digital installation is in the relationship it establishes between material distortion and media surface. As well as distorting the clear surface of materiality, entropy as a measurement of that system introduces noise. When entropy is evoked in digital installation this dual role of measure and material force becomes further complicated. Although a digital installation is not a classical closed system – in fact the essential intervention of a viewer means it cannot ever be closed – a focus on entropy can offer a new vocabulary and a new set of concepts in which to discuss what goes on in digital installation. If digital installation is understood through an analysis of shifting materiality, the manner in which entropy actually introduces and defers the material becomes fundamental. The remainder of this essay will focus on two recent digital installations, Ronnie van Hout’s On the Run (2004, City Gallery Wellington, NZ), and Alex Monteith’s Invisible Cities (2004, The Physics Room, Christchurch, NZ). In van Hout’s On The Run entropy is both the force by which a viewer can engage directly with the work, and a tool for the measurement and transformation of the work’s borders. In Monteith’s Invisible Cities entropy is a model and apparatus for the materialisation of description. Not necessarily immaterial or singularly material, the digital installation finds its mathematical equivalent in Shannon’s impure, noisy, transformative and entropic communications model. When working across networked media, as both these works do, Clausius’s idea of ‘transformation content’ becomes even more pertinent (von Baeyer, 2003: 91-92). It is possible to see how entropy in these installations is more than a pessimistic description of decay, and instead operates as a productive force for, and measure of, material transformation. This is because ‘the entropy of a substance determines whether it will exist as a solid, liquid, or gas and how difficult it is to change from one such state to another’ (Spielberg and Anderson, 1987: 106).

Ronnie van Hout, On the Run, 2004. Exterior view.

Van Hout’s On the Run (2004) takes the digital tropes of interactivity and presence and through the invocation of entropy as a networked force, gives the viewer a way to become complicit in the artist’s desertion of his own work. In the gallery is a large architectural form built from plywood. It could be read as a maze of packing crates, abandoned at the end of the gallery, or a basic house designed for a person to inhabit the gallery. A small trap door, a number of bolted flaps and two entrance/exit spaces punctuate the surface. The front doorway entrance is open, and the viewer must slip through an uncertain gap to enter the confines of the work. Like the First World War gun emplacements scattered on the coastal harbours of New Zealand, the inside spaces and the external space do not appear to be aligned. Viewers find themselves within the deadened sound space of a thin wooden corridor. There is the sense that the work is some kind of architecture of confinement. On our right is a large glass pane that lines a cell room. Leaning over and pressing our noses against the glass, we can make out what seems to be the sleeping figure of an inmate on a low army camp stretcher. His cell is littered with detritus from an artist’s studio, including recognisable incarnations of van Hout’s other works, marquettes, embroidery, and multiple pieces of screwed up A4 white paper. There seems to be some kind of escape plan or map sketched on one. The prisoner has been busy in his cell. The sleeping figure is at first shocking, how does he breathe in there? Suddenly it is obvious that although the room shows evidence of recent habitation, the prisoner has escaped, his form is only just covered by the green wool blankets, his head a stuffed bag. The mess of the cell room recently inhabited by the prisoner, apparently van Hout himself, offers fragments and clues to the operations that may have occurred within the space to enable his escape.

Ronnie van Hout, On the Run, 2004. Installation view.

There is no sound at all in this space and there is not enough room for the viewer to turn around to exit. The closeness of the air is cloying, and the deadened atmospherics imply that we are somehow underground. Where to now? Deeper inside the space and around a sharp bend the viewer encounters the figure of a guard dressed in army camouflage fatigues sitting before a computer monitor with his fist raised. He is an uncannily realistic figure – bearing a striking resemblance to van Hout. The guard has obviously neglected to look to the glass in the cell, and as a result has lost his charge. To find out why, we must stand too close to him, and peer over his shoulder, over his lifted fist. On the screen before him are endless messages. Scrolling across the screen are SMS messages and emails posted from the artist (the prisoner, on the run), visitors to the exhibition and distant onlookers. Alongside the artist, the audience has sent posts offering the warden advice on where to locate the artist/prisoner, or gleeful messages of escape.[3]

‘where am I?’

‘Ann & Stephanie are on the run.’

‘you’ll never catch me! mwa-ha-ha-ha!’

‘Squirrels are like cigarettes, neither are dangerous until you put them in your mouth and set fire to them.’

‘I can see you. I know what you’re up to. I’m coming to get you. Watch out…..ha ha ha!’

‘LOOK OUT!!!!!!!! there’s something BEHIND you…’

‘I am watching…’

I will Not GiVe uP’

‘blah blah blah I escaped your crap jail!’

Sleep with one eye open…’

always a man on the run.’

‘We Are Watching You… We Know where you live… We are Stalking U.’

‘NAT N LUCE R 2 HOT MAMA’S.’

‘the longest childhood is that of man himself growing into self-knowledge.’

‘it looks real.’

‘Hey kids in the room I am saying hello.’

‘the brilliance of my mind has slipped away. When I wasn’t looking caz.’

‘the evidence lies in your t-shirt.’

‘Ha. I know who you really are.’

‘GO RONNIE GO.’ ‘

‘”a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at”Oscar Wilde.’’

‘don’t know much about art but great nosh at the opening…’

‘C U at t-e vault on w!ll!5 5f.’

‘just like Ward 27 @ Wellington.’

Reading the posts there is ambivalence surrounding the positions adopted by the audience or the artist. Some offer advice as another voice helping the prisoner out. Others, inhabiting the space as textual avatars, write as the prisoner himself. The broader assumption is that participants became assimilated into yet another of van Hout’s personas.[4] As van Hout infiltrates their phone systems, they pay for the artist to stay on the run, keeping the ball going. Van Hout uses these records of networked media to disrupt the closed spaces of the installation. By including the messaging options van Hout suggests that a viewer must adopt both an embedded and a mobilised position in order to engage fully with the work. Not only must we be where the artist is not, in order to interact fully we must also be away from the structural object.

By sending messages on van Hout’s behalf, gallery visitors assume the role of the artist, momentarily taking the starring role in an ever-changing present of the screen. Present, yet not present, the artist’s escape can be charted through these posted messages; they are a reminder of the warden’s failure to contain him. There are a number of entropic forces at play here. Reliant on the improbability of escape, and the reassurance of repetition in the messages before him, the warden does not leave his chair to check the cell. His adherence to a model of information as repetition, redundancy and order has foiled him. Deleuze identifies this concentration of information, and reliance on analogue spaces of confinement as central to the operations of the disciplinary society (1992). Following Foucault, Deleuze argues that within the disciplinary society the individual is subject to the watchword or signature and is forced to conform to particular architecture molds. In On The Run this model is shown to lose its effectivity, due in part to its inherent entropy. Although the prison guard has established spatial and informatic controls, the prisoner has slipped his grasp. This is because the prisoner is aware of a second mechanism of control, that of modulation. For Deleuze the society of control (which follows the disciplinary society) is digital, and it can be measured, not by static media or the reassurance of fixed architectures but by codes. ‘The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5). Enclosed within continuous networks the prisoner has used the very network of enclosure, and the access to information afforded by the network to map his escape. On The Run makes us aware of the interleaving of these two systems. Neither the network of the society of control nor the entropic machine of the disciplinary society is a closed system. Both are shown to have spaces for escape.

On The Run locates escape as a temporal activity. Entropy is tied to duration, and the movement of entropy is always forward, toward greater entropy. Entropy cannot flow backward. Nevertheless, within the macroscopic durational force of entropy small pockets of discrete ‘order’ persist. Arnheim and others use the example of the entropic force of a small child in a bedroom, claiming that once the child has passed through the system of a bedroom it is impossible to discern the original order of the space (1971). Arnheim rightly points out that small pockets of order are the key focus of any child’s room, and the interpretation of whether the structure is ordered or disordered depends on the perspective of the observer on the system. In On The Run the confined but messy system of the cell block reflects this relationship. Entropy has spun the prisoner away, and looking into the cell it is easy to see the clues and traces of its ongoing dissipation. Positioned so that he is unable to see directly into the cell room, van Hout’s guard reads the external ordered structure as a sign of control, allowing him to disregard any minor infringements as simply ‘mess.’ Entropy is found operating as both singular event (the escape of the prisoner) and generator of further leaks and flows (the apparent ‘order’ authorised by the SMS messages as they appear on the screen.) The work operates across distributed and entropic temporalities rather than within the fixed duration of the gallery.

Van Hout introduces further clues regarding the space’s transformation. Like all architecture of detention, the prison itself is positioned at a remove from ‘normal’ life; it is a closed finite environment. When entering the space, on the viewer’s left is a large flat screen monitor showing an ever so slightly moving image of an idyllic lakeside (a kind of mimetic window). The lake is redundant enough to be any lake in New Zealand, non-specific enough to be any lake with deciduous poplars at its banks, and familiar enough to be anywhere. This is nostalgia and kitsch (both tropes dependant on redundancy; that is, they do not make us think but show us somewhere we already know) repackaged as location. The scene becomes a place-holder or sign of the desire for the removal of entropy. It is the seemingly perfect environment, in which duration is stilled and the scene (nature) has not been overtaken by the potential entropy contained within the cell or the prison. The window/screen offers both a panorama of normality and a scene of unattainable perfection, and is a further indication of the necessity of entropy as a force and measure, a tool to read the system. Unfortunately the guard watching his monitor knows nothing of this, because he relies on a standardised model of interactivity that excludes entropy. He believes that if he looks long enough, enough information will come. But due to the redundancy of his system – tell me you are still here, and I will believe you – ‘I’m still here’ becomes equated with ‘I’m on the run’ and he receives no information. In informational terms, he has no entropic uncertainty measure, only the certainty of his position and the authority of his glass box. He has made this mistake because he has dismissed entropy as some kind of random, undifferentiated matter irrelevant to the study of systems.

In Entropy and Art Arnheim both presents and questions this reductive model of entropy as undifferentiated matter, leakage and flow (1971). Arnheim is most concerned with the threat to order that the uncritical application of entropy principles to art practice pose. Separating out informatic and thermodynamic definitions of entropy, Arnheim argued that the accepted notion of entropy within thermodynamics ignores the larger structure or form, and instead focuses on the microscopic arrangements within the structure. He calls this focus on systems or sequences absurd, and suggests that we must return our gaze to the ‘preserved islands of order everywhere’. The ‘ludicrous’ nature of entropy for Arnheim is further encapsulated in the fact that within informatic definitions of entropy order itself becomes defined as ‘improbable’. The absurdity of disorder leads him to ask ‘Now what sort of sequence of events will be least predictable and therefore carry a maximum of information?’ His reluctant answer is that ‘the least structured sequence will be called the most orderly.’ His example is found in a pack of cards. The least likely probability is that a pack of cards would end up identical (or ordered) after subsequent shuffling. His own equation of probability with predictability, and the broader dismissal of structure which he sees occurring in systems leads Arnheim to declare the tension of the second law of thermodynamics to be at its very worst anti-Darwinian. The most extreme exemplars of what he saw as entropy gone mad are found in Arnheim’s footnoted references to minimalism, experimental music and avant-garde film.

Arnheim’s dislike of the connections drawn between information and entropy in the above examples lead him to argue for the realignment of information with order. As such he did not dismiss the necessary role of entropy, but resisted what he saw as its unnecessarily dominant role in art practice. Although he argues that an awareness of entropy is necessary for the perfect artwork to reach a position of equilibrium, a point of order and maximum entropy, he argues that current (1971) social relaxations of the ‘demands of organised experience’ mean that many artworks take the ideas of entropy too far, resulting in ‘the shapelessness of accidental materials, happenings, or sounds.’ His targets here are performance, improvisation and conceptual art. That is, any works that do not appear to adhere to an external structure, or desire a stability of order. As he explains: ‘Mere noise involves a minimum of structural tension and therefore calls for a minimum of energy expended by producer and recipient, in spite of creating the illusion that much is going on.’ By establishing hierarchies for the appropriate employment of entropy and noise, Arnheim reaches the end of his text sounding very much like van Hout’s prison warden looks; watching his monitor for any sign of order, and unaware of the ‘impossibility’ of ‘exact transmission’ (Shannon 1948: 48). The difficulty for Arnheim is in the unachievable resolution of Shannon’s dual definition of entropy as both function and parameter for a system.

The analogy made by Shannon between entropy as material force, and entropy as probability measure becomes significant here. As uncertainty, noise and entropy work together in the threefold process of measuring efficiency . Shannon does not dismiss noise but locates it as a crucial determining capacity. Without entropy there cannot be capacity. Arnheim’s formalist ideal of order without noise does not admit transformative movement as a quality of the art work. As entropy increases the useable capacity of the channel shrinks and it is necessary to employ other models of distribution that focus on the transformative rather than the fixed. As I have mentioned, Deleuze connected entropy specifically with the disciplinary society arguing that the subsequent society of control (in many ways more insidious) is reliant on the leakage and noise of distribution, whether through code, modulation or incorporation. Present within this society of control is an expanded notion of entropy, which is not specifically tied to closed systems. This expanded notion of entropy is central to the second work discussed here, Invisible Cities (2004) by Alex Monteith. The source of Monteith’s work is located in the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. In the novel Marco Polo describes the movement of entropy outside of the closed system:

“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the must improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real”. (Calvino, 1997: 69)

In the installation Invisible Cities (2004) Monteith draws on the languages and objects found in Calvino’s novel to activate a trawling of Internet image spaces.

Alex Monteith, Invisible Cities, 2004. Installation view.

Invisible Cities is a record of the interrelationship between entropy and information in the visualization of a search engine. Monteith isolated two thousand noun groups from Calvino’s book. Using a code written by Sean Kerr to limit, and to some extent automate the AltaVista search engine, Invisible Cities (the installation) brings up linked images based on these terms every twenty seconds. One large projection fills the whole end wall of the gallery, its screen continuously projecting the AltaVista search results. The work deceptively fulfils Shannon’s definition of information as quantity measure and its conflation with an extended, or distributed notion of entropy. There is already a reliance on the structures of fragmentary narrative and subtle variation within Calvino’s book; Monteith adds to this a new action as the book becomes reduced to nouns and is fed or filtered through the search engine. Invisible Cities get searched, sorted, arranged and manipulated as visual images rather than descriptors.

Calvino’s novel plays out the impossibility of mythical and unmediated communication. The book documents conversations between Kublai Khan and his emissary Marco Polo. Polo is sent out to the far reaches of Khan’s empire to bring back tales of the cities he finds there. As the novel progresses both Polo and Khan become increasingly aware of certain amounts of noise gnawing in their conversations – what Shannon would call the ‘conditional entropy’ of their messages (1948: 20). In spite of his desires to hear more and to believe in the greatness and strangeness of his kingdom Khan begins to distrust the descriptions he is hearing. Polo is describing only one city, his home – Venice. Both hide their awareness or distrust of the tales being told, because, as Shannon would later inform them, entropy offers a significant tool by which they can each measure the exchange of information. Disclosed, entropy might vanish, and the story would be finished, uncertainty removed at both source and reception would lead to redundancy. Nothing more could be learnt, no more cities could be visited, no more stories could be told. To hold off redundancy, Khan and Polo concentrate on the objects found within the cities.

Monteith picks these objects up, and sends them back out to the farthest reaches of a different kind of empire but one equally distributed. As they return they too bring different tales of their locations, and contain inadequate informational relationships. In this way Monteith sets into play the entropic forces of distribution, again as a probability measure. In a text so intimately concerned with information Calvino makes us as readers complicit in the agreement that entropy is not only necessary but also essential (in both senses) for the continuation of the story. Entropy determines, delays and distorts the materiality of Venice as it is described through inventory, narrative and measure within the novel. Paradoxically then, in Calvino’s Invisible Cities entropy both causes and defers material decay, whilst also recording and perpetuating the narrative’s movement towards its conclusion. Entropy operates at a macro-material level within the structures of the story, as well as generates the sequences that determine the micro-material events of the narrative. It is both a complex force and a measure of that force.

There are a number of apparently random occurrences in the viewer’s anticipation of the installation. Firstly, the images produced may not be exactly what are expected from the search term. Secondly, the selection of nouns appears arbitrary until the context of Calvino’s Invisible Cities is understood. Lastly, the viewer’s visible intervention in the space means that no one experience is like any other. However, Invisible Cities operates through entropy not randomness. The appearance of a particular image inside the search engine database is reliant on a previous identification of image with text, on a series of decisions that have lead the work to this material point. Determined either by the search engine and its rules or by the individual who has placed the image into the databases of the Internet, there are factors that limit this seemingly infinite system. The work is not random nor indeterminate but entropic. If something improbable introduces order (or in Polo’s case – reality) then its probability or number of bits ‘per second common to the two’ can be understood as its material (Shannon 1948: 20). This is how as a quantity measure entropy comes to share its definition with information rather than randomness. In the installation Invisible Cities there is a further doubling of this relationship. In front and to the side of the large screen projection are a monitor, camera, another smaller projection and other assorted electronics. Using the same code as the Calvino search a second iMac conducts a live examination of its own contexts and surroundings by sending AltaVista search terms drawn from objects in the room: ‘….RCA, Imac, Tripod, video switcher, CCTV camera, four-plugs, extension cables, Ethernet cables, roller blind…. ‘

There is no overlap between the search terms, but the two are bought into close proximity by the overlapping screens and the timing of the searches. The images are viewed together amidst the multiple architectures of the gallery. The second iMac is watched by a mini-DV camera, which transfers its signal to a smaller wall projection on the left of the space. This second projection is also connected to a video switcher. Entering the space means that a viewer’s presence is picked up by a CCTV camera on the back wall of the gallery, this image is intermittently fed to the video switcher appearing for approximately twenty seconds on screen before the switcher returns to the computer image and its ceaseless task of searching for the objects that construct the space. The materials that make up this installation are not only those present within the space but the forces that introduce outside materials, disturbances, dirt and noise into the system of the search engine. A viewer can also enact her own duplication and become part of the inventory of this space. By positioning herself in front of the mini-DV camera the viewer’s presence becomes multiple – becoming no longer a singular or proper noun but a phrase appearing across a number of locations and projected large by the video switcher. The descriptive nouns are not determining but simply one material among many:

…cities, silver domes, bronze statues, streets, crystal theatre, tower, lamps, doors, buildings, spiral staircases, square, wall, aluminium towers, gates, drawbridges, moat, canal, houses, chimneys, market, steps, streets, stairways, arcades, roofs, lamppost, dock, gratings, banisters, steps antennae, lightening rods, poles, canals, pool garden, trees, stones, sand, marsh, signboards, walls, house, tavern, barracks…

Removed from original context (meaning) the AltaVista images arrive automatically on the installation screens every twenty seconds. At the viewer’s end of the channel we have enough time to engage with them, assess their relevance, and perhaps make connections to our own images of these terms before another poll begins. The computer conducting the poll has keyboard and mouse removed, so we are surplus to the generation of the information, and in many ways redundant to its interpretation. Instead we operate as part of the continued distribution of noun, phrase, image and text.

The relationship between the projections and the monitors is one of multiplication but also inhabitation of the space. Calvino’s Invisible Cities presented multiple takes or narrations of a city. The many imaginings brought by Polo to Khan transport them back repeatedly to the same place only different; a difference of kind rather than type. At one point Khan questions whether they are even present within the room together. Through the text Calvino suggests that it is possible to know a city by its contents but also that this city is made of previously constructed spaces and inhabitations. After a while it feels like Polo is describing multiple diasporic entities rather than the singular growth of empire. The inventory becomes a tool for the documentation of the matter that makes the city but also a way to avoid the entropy, which seems to threaten the empire’s borders. By employing a similar modular and descriptive method Monteith offers a tool by which the viewer can grasp at a different sort of space. Monteith has said that ‘Calvino often uses a slightly modular, mathematical or scientific rhetoric in the structure of his works and I enjoyed this framework. His approach seemed to suggest a way to hem-in virtual space’ (2005). Monteith suggests that by listing and searching it is possible to reach some kind of distributed or entropic edge located within a more generalized notion of Internet space.

In its desires to archive and retrieve more and more ‘information’, a search engine is committed to a constant but imperfect view. AltaVista explains the operation of the search engine within its ‘terms of use’:

Search results: the web changes constantly and no searching or indexing techniques can possibly include all pages accessible on the web in its index of sites (the ‘index’). As a result, AltaVista does not and cannot guarantee that your search results will be complete or accurate or that the links associated with the index will be complete or accurate or active at the time of your search. The web sites included in the index are developed by people we do not control. The process of including sites in the index is largely automatic. AltaVista cannot and does not screen the sites included in the index. For these reasons, we assume no responsibility for the content of any site included in the index, and are not responsible for any errors or omissions contained in the site or any AltaVista site (or any site you may link to from the site or any of the AltaVista sites), or any offensive or otherwise objectionable content contained in the site or any AltaVista site (or any site you may link to from the site or the AltaVista sites). (AltaVista, 2005)

This emphatic disavowal of control and scope is supported by sites such as Nous that have been designed to assist Website managers get the best results from the search engine. Nous explains that AltaVista operates by downloading pages and indexing them utilizing robot or spider technology that makes a copy of the site’s html into the AltaVista database. ‘AltaVista then accesses each page and looks for every instance of the search within the indexed pages. AltaVista views every page and article on the web sequentially. A word may be misspelled but as long as that word exists on the Web, AltaVista will search for it’ (Nous, 2003). This highlights the role of the search engine itself as a monitor of entropy and distribution. Invisible Cities makes us aware of the limits and architectures of the search engine. AltaVista literally means ‘view from above’ and Monteith’s Invisible Cities operates at the limits of a virtualized information space (a place that on early topographical maps would have been marked with dragons). A question is raised regarding how much can be seen from above without additional magnification. Monteith’s work suggests that what can be discerned are pattern, permutation, and modulation; the tightly bound edges at which entropy functions.

Monteith’s Invisible Cities also has a stand-alone online version. In the Web version of the work it seems possible to set the timing between polls, so that a user can navigate some of the retrieved links. Yet whatever text is entered or intervention attempted is automatically overwritten by the computer in its endless quest for images from the invisible cities. The user cannot change or transform the ongoing movement of the search. Obeying the rules of entropy the forces of the search engine are unidirectional and ongoing. Although the infinite point of heat-death may be approached it will never be met and the journey toward it cannot be stalled. In the installation, the second iMac does have a keyboard and mouse, and the viewer can interfere with the activities of the computer but, again, this is overwritten within twenty seconds. In both cases the live Web narrative is constructed through the repetition of parameters and systems. That is, Invisible Cities is a digital installation in which the terms of interactivity and immersion are distributed between viewing and scanning machines and the viewer becomes one element distributed across its screens. If this is a model of digital interactivity it is a consciously flawed one by being a frustrated byproduct of something else. And a viewer is quickly made aware that she is interrupting a particular and ongoing narrative. The work operates as a transformation of both the search engine as a device and Calvino’s original text. The lasting material is of a silent room filled with the noise of data searching:

…canoes, Banks, Green estuary, Land, Mullioned windows, estuaries, Hole, wheels, 63, half-cities, roller coaster, carousel, Ferris Wheel, Death ride, Big Top, trapeze, Half-city, Stone, Marble, Cement, Bank, Factories, Palaces, Slaughterhouse, School, Half, City, Half-city, Marble pediments, Stone Walls, Cement Pylons, Ministry, Docks, Petroleum, refinery, Hospital, Trailers, Shooting galleries, Carousel, cart, Roller Coaster, Caravan, 64, territory, one city, rolling plateau…window sills, flapping curtains, ground, gutters, manhole covers…

The noise of the descriptions contaminates the spaces inside the gallery that are layered with the noise of virtualised spaces inside the Web. Marco Polo infected his descriptions of different (invisible) cities with the real Venice; here the gallery space becomes Venice. The screens float before us, the litter of surveillance cameras, monitors and lights, and electrical cable scattered over the space encourage us to stay a little longer. And we wait like Kublai Khan, our breath held like any other expectant tourist, except we are already present within the material spaces that will be shown to us.

The spaces of both installations discussed here are not experienced in continuous cinematic instants or destination-based interactive play but through duration – a distributed affective experience of sound, image, and delay. Duration is a key measure of entropy, and entropy occurs through duration. Although it is durational, entropy is not a singular smooth progression. Because it is simultaneously a material force and a measure of that force entropy contains its own stutters, gaps, dirt and noise. When located amidst digital materials, entropy echoes and records the modulations and distributions of code. It is Clausius’s ‘transformation content’ not necessarily tied to particular systems (von Baeyer, 2003: 91-92). Like Deleuze and Guattari’s intensive multiplicities, the digital work changes after each division or viewing – likewise, the work is distributed. In Eco’s sense of the word, it maintains disjunctions and contains an intrinsic mobility. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 261; Eco, 1989: 12–15). On The Run and Invisible Cities address the problems of distributed aesthetics by drawing on the force and measure of entropy. When we view these installations listening (even to silence) augments looking. In listening for bursts of entropic noise in Invisible Cities and On the Run it is possible to identify points of delay that highlight the infinite material shiftings of entropy and matter. In these digital installations entropy both determines and maps material relationships by encouraging a politics of noise. This is its necessity.

Author’s Biography

Su Ballard is an artist, writer and musician whose research focuses on new media art with a particular emphasis on contemporary digital and time-based installation from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is completing a PhD with Art History and Theory and the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Su is a senior lecturer, and head of Art Theory at Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a convenor of ADA Aotearoa Digital Arts Network and deputy board chair of the Physics Room contemporary art space, Christchurch, NZ. [http://www.physicsroom.org.nz, http://www.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz]

Notes

[1] This paper will focus on Claude Shannon’s equation of information and entropy. Shannon wrote ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ in 1948, and published it in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. The following year the article was reprinted, with alterations and a preface by Warren Weaver, as: ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). Weaver offered a particular reading of Shannon and emphasized the importance of the separation of information from meaning. It is from this second text that we get the Shannon-Weaver communications model. In this essay I refer to the original Shannon text and the authoritative version posted online by Bell Labs, and in text paginations refer to the pdf pagination.

Norbert Wiener presented a strong counter to Shannon’s use of entropy stating that information and entropy are not the same, but that ‘the information carried by a message is the negative of its entropy’ (Wiener, 1967: 31). Wiener tried to rewrite Shannon’s formulas so they used the term negentropy, as a way of maintaining a position that claims ‘information means order and entropy is its opposite’ (Eco, 1989: 53). For more on the implications of Shannon’s decision to equate information and entropy see Hayles (1990: 48–60).
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[2] In 1867, facing this pessimistic probability head on was James Clerk Maxwell’s ‘demon’. As a way to challenge what he saw as the unnecessary inevitability of this law, Maxwell proposed a microscopic demon that sat between two boxes of equal temperature in a closed thermodynamic system. The demon was imbued with enough intelligence to sort molecules as they rapidly approached him; at his gate the demon would sort fast from slow. By only letting exceptionally fast balls travel in one direction and very slow balls travel the other, one box would increase in temperature and theoretically heat would flow without a change in temperature (von Bayeur, 1999: 92ff). (In a parallel phenomenon water might be seen to flow uphill). Unfortunately for the demon, his position was unsustainable, for as Leon Brillouin pointed out in 1950, ‘the energy the Demon would have to expend to get information about molecules is greater than what the Demon could gain by the sorting process’ (Hayles, 1999: 102, see also von Bayeur, 1999: 145ff). Entropy as a measure of possibility would defeat the perpetual stability introduced by the demon who would have to break the borders of the closed system in order to gain more useful energy.
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[3] The following is a transcription of selected texts recorded by the exhibition’s curator, Emma Bugden, over a two-week period.
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[4] Van Hout’s work is characterised by a number of these persona that include a dog man, a monkey man, the prison warden, and van Hout himself variously guised. In the sculptural installation I’ve abandoned me (2003, Resin, plastic, rubber, fabric, fibreglass, video systems, Dunedin Public Art Gallery) van Hout presents a life-size model of himself standing fixed in front of a TV monitor in which his onscreen doppelganger repeatedly tries on different costumes whilst also berating himself for the ineffectualness of his appearance. The watching figure is silent. Furthermore, another of van Hout’s alter egos watches both figures at a short distance. Seated on the floor and resting against a fibreglass log is a ‘monkey’ staring intently at a small hand-held monitor, which screens a CCTV feed of the exchange. For more details on these multiple personas, see Justin Paton (2003).
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References

AltaVista. ‘terms of use’ (2005) http://www.altavista.com/about/termsofuse.

Arnheim, Rudolph. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California, 1971), http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Arnheim.html.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997).

Clarke, Bruce. ‘From Thermodynamics to Virtuality,’ in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature eds Bruce Clarke and Linda Henderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17–33.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).

Deleuze, G. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7.

Deleuze, G., and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1996).

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1990).

Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Monteith, Alex. Invisible Cities. (2004) Computer, Internet search engines, CCTV, Macromedia Director code by Sean Kerr. Exhibited at Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand. Also, Web only version hosted by Window Gallery, Auckland: http://www.window.auckland.ac.nz/showing/viewinvisible.html.

Nous information technology, ‘search tips’ (2003),. http://www.nous.net.au/search-tips/altavista_search-tip.asp.

Nunes, Mark. ‘Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace.’ (reprinted from Cyberspace Textuality, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan place of publication needed Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), http://www.gpc.edu/~mnunes/vtop.htm.

Paton, Justin. ed. Ronnie Van Hout: I’ve Abandoned Me (Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2003).

Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca : Cornell University, 1988).

Shannon, Claude. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ The Bell System Technical Journal 27, (July–October 1948): 379–423, 623–56, http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html.

Spielberg, Nathan, and Bryon Anderson. ‘Entropy and Probability’, in Seven Ideas That Shook the Universe, (New York, Chichester: Wiley Science Editions, 1987), 106–38.

van Hout, Ronnie. On the Run. (2004) Multimedia installation including Web interface, digital flat screen projection, sculptural elements, computer technology. Exhibited in “Telecom Prospect 2004”, curated by Emma Bugden, City Gallery, Wellington New Zealand, http://www.telecomprospect2004.org.nz/artist/vanhoutronnieresume.asp.

von Baeyer, Hans Christian. Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat (New York: Random House, 1999).

von Baeyer, H. C. Information: The New Language of Science (London: Phoenix, 2003).Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings, (New York: Avon Books, 1967).

On the surface, discourses of immersive aesthetics and distributed aesthetics may appear incongruous. The terms evoke different media, creative processes and modes of audience engagement. On one side stands the ideal of immersive aesthetics in Virtual Reality (VR) art and screen-based installation. On the other side, shimmers the fluid ideal of distributed and dispersed aesthetics that circulate around discourses of net.art. Distributed aesthetics implies creative modes of operating in, and experiencing, the spatial and temporal flows of information networks. While there are differences between these aesthetic forms and experiences, immersive and distributed aesthetics also share similar interests in transforming and extending notions of the body and perception through technological mediation. This paper undertakes a comparison between immersive and distributed aesthetics in relation to VR and networked art, particularly networked installation art.

I will focus on the ways in which these artworks immerse the viewer in states of perceptual and cognitive transition in order to argue that networked art, along with VR art, can generate immersive experiences in the viewer. Central to this notion of immersion is the sensation of being present in an electronically mediated environment that is illusionistic and sometimes remote from the body of the participant. In other words, immersive artworks have the capacity to collapse the perceived distance between the viewer and the artwork or between remote participants. Furthermore, VR and networked immersive artworks may have revolutionary consequences for traditional aesthetic theory in relation to spectatorship and aesthetic judgment. Three questions guide this enquiry: What does it mean to be immersed in art? How is it possible for viewers to become immersed in the flows of networked information? If networked immersive artworks create new aesthetic experiences for participants, what are the consequences for traditional theories of aesthetics and spectatorship? There are many artists who could be surveyed in this brief study of immersive aesthetics and technologies. Artists such as Luc Courchesne, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Michael Neimark, Simon Penny, Erwin Redl, Jeffrey Shaw, Christ Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, all use digital, screen-based and projection technologies to immerse the viewer in various aesthetic, structural and perceptual states. For the purposes of this article, though, I have decided to focus on works by Char Davies, Ken Goldberg, Paul Sermon, Stelarc, and a collaborative VR artwork by Petra Gemeinboeck, Roland Blach and Nicolaj Kirisit. These artists effectively illustrate the central concept of this article, that immersive artworks, whether they are VRs, screen-based or networked installations, have the potential to transform how we perceive our bodies, consciousness, communities and relationships with digital technologies. Ultimately, immersive artworks re-shape our understandings of art spectatorship from a distanced and passive exercise, to an active and often intimate endeavor, that is both playful and performative in nature.

Defining Immersion

What is immersion? What does it mean to describe a technologically generated environment as immersive? The very term immersion implies that one is drawn into an intimate and embodied relationship with a virtual and physical architecture, whether this immersive affect is generated by a VR system, the cinema, a panorama or another medium. It suggests that one is enclosed and embraced by the audio-visual space of the work, and transported into another realm or state of perception. One cannot be immersed without being affected by the environment on perceptual, sensory, psychological and emotional levels. In Ten Dreams of Technology, Steve Dietz includes ‘immersion’ (alongside ‘symbiosis’, ‘emergence’, ‘world peace’ and ‘transparency’) as part of a register of ideal states of presentation and viewer experience aspired to by many new media artists, curators and theorists (2002: 510-511). Immersive art and technology are not new phenomena. The ‘dream’ of total immersion can be seen as an ongoing quest to create an artificial environment that is absolutely embracing and engaging for the participant-viewer on sensory, emotional and psychological levels. Erkki Huhtamo (1995), Margaret Morse (1998), Barbara Maria Stafford (2002), Oliver Grau (1999 & 2003), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) and Angela Ndalianis (2004) all historicise immersive technologies and maintain that techniques designed to immerse the viewer in virtual and illusory spaces did not appear with the invention of digital technologies. They variously trace the origins of immersive aesthetics back to panoramas, cabinets of curiosities, Baroque ceiling paintings, ancient frescos and even cave paintings. So rather than being completely new, immersion seems to keep reappearing as an ideal, and often transcendental, form of human-representation and human-technology relationship. This fascination with immersion seems to indicate a human desire to fuse with the immersive image-space or technology—a desire to become posthuman or transhuman (Hayles, 1999: 6).

Immersive technologies and aesthetics are not empty of politics; on the contrary, they are ideologically loaded devices that allow viewers to enact a form of voyeuristic and colonising ‘machine vision’ that brackets out the ‘disturbing realities’ of the actual world (Huhtamo, 1995:161). As Huhtamo argues, immersive technologies create a form of directed vision that edits out the immediate world around the participant, while providing them with an illusion of being transported into another (remote) environment. For Huhtamo, immersive technologies are a form of visually immersive entertainment and ‘escapism’ (1995: 161). Although I agree with Huhtamo’s assertion that immersive technologies are ideologically imbued devices, there is a contradiction inherent in his critique of immersive aesthetics. On the one hand he interprets immersion as a ‘predominantly passive’ experience in which one simply looks into the screen (1995: 163). Paradoxically though, he also sees immersion as being linked to the desire to transcend the material body and to become immersed in a telematic environment (1995: 163).[1] This second point suggests an active perceptual relationship with immersive technologies, rather than a completely passive one. In order to become immersed, and to transcend the body, one must actively engage with the technology to extend one’s body and consciousness beyond biological and habitual modes of embodied perception.

In contrast to Huhtamo and others, I maintain that immersive aesthetics, especially in relation to immersive art, does not simply facilitate pure escapism into a hyper-real environment. Immersive artworks often generate self-conscious and self-reflexive forms of perception and interaction as participant-viewers engage with the work. Considering this, immersive art presents a challenge to traditional aesthetic philosophies—specifically Modernist philosophies descended from Immanuel Kant— that seek to assert the need for perceptual distance during the experience and assessment of art.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully elaborate on the debates surrounding the idea that one needs critical distance to competently judge and fully comprehend a work of art, but it is worth noting that critical distance has remained a dominant discourse in art history and theory. Modern aesthetic philosophy has often struggled to account for sensory-aesthetics in the body of the spectator, tending to privilege rational thought over sensory perception and a body that simultaneously thinks and feels (Lyotard, 1994: 10). Modern aesthetic theory that asserts the need for critical distance tends to perpetuate a mind/body dualism where the mind of the spectator is seen as the primary site of interpretation. The inability of modern aesthetic theory to adequately deal with sensory-aesthetics is somewhat ironic given that Alexander Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ (from the Greek ‘aesthesis’) to describe his project of creating a theory of ‘sensory knowledge’ (Shusterman, 1999). Kant also acknowledges that the subject’s experience of ‘pleasure and displeasure’ are central to the aesthetic experience, however he suggests that there is a serial temporality to sensation, reflective thought and meaning (Kant, 1957: 41-42). Kantian aesthetics implies that a form of emotional detachment and critical distance are necessary on the part of the viewer to adequately judge art and to experience a sublime encounter (Kant, 1957: 41-42). Thus, the viewer must maintain a position that is outside of the artwork or event.

The idea of a secure place outside of an event, culture or artwork has, of course, been critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Bourdieu and postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994), Lyotard critiques the assumed temporality of Kantian aesthetic reflection and critical distance by arguing that intuition and sensation are both forms of knowledge that take place instantaneously with other forms of thinking (10). According to Lyotard,

The act of thinking is … accompanied by a feeling that signals to thought its ‘state’. But this state is nothing other than the feeling that signals it. For thought, to be informed of its state is to feel the state of thought and a warning to thought of its state by this state. Such is the first characteristic of reflection: a dazzling immediacy and a perfect coincidence of what feels and what is felt (Lyotard, 1994: 11).

Rather than maintaining the idea of distanced contemplation, I am interested in the idea of contemplating an art object or environment from within the architecture of the work. Renée Van de Vall addresses this idea of a ‘critical distancing from within’ the physical and virtual boundaries of an artwork in ‘Immersion Distance and Virtual Spaces’ (2002: 141). Van de Vall asserts that interactivity and aesthetic self-reflexivity—‘the feeling one has of one’s own movements and perceptions in the performance of the work’—are central to experiences of immersion (2002:141). Hence, critical reflection is integral to the experience of immersive artworks. It takes place while one is engaged in the act of play or interaction within the immersive environment.

Immersive digital art may be seen as an extension of modern art movements such as Dada, Fluxus and Conceptual art because of the emphasis on formal elements, the concept of the work, art as an event, and the focus on audience participation. Immersive art is also markedly concerned with exploring and foregrounding the body’s complex role in aesthetic experience. Immersive artworks are often body-centred works that draw attention to the body of the participant during first-hand participation and spectatorship, while rendering visible the affects of technology and technological discourses on the body, the subject and habitual modes of perception. As such, immersive aesthetics can be seen as part of a discipline that Richard Shusterman calls, ‘somaesthetics’, the ‘critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning’ (Shusterman, 1999). Immersive experiences with VR and networked art may in fact have a transformative affect on how participants perceive their own bodies and everyday modes of perception during and after the event.

The point of many immersive artworks might in fact be that the viewer becomes aware of their own presence in the artwork and how they perceive these environments physically and intellectually while interacting with the work. Certain immersive VR, networked and screen-based installation artworks seem to invite viewers to contemplate the structure of the work and to comprehend their passage through a variety of perceptual states while they are immersed in the work. Rather than making the technology and interface invisible and natural to the participant, it seems that immersive artworks draw attention to the technology and the ways in which the technology and aesthetics structure the experience of this environment and everyday modes of perception.

While immersion may be viewed by some as an ideal state of presentation and experience, it is questionable whether artists are really seeking to achieve this ideal, given that they often have alternative strategic interests in using new technologies in the production and presentation of their work. Digital artists often have different interests to commercial, entertainment and military professionals regarding the development, creation and presentation of technologically mediated-environments. In some cases, artists actually work against the intended or legitimate uses of digital technologies and aesthetics. This is not to defend the idea of art as a separate and superior field of representation to computer science, entertainment media or military communication research. In fact it would be naïve to assume that the boundaries between these fields had not become increasingly blurred over the past forty years. Artists collaborate with scientists, engineers, graphic designers, robotics engineers and other specialists in the production of new hardware, software and interfacing systems. In turn, the new technologies and interfaces designed by artists, or made in collaboration with other professionals, are often appropriated by entertainment, scientific-research and military industries for their own projects. Nevertheless, some artists deliberately seek to subtly or overtly subvert the typical uses and aesthetics of certain technologies. New digital technologies and aesthetics may be appropriated and applied in critical and subversive ways to draw attention to the medium, the interactive event and the modes of perception used to participate with the work.

Immersion & VR

VR systems are seen by many new media theorists, artists and designers as the ideal medium for evoking a sense of immersion in the viewer. While cinema and VR are not the only aesthetic forms that create immersive experiences for participant-viewers, they remain the most written about forms of immersive technologies. Over the past two decades, histories and theories of immersion have tended to circulate around VR systems and discourses of cyberspace. The dominance of VR in discourses about immersive technologies and aesthetics is directly related to the fact that VR is seen by many theorists as the ultimate technology for totally immersing the viewer in a virtual environment. New media theorists and practitioners such as, Huhtamo, Bolter and Grusin and Grau, along with Michael Heim (1998), Ken Hillis (1999), (2000), Peter Lunenfeld (2000), Lev Manovich (2000) and Joseph Nechvatal (2001), maintain that VR systems are one of the most effective forms of immersive technology. Indeed, immersion is seen by some as the ‘defining feature’ of VR aesthetics (Heim 1998: 54).The types of immersion that VR is said to stimulate include ‘total immersion’ (Lunenfeld and Nechvatal), ‘full immersion’ (Bolter & Grusin) and ‘total sensory immersion’ (Featherstone and Burrows 1995: 3). There are also theorists and artists, such as Brenda Laurel, who suggest that immersion does not have to be ‘total’, it can be ‘partial’ by privileging some sensory ratios over others, especially vision and hearing. Whether it is ‘total’ or ‘partial’ these forms of virtual immersion imply that the user experiences a sense of fusion with a technologically generated space—a virtual environment (VE). The user becomes deeply embedded in this illusory space and their faculties of perception—their senses and processes of cognition of space, time and motion—recognise this experience as being akin to an embodied form of perception. Consequently, the boundaries between the computer-generated stimuli of the VR system and the embodied space of the participant-viewer seem to collapse. Char Davies virtual artworks, Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) are two examples of artworks that evoke this perceived collapsing of boundaries between technological and bodily space. These works will be the focus of the next section.

According to Grau, the aim of immersive art is to allow the viewer to ‘become part of the mise en scene’ of the artwork (2003: 44). The production of a sense of immersion in the viewer requires this perceived collapsing of distance between the viewer and the object, screen or image space. The aim of some VR systems seems to be to reduce the perception of distance between the viewer and representational space—or the subject and object—to almost zero degrees (Grau, 2003: 44). Distance is therefore antithetical to illusions of immersion in virtual spaces.Concepts of presence and telepresence are of central importance to understanding how immersive aesthetics seem to collapse space. Jonathan Steuer has argued that telepresence is a defining characteristic of virtual reality (1995: 35). He defines presence as ‘the sense of being in an environment’, while telepresence is a feeling of ‘being there’—of being present in a remote elsewhere through technological communication links (1995: 35-36). In other words, telepresence suggests that one can feel present in a distant location or virtual environment through human-technology interfaces. Presence and telepresence are central to immersive aesthetics in digital media art, because in order to feel immersed in a virtual or technological environment, one needs to have a sense of immediacy and intimacy with that environment.[2] In the case of VR systems, telepresence refers to the sensation of being present in a virtual space, while simultaneously occupying physical space in the material world. Telepresence of this form symbolically collapses space for the immersant through interfacing with specific digital information and VR technologies, while metaphorically expanding the space of the body and imagination through these technologies. The sense of closeness or (tele)presence within the virtual world of the artwork is achieved through several conditions. Firstly, VR technologies collapse the perceived distance between the viewer and the representational space by isolating the user in remote technologically-mediated space that surrounds the participant with three-dimensional imagery and sound. Immersive VEs physically and perceptually envelop the viewer in a technologically-mediated architecture. To engage with VEs first-hand, participants are required to enter into a physically intimate relationship with technology. They either have to enter a physically enclosed architectural space such as a Virtual Cave or multi-screen projection space, or they need to wrap their bodies in technological equipment such as Stereoscopic Goggles, Head Mounted Display (HMD) Units, Data-Suits and Data-Gloves. The hardware devices work with the software elements of computer graphics or animations, to enhance an illusion of being enclosed in the image space. Bringing the screen or image closer to the viewer’s eyes reduces the physical distance between the viewer and representational space (Grau, 2003: 44). This close proximity to the screen and image theoretically produces a sense of immersive presence in the illusionistic space of the work. In the case of HMD units they also effectively decapitate the viewer’s head from the rest of their body—a condition which Simon Penny (1995), N. Kathryn Hayles (1999) and others have argued reproduces a Platonic-Cartesian mind/body split. This split implies that the central site of perception is located in the mind and through the senses of vision and to a lesser extent, hearing. The rest of the body is meat to be abandoned and transcended by theoretically entering a VR which according to Jaron Lanier (1989) is a form of cyberspace.

Collapsing the perceived distance between the viewer and image is also made possible by placing the viewer at the centre of the virtual world and by emulating techniques of embodied perspective and perception. Point of view (POV) perspective is an especially powerful device for evoking a sense of embodied presence in VEs. Bolter and Grusin describe the embodied first-person POV used in some VEs as a ‘remediation’ of cinematic and televisual techniques that seek to provide viewers with the mobilised POV of particular characters (2000: 243). Cinema and game designers use POV techniques to provide a subjective form of narration and to heighten identification with on-screen characters or avatars. POV and psychological identification are central to suturing the viewer into the VE and heightening their impressions of total immersion within these domains. While panning, tracking, tilting and zooming shots are used in cinema to emulate the mobile gaze of characters, computer graphics and virtual reality systems, such as Davies’ environments, take the techniques of first-person POV and perspective further, often placing them in the participant’s control. The participant has agency over where, when and how to look. Placing the control over POV in the hands of the viewer has the effect of reinforcing the viewer’s perception of embodied and cognitive presence in the immaterial space of the VE. This sense of presence can only be experienced through technological mediation and first-hand interaction with the appropriate technology.

Embodied Immersion: Osmose and Ephémère

Issues of embodiment vs. disembodiment and the perception of space obviously play a central role in the artistic explorations of virtual reality. Only a few virtual-reality environments which completely immerse a viewer into an alternative world have been developed within an art context, and Canadian artist Charlotte Davies’s (b. 1954) Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) are classics of the genre. (Christiane Paul, 2003: 126)

As suggested earlier, Char Davies’ virtual environments, Osmose and Ephémère, are designed to enable for a mobile first-person point of view. They use a HMD unit in order to facilitate this perspective. When an active participant (or ‘immersant’ as Davies prefers to call them) perceptually enters Davies’ VEs they are offered an embodied POV of an imaginary world that fills their ‘field of vision’ in all directions (Lunenfeld, 2000: 87). As the participant physically turns or tilts their head and body to ‘look around’, they appear to be visually surrounded by this ephemeral, semi-abstract illusion in all directions. The immersant occupies a central position in this environment as the virtual world revolves around them. Davies environments are 360º spaces that visually and psychologically envelop the participant, which in turn produces kinaesthetic affects in the immersant. The visual spaces of Osmose and Ephémère have a depth of field and three-dimensionality that emulates human visual perception of actual space in terms of scale, depth and movement. The mobile, first-person POV works with the other elements such as the semi-translucent, semi-abstract imagery and three-dimensional sound, to generate an impression of being physically present in a virtual environment. These environments enact a Baroque logic by making the frame of the work invisible to the active participant and by stimulating multiple senses at once, extending the space of representation in all directions so that embodied perceptions of space become fused with the illusionistic space of the VE (Ndalianis, 2000). Davies’ VEs are consistent with Angela Ndalianis’s notion of the generation of the ‘Neo-Baroque’ effect in that they encourage participants to ‘emotionally, empathetically, and perceptually enter the microcosmic world of virtual reality’ (2004: 151). Ndalianis argues that the Neo-Baroque aesthetics of entertainment media have a ‘dual sensation of the audience’s immersion into the alternative world and the impression of the entry of the world into the space of the audience’ (2004: 151). Thus, perceptions of bodily and exterior space become blurred to the participant viewer. However, Davies’ works are not just entertaining or immersive in nature.

Although Osmose and Ephémère are often described as completely or totally immersive VE artworks, as evidenced by the Christiane Paul quote at the beginning of this section, it is important to note that these works are also presented as installations in public exhibition spaces. The immersant is situated in a small room behind a frosted glass pane. A back-lit silhouette of the immersant’s body is visible through this screen as they interact with the work. The immersant effectively adopts the role of performer while they interact with the VE. They are on display for the other viewers who are able to view the silhouette of the active participant while they interact with the virtual technology and see a two-dimensional version of what the immersant sees on a large high-resolution screen. Thus, becoming immersed in Davies’ VEs is not simply an intimate or autonomous event. Rather, this is a collective happening between multiple viewers with different perspectives of the same event. At the very least there is the first-person embodied mode of immersion and interaction with the work and a vicarious view of the screen and active participant as the spectator edits together this ‘performance’ and screening.

Lev Manovich compares the immersant in Davies’ work with a ‘ships captain’ who takes ‘the audience along on a journey’ and ‘occupies a visible and symbolically marked position, being responsible for the audience’s aesthetic experience’ (2000: 261). However, the immersant does not have as much control over navigating this environment as the ‘ships captain’ analogy implies. From first-hand experience of both Osmose and Ephémère, the interfacing systems are often quite difficult to control and this generates a self-awareness about how one is engaging with the technology. Besides the fact that the HMD unit is heavy and difficult to ignore, participants have to use their breath, movements and balance to navigate the system. They breathe in to rise; and out to fall; lean forward in a skiing gesture to move forward in a particular direction and stand upright to pause and float as if in water. Therefore participants navigate pathways through these immersive virtual environments by using their whole bodies or aspects of their bodies in unconventional ways. An effect of this embodied interface is that it creates a self-reflexivity about how one usually perceives actual space through habitual and embodied processes. While Osmose and Ephémère engage the participant’s body as a source of knowledge and experience through the interface system, they do so in a way that makes ones’ body seem alien to oneself. The techniques of breathing and movement utilised in these works are not everyday experiences of the body in motion for most people. Although Davies’ interfacing systems were based on the experience of scuba diving, this is hardly an everyday experience for the majority of people. In fact, these navigational techniques are better described as body disciplines that are acquired through practice. Viewers need to readjust and re-discipline their bodily movements and breathing in order to control their pathways through these virtual environments more effectively.

This is perhaps the main strength of Davies’ work. Rather than providing a completely escapist and passive experience of an immersive virtual environment, it heightens the immersant’s self-awareness of how they usually perceive and interface with the world and technology. They are required to enact a different form of embodied interaction with this virtual environment than a mouse or joy-stick interface would facilitate. Osmose and Ephémère have the potential to make participant-viewers more aware of their desires for control of their own bodies, the environment, technology and the actions of others. Active participants are neither physically nor intellectually distanced from the technology of the work, and hence, these immersive artworks can generate critical forms of engagement in the participant while they are ‘inside’ the work.

Dancing with the Goddess: Uzume

Petra Gemeinboeck, Roland Blach and Nicolaj Kirisit’s immersive virtual reality system, Uzume (2002), also provides the immersant with an embodied POV, while also situating these participants as performers or objects of observation for other viewers. Uzume is designed as a 4 to 6 wall CAVE projection environment. The title of the work refers to a Japanese Shinto Goddess and literally means ‘whirling’, an action that is repeated in the swirling visual aesthetics of the work and often in the gestures of the participants as they play with the work. Uzume provides the viewer with a screen-based responsive environment that is in a state of unfolding and emergence in relation to the actions of the participant-viewer. Participants are equipped with two hand sensors and tracked shutter glasses, which are significantly less cumbersome than the HMD unit utilised for Davies’ work. These devices allow participants to generate a three-dimensional, aesthetic environment in a process of becoming. As participants physically move around in the projection space of Uzume, they engage in a gestural and responsive communication exchange with the audio-visual interface. The Goddess software does not simply mimic the actions of the participant, but responds in more discrete and unpredictable ways. Uzume seems to be a virtual entity with autonomy from the participant-viewer. Participants do not have complete control over the system and must communicate with the system via playful gestures. Yet as they dance with the Goddess, they are also being observed by other viewers who witness their interaction as a performance. VEs such as Uzume, Osmose and Ephémère operate as installations and theatrical events by placing the active-participant on display within the architecture of the work—similar to some early happenings. While the participant communicates with the interface through their actions and movements, they effectively become performers and active participants within the work, challenging the once idealised aesthetic position of the distanced observer. Active-participants therefore occupy the dual position of the subject and object of observation for other viewers and they cannot help but be aware of these related roles. These immersive installation environments provide conditions for both the active observer and a more distanced observer, but they subvert the traditional notion of the objective contemplation of art.

Telepresence & Networked Art Events

While VR technologies provide the most overt forms of telepresence for viewers, VR is only one of many communication mediums that give the impression of bringing a distant space or subject closer to another (Steuer 1995: 36). Telepresence implies a form of absent presence in distant locations for the operator (Steuer, 1995: 35-36). Simulcast television, telephones, and mobile phones with built in cameras and live video or internet link-ups are other examples of communication technologies that potentially create a sense of telepresence in participants. These technologies seem to collapse the distance between users in remote locations by placing them in a participatory and communicative relationship with each other (Grau, 2003:271). Telematic, telepresence and telerobotic art projects explore the idea of our physical body and communities being distributed throughout the world, yet also being linked together via networked connections and spaces. Perhaps not surprisingly, these projects often have an interest in exploring the extension of the body and consciousness through digital technologies. The themes of new communities, surveillance, voyeurism and the lack of privacy in relation to networked technologies and spaces, are dominant concerns in telematic and telerobotic art. One of the first telerobotic projects on the internet was Ken Goldberg’s Telegarden (1996) which is on permanent display at the Ars Electronica Museum of the Future Centre in Linz, Austria. Telegarden combines networked art, robotics, webcam surveillance and the active participation of viewers located remotely from one another. The miniature garden is maintained by ‘gardeners’ who are situated remotely from the installation. Participants make their telepresence felt in the garden through the process of tending to this garden, which they are able to access via various networked technologies. They are able to see the garden via a webcam, and tend the garden via a robotic arm that allows them to water, feed and sometimes plant seeds in the garden. Thus they extend their physical presence through various networked technologies that render them telepresent in the geographically remote installation space. The success of this project is remarkable given that the maintenance of the installation depends upon the nurture of people across remote locations. Thousands of people have logged onto the system to help cultivate the garden in its various stages of growth and decline over the past few years. Tending this garden is a collective and anonymous activity. The creative act in this case is not only located with the artist, but with the participants who log in and technologically extend their bodies in order to nurture this mini-landscape. Telegarden highlights the potential that networked creative projects have to connect people from distant locations and involve them in collective community actions.

Although Telegarden is not a sensorially or architecturally immersive environment in the same way as VR and other networked installations, I maintain that it still immerses the user in a collective telematic environment. Experiences of telepresence and imaginary connections made between the different participants, the various technologies and the physical space of the garden, suggest another form of immersion—telematic or networked immersion. This form of immersion entails participants becoming involved in a collective act of creation of an event or environments through information links and networks. So while the participants may be distributed throughout the world they are collectively telepresent and telematically linked and immersed in production and information exchange.

More recently, a number of interesting networked technology art projects have taken place via video conferencing and more nomadic technologies such as mobile (cell) phones and personal digital assistants (such as Palm Pilots). Speakers Corner (2000-1) was designed by Jaap de Jonge to encourage remote participants to send text messages or emails to an interactive LED text display that was attached to the outside of Kirklees Media Centre in Huddersfield, England. The fifteen metre text display screened a constant stream of information from news updates, weather reports, political messages, poetry and personal messages sent by remote participants. Some strangers effectively communicated with each other through this public interface, which made public what is usually thought of as a secure and private form of communication. The space of the display screen became a nexus point of streaming information and projected identities—a site virtually (tele-)present, if only momentarily. While the concept of distributed aesthetics implies a fractured and dispersed form of cultural and artistic practice through the space and time of information flows, networked digital technologies also facilitate the connection, meeting, interaction and collective activities of people located in distant locations. Networked technologies allow for new forms of human-machine interaction, including the ability to experience a shared presence in multiple and remote locations at once.

Telepresence and Connectivity in Networked Installations

Networked installations often seek to immerse participants in a ‘composite reality’, connecting people from remote locations in virtual and physical spaces (Paul, 2003: 21). Grau has commented that telepresence art is ‘the successor to telematic art’ as defined by Roy Ascott (2003: 271). Yet it is probably more appropriate to say that telepresence art is an extension of telematic art. Telepresent, networked installations share some concerns with telematic art in terms of linking participants from distinct locations, foregrounding the concept of a networked community, stressing process-orientated art practice and enticing multiple users into participatory relationships with art. British artist, Paul Sermon, synthesised immersive aesthetics into his telematic installations in the early 1990s. Sermon studied with Ascott in the early stages of his career and credits Ascott with having influenced some of his initial concepts. In Telematic Dreaming (1992), Sermon used video-conferencing technologies to create a link between individuals located in two distinct spaces. Central to the installation was a double bed that acted as both a prop and projection screen for the event. Participants would recline on the bed and face a real-time projected image of another individual who was situated remotely. The feedback system and intimacy of the work created an immersive environment and sense of telepresence for active participants occupying the imaginary bedrooms. Although the participants could not communicate verbally, they could communicate through facial expressions and bodily gestures, sometimes reaching out to touch the other person. This installation brought individuals (usually strangers) into close proximity with each other. The experience was both personal and public, with a video camera documenting the exchange between the strangers and then sending the live footage to a series of monitors that surrounded the bed in one of the spaces. So while it was an immersive and intimate experience for the participants on the bed, it was also a voyeuristic experience for on-lookers. The semiology of the bed contributed to the success of this immersive, telepresence installation and event. The bed is a cultural symbol that holds connotations of intimacy, privacy, rest, sexuality and desire. Sermon played on these connotations by using the surface of the bed as a projection screen and through the production of a perceived intimacy in the collapsing of the psychic space between participants. The materiality of the bed further enhanced the immersive qualities of this installation by drawing on the bodily memories of those participants who had an experience of sharing a bed with another person.

In a later work, Telematic Vision (1993), Sermon produced another immersive, telepresence installation around two large sofas and a television monitor that were placed in different rooms. Once again, the semiology of the sofa and the television worked together to create a familiar and intimate relationship for a theatrical exchange to take place between strangers in these locations. From personal experience, this work seemed to evoke far more playful and mischievous interactions from the participants than Telematic Dreaming, perhaps because the lounge room is usually a more social space than the bedroom.

Extending the Body

One of the obvious advantages of telepresence is that the operator can hypothetically see and feel from a machine’s perspective in close proximity, while simultaneously maintaining a safe physical distance. The operator extends their body through hardware and software technologies. A technological device becomes an extension of the operator’s body, continuing human presence beyond the corporeal body through information networks and into a mechanical form. Thus, telepresence produces a type of cyborg embodiment and perception for the operator who fuses their naturalised modes of sensing and perceiving with technological modes of seeing, hearing and feeling. Stelarc has evoked a type of cyborg vision and telepresence in his events by attaching cameras to his head and other body parts to document events from an embodied POV that seems on the surface to emulate naturalised vision, while actually being mediated through the lens of the camera. Stelarc’s Ping Body and Fractal Flesh (1995-7) events explored the possibilities of cyborg vision and re-embodiment through technology by drawing upon and extending the idea of telepresence. Distant spectators were given the opportunity to log into a web interface and to affect the artist’s body (or ‘the body’ as Stelarc prefers to call it) from a remote location (Stelarc, 2004). Active contributors effectively participated in a performance event with Stelarc by activating muscle stimulating electrodes that were attached to his body. Ping Body/Proto Parasite (1995) at Telepolis offered an opportunity for people at the Pompidou Centre (Paris), the Media Lab (Helsinki) and the Doors of Perception Conference (Amsterdam) to remotely access and manipulate Stelarc’s physical body in Luxembourg. Remote users could stimulate various parts of Stelarc’s body through the Stimbod system (Touch Screen Interface for Multiple Muscle Stimulation) by physically interacting with a touch-screen and graphic representation of the artist’s body.[3] Ping values were then gathered from users’ collective activity and translated into electrical stimuli (low voltage shocks) that were applied to ‘the body’. Users could watch the affects of this information feedback system in real time because it was video taped and webcast live. Stelarc was effectively telepresent in multiple locations at once via video, computer and internet links, while remote users were also making their telepresence felt through their ability to manipulate Stelarc’s body from distant locations. In both cases, metaphors of cyborg bodies and telepresent perception were evoked through these interactions. The Ping Body experiment implies a desire for control over bodily reactions (pain and fatigue) as it goes through physical and metaphorical re-construction through prosthetic addition and cybernetic extension. Simultaneously though, it suggests a surrendering of autonomy and power over the body as it becomes a vehicle for telepresence and communication. The tension between the desire for technological control and subjection is fundamental to debates about telepresence and information technologies more generally. Telepresence implies that one can be electronically present anywhere with the right information links, equipment and feedback systems. Central to the fascination with telepresence and virtual reality is the desire for control over things that are remote from the body. Arguably, the fixation that some people have with being (tele)present in several locations at once and being able to escape the corporeal body (if only temporarily) reflects an obsession with transformation and control through technological means. Stelarc creates an inverse relationship in his work by surrendering control of his body and allowing it to become another point of connection in the information flow. Ken Hillis maintains in Digital Sensations (1999) that we ’fear the loss of control over our minds, our society, our government, our bodies, and our sexuality‘(1999: 211). Ironically, VR and the internet are sites that heighten our awareness of conditions that already exist in our culture that we have little control over such as conflict, exploitation, media saturation, visual surveillance and the technologisation of our bodies and perception (Hillis, 1999: 211). These cyberspaces intensify an awareness of our desire for control over our bodies and environments, but couple this alertness with an anxiety concerning the extent to which we are able to control such things.

Three conclusions emerge from this analysis of VR and net.art. First, net.art has the potential to create immersive experiences for participants by collapsing the perceived distance between the viewer and another participant or event in a remote location. Information networks not only distribute information, they create links and draw people closer together. Second, immersive and distributed aesthetics are not necessarily escapist in nature and do not always represent a flight from the body. Rather, as the term aesthetics implies, they can evoke a return to the body and sensory perception by heightening awareness of naturalised and embodied modes of perception. They also draw attention to how naturalised modes of perception are being extended and transformed through new information technologies and networks. In some cases, technological interfaces have already become so ingrained in our everyday lives as to be normalised body disciplines, even though they clearly generate particular modes of interacting with the world.

Finally, artworks that generate immersive and distributed aesthetics have had a dramatic effect on traditional aesthetic theories that uphold the ideal of a distanced observer. Immersive digital artworks enfold the viewer in the architecture of the work, extending the viewer’s sense of bodily presence in virtual and remote locations. The traditional relationship between the viewer and art object has been radically reconfigured by new technologies that situate the viewer in different spatial and perceptual relationships with the work. By immersing the participant in a changing sensory-aesthetic environment, VR systems and net.art refuse the illusion of a secure place outside of an artwork or technological culture where one can dispassionately assess art, technology and our relationships with these discourses. They highlight Lyotard’s point that aesthetic judgment takes place in ‘a dazzling immediacy’ of thinking and feeling while interacting with the work of art. Yet immersive artworks often expand this concept by transforming the role of the viewer from a spectator to a participant or performer who effectively helps to create both the content and the meaning of the work as they interact.

Author’s Biography

Edwina Bartlem is an art curator and writer with a specific interest in video, new media and biological art practice. Until recently, she taught cinema and new media studies in the Cinema Program at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is currently completing a PhD on immersive aesthetics in new media art. At present, she is the Curator and Arts Programmer at Manningham Gallery in Melbourne. Recent publications include: ‘Immersive Artificial Life’ in the Journal of Australia Studies (Issue 84, 2005), ‘Coming Out on a Hell Mouth’ in Refractory: Journal of Entertainment Media (Vol 2, 2003) and ‘Emergence: New Flesh and Life in New Media Art’, soon to be published in an edited book on the future of flesh and bodily mutation.

Notes

[1] ‘Telematics’ refers to computer mediated communication networking made possible through telephone, cable, internet and satellite links. These technologies effectively bring individuals or institutions from geographically dispersed locations into communicative relationships. Perceptions of space, bodies, identities (personal, national and global) and ideas about communication have been challenged by telematics. Roy Ascott introduced the term ‘telematic art’ to describe art projects that use communication links and exchanges as integral parts of the work. For Ascott, the meaning of art is not generated by the artist alone, but by the process of interaction between the participant(s) and networked systems.
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[2] The concept of telepresence evolved from research done in the mid-1980s by NASA’s Human Factors Research Division who were working on developing telepresence as a way of manipulating robots from a distance, to reduce the risk of human harm or death in hazardous environments (Woolley, 1992: 126). As Benjamin Woolley describes it, NASA’s research was aimed at providing ‘a wrap-around technology that would give the machine operator the feeling of being in the place of the machine being operated’ (1992: 126).
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[3] The Stimbod software was conceptualised by Stelarc and designed by Troy Innocent. Gary Zebington developed the remote body-control element of the software that was used in the Ping Body events. See Stelarc’s website for more information about the design and development of Stimbod (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au).
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References

Ascott, Roy. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. Edward A Shanken (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003).

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000).

Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’, in Analytic Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

Featherstone, Mike, and Burrows, Roger. ‘Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction’, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies /Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, eds, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995).

Stelarc. ‘Parasite Visions: Alternate, Intimate and Involuntary Experiences’, Ars Electronica Archive (2000), http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=8472.

Grau, Oliver. ‘Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality’, Leonardo, Vol 32, No 5 (2000): 365-371.

Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, translated by Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

Hayles, N. Kathryn. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Hillis, Ken. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Huhtamo, Erkki. ‘Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion’ in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. Simon Penny (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

Lanier, Jaron. ‘Virtual Reality: A Status Report’, in Cyberarts: Exploring Art and Technology, ed. Linda Jacobson (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1989), 272-279.

Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993).

Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures (Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 2000).

Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000).

Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).

Nechvatal, Joseph. ‘Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Nervous Views from Within’, Leonardo Vol 34, Issue 5 (December, 2001): 417-422.

Ndalianis, Angela. ‘Baroque Perceptual Regimes’, Paper delivered at Special Effects/Special Affects: Technologies of the Screen, University of Melbourne, (2000). Available from Senses of Cinema 9, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/baroque.html.

Ndalianis, Angela. Neo Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press, 2004).

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003).

Shusterman, Richard. ‘The End of Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55:1, (Winter 1997).

Shusterman, Richard. ‘Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999).

Shanken, Edward A. ‘From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott’, in Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. Edward A Shanken (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003).

Stafford, Barbara Maria and Terpak, Frances. Devices of wonder: from the world in a box to images on a screen (Los Angeles, California and Windsor, Garsington: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art & the Humanities, 2002).

Stelarc, ‘Stimbod’, http://www.stelarc.va.com.au.

Steuer, Jonathan. ‘Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions DeterminingTelepresence’, Journal of Communications 42, 4 (1992): 73-93.

Van de Vall, Renée. ‘Immersion and Distance in Virtual Spaces’, Thamyris/Intersecting 9 (2002): 141-54.

Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality, (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).

These articles have been designed in PDF will launch in Acrobat. There are two versions..

Launch Experimental Version: Beyond the Museum Walls: Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements)

Launch Print Version: Beyond the Museum Walls: Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements)

Author’s Biography

Vince Dziekan is Senior Lecturer in Digital Imaging, and Deputy Head (Academic) of the Department of Multimedia & Digital Arts, at Monash University in Melbourne. Over the years, he has used photography as a basis for his interdisciplinary practice and towards negotiating the impact of digital technologies on art practice. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions since emigrating to Australia in 1986 and is represented in a number of public collections.

Complementing his own artistic practice, he has also curated exhibitions such as Archival Permanence: Time and Timelessness in 100 years of Australian Photography and The Synthetic Image: Digital Technologies and The Image and Small Worlds: A Romance; the ‘multi-modal’ exhibition Remote is his current curatorial project (in development for 2006).

In his current work, he is engaged in an ongoing interdisciplinary project into the implications of virtuality and the art of exhibition and producing what can be described as ‘multi-modal’ artworks and art projects. He has also contributed to the critical theorization of digital aesthetics, including sub-chairing, reviewing and presenting at a number of national and international conferences.

(This paper was originally presented as part of the User_Mode symposium, Tate Modern, London, 2003)

In recent artistic work I have been exploring the implications of digital technology, interactivity and internet connectivity that allow people to not so much space/time-shift their visual experience of things but rather see what happens when everybody is simultaneously able to see what everybody else can see. This is extrapolated through the remote networking of sites that are actual installation spaces; where the physical movements of viewers in the space generate multiple perspectives, linked to other similar sites at remote locations or to other viewers entering the shared data-space through a web based version of the work.

This text explores the processes involved in such a practice and reflects on related questions regarding the non-singularity of being and the sense of self as linked to time and place.

Introduction

We regard the self as singular. We imagine the collective other as composed of multiple singular selves. Each ‘self’ is seen as occupying a single moment in time and a single point in space. The notion of the instance of self is inextricably bound up with this idea of a singular locus in time/space. It is perhaps this, in correlation with memory, which we conveniently refer to as consciousness.[1]

The geometry of vision we accept as conventional is the inverted triangle, with the ‘eye’ at the apex of the triangle and the ocular field composed of that lying within the boundary of this triangle (Lacan, 1977). Such representations of the visual field typically manifest as single graphical forms with a single apex, related to the single, even if abstracted, ‘eye’. Such a representation functions to reinforce our accepted belief that the self is singular and can only occupy one point in space at any one time. This paradigm is also evident in the structure of mechanised visualisation and image recording systems we have developed (2D and 3D imaging systems). This dominant mode of ‘vision’ and, by implication, notion of self, is also evident in how we visually represent things; for example Cartesian space and its unique vanishing point functions as a correlate, although inverse, triangle relative to the geometry of vision outlined above. Thus we can see how our artifacts, in their very structures, map onto our models of the human and thus reflect our sense of who we believe ourselves to be.

Background

Over the past two decades my artistic practice has been focused on questions around identity explored through the use of interactive spaces where the act of interaction itself functions to foreground issues concerned with being. The intention of this work has always been artistic. That is, there is no pretence in any of these projects to a position on psychology or the less rigid domain of philosophy concerned with ontology. As an artist I have often been inspired by well thought out and argued theoretical positions but I have never felt any compulsion to make work with the necessary rigour and internal coherence that such academic practice demands. Art is not a means to make an argument, nor is it a device to illustrate theoretical concerns. Rather, art is that human activity which can confound the basic sense we make of things, such that we are then able to see things in a manner we might otherwise never have considered. It is in the creation of dis-juncture between the thing and its representation that we come to see the thing and its relation to other things, particularly ourselves, anew.

My intent, when creating works of art that function to disturb the manner by which we physically see things, is to disturb our accepted notion of self as evidenced through how we ‘know’ ourselves through our sense of seeing. The objective is not to author a new theoretical position, nor to reflect an accepted one, but to destabilise our sense of self as a subjective experience in the hope of giving cause to doubt, at a subjective and experiential level, this basic belief in self.

A primary point of differentiation we subjectively employ to maintain our sense of internal unity and uniqueness is that between the self and the other.[2] Although it is well established, with numerous arguments having been made regarding cultural, sociological and psychological factors, the focus of my practice has been in engendering a subjective ‘failure’ to differentiate, resulting in a process of de-differentiation of self and thus a re-positing of self as non-singular, de-centred and distributed.

Development

Technology has functioned, for as long as people have developed and applied it, to extend human ability. One human capability which has been subject to numerous technological enhancements is vision. Generally these enhancements have been concerned with either allowing us to see things that we cannot see due to spatial limitations (they are too far away, too small or obscured by some other element) or temporal restrictions (things that have happened at another time). Technologies such as the telescope, microscope and periscope have been developed to deal with the limitations of space. The camera fulfils the same role relative to time (Cubbitt, 1991).

However, as we all know from basic physics, time and space are not separate things but are the dialectical aspects forming the fundamental medium of being (Russell, 1997). This has been accepted as conventional scientific knowledge for most of the Twentieth Century and as an idea has inspired numerous artists, perhaps most famously Picasso and Braque, with the initial development of what is now known as Analytical Cubism. Modern physics, as best exemplified by Einstein’s theories, has, along with contemporary psychology, been amongst the most influential of knowledge systems upon Modern artistic practice.

Nevertheless, it would be an error to seek an interpretation of Picasso within the paradigms of physics for it is unlikely that Picasso’s intent would have been in any respect scientific. More likely, he managed to find something in contemporary scientific theory that allowed him to further his objective of destabilising the way things seem to be. His interest was in how we feel, or know, ourselves to be relative to the subject or other. Picasso’s interest was most likely in ontology, not physics.

Analytical Cubism is typified by its representation of the subject as a highly fragmented, often incomplete, object within a similarly treated context. A primary device in achieving this fragmentation is the use of multiple points of view in establishing the format, angle and placement of the subject. In such work the multiple points of view are clearly those that were available to the artist (either in reality or in their imagination) and although they may become numerous their number is finite.

My own work has taken, to a degree, ideas as represented in work such as Picasso’s as an initial point of departure. I must admit though that although I am an admirer of his work, and particularly of that period known as Analytical Cubism, the connections between my own recent practice and Picasso’s work only dawned on me retrospectively (although this does not mean that his work did not influence mine…just that if it did so it was not conscious).

Application

When developing the multiple viewpoint model employed in my recent practice, initially in a work entitled Babel (Biggs, 2001a), my primary interest had been in ways by which I could solve the problem of shared three dimensional perception in shared interactive and immersive three dimensional spaces (what are typically referred to as responsive environments or virtual reality, although I find neither of these names satisfactory). That is, I was concerned with the viewer’s viewpoint (or viewers’ viewpoints), not the artist’s. How to represent the ‘point of view’ is a fundamental problem in
such work. When there is only a single inter-actor (as in conventional head-up Virtual Reality systems) this is not a problem. The system is able to calculate both the ocular origin of the viewer and a three dimensional view around them that satisfies the requirements for a coherent, convincing and conventional three dimensional scene.

However, as soon as more than one inter-actor is involved in such a system a problem emerges, as the technology is still required to construct a coherent three dimensional view determined by the points of view of the participants. Two typical solutions to the problem are usually employed. Firstly, one of the inter-actors is assigned a lead role (this might be dynamically assigned and reassignable) in the definition of the point of view and therefore the construction of the ocular field. This role is usually assigned to the inter-actor who is also in control of the interactive ‘levers’ of the work [3] , although in some works the roles are kept separate such that a communications dynamic is formed between the ‘one that can see’ and the ‘one that can act’.[4] A second approach to the problem is to calculate a generic view, usually through some sort of median sampling of inter-actor positional data and activity. By this latter method a single point of view is calculated that is in some manner the mean average generated by the total number of view points and their relative positional data. This results in a generic view that relates equally to all the views but does not necessarily map onto any single one. In this solution any attempt at a sensory representation of three dimensional space built around the subjective eye of the viewer is abandoned (Barron, 1996).

Neither of these approaches have ever seemed satisfactory to me and thus have functioned to deter me from employing three dimensional visualisation techniques in my practice. My primary interest in all my work is the interaction of people with other people (not people with machines) and how through the manifestation of this interaction new experiences can be generated that allow us to further reflect on what it is to be ‘us’. Due to this all my interactive artworks have been, by necessity, multi-user. Thus it was clear I would always have concerns with three dimensional visualisation as the problem of the point of view would always be there to confound and compromise the (inter-personal) intent of the work.

The commissioning brief to design and build Babel was clear; that the work had to be concerned with libraries, that it must exist on the internet and that it must in some fashion involve the notion of navigation. My immediate response to this was to imagine a navigable virtual space that people could explore, and where the contents of a library could be navigated in some manner. The idea evolved to the point that it was clear that this space should be multi-user and that the various ‘users’ would be explicitly aware of one another. It was a small step from there to decide that the visualisation of all this should be such that the navigational system and the data to be navigated should be the same thing. Then the problem emerged: How would the issue of ‘point of view’ be addressed? After looking at the alternative solutions to the problem, as outlined above, I decided to use neither of them and to use instead the usual convention of each viewer having their own point of view, but to simply have them all visualised simultaneously, rendering them in real-time into a single multi-layered representation of space. This allowed people to be immediately aware of other participants, to render the entire scene as a product of this multiple-view-point ocular space, and to fold the various components of data, interface, user modelling (user presence) and visualisation into a single graphical model. It also satisfied my poetic need to create a work that in some fashion caused a dis-juncture between each of these components.

Since the completion of Babel I have continued to develop some of the emergent key themes of the work through pieces such as Precession of the Equinoxes (Biggs, 2001b), Parallax (Biggs, 2002a) and Tristero (Biggs, 2002b). The works Precession of the Equinoxes and Tristero exist as primarily online works. Parallax exists as primarily an installation but with an online component.

When Babel was first produced the intention was that it would be an online project. However, as work progressed, it became clear there was a compelling case that it could also become an architectural scale site-specific installation. Thus when the work went live on the internet this was complemented by three installation versions of the work at the three main libraries comprising the commissioning agent (Essex Libraries, UK). This involved large scale interactive projections of the work onto the three buildings, each in a different town, either inside or outside, of Babel, with all of these projections linked to the internet such that inter-actors, whether at one of the three locations or at any location on the net, would be able to participate in the collective process of visualisation that the work is primarily composed from.

Parallax sustains this approach, although the work has been designed from conception to employ and exploit this device, whereas with Babel this arose through an evolutionary iterative artistic process and was not the initial intention. In Babel the content was concerned with the taxonomies of knowledge that determine how we create our libraries and how to navigate this ever burgeoning data-space (with implicit reference to the now potentially un-catalogue-able scale of the internet through the re-mapping of Dewey Decimal numbering onto URLs of similar taxonomical value). By contrast Parallax is a determinedly formalist work where the focus of the piece is on the process of visualisation itself. That is to say, the work could be considered a structuralist exercise in that the choices of the visual elements were primarily determined by the form of the visualisation rather than a desire to visualise certain content.

It was clear that Parallax would be composed of multiple over-layed three dimensional views so the imagery required would have to be simple, without backgrounds or multiple related components, to avoid confusion and aid perception of the implied and critically important multiple view points. Secondly, unlike Babel, which was primarily an online work requiring low-band solutions (e.g. text instead of image), Parallax, as primarily an installation-based work, could be high-band and thus use photographic quality moving imagery (as is the case with most of my installations). Thirdly, most of the movement in Parallax would be the result of the parallax effect (where objects nearer the eye appear to move faster than those further away) itself caused by the multiple movements in the installation space of the various inter-actors.

To aid in the formation of the strongest three dimensional illusion possible it was obvious that the objects that would come to compose the three dimensional views would also have to be moving, but not moving through the virtual space relative to one another and the overall spatial envelope of the ocular field. Freer movement of the objects would have functioned to confuse the parallax effect that the three dimensional illusion relied on. Thus it was determined that the objects would move around their own axes, this in turn heightening the three dimensional effect as the viewers gain sight of all aspects of each object.

Thus, the selection of the imagery was dictated by a set of very stringent criteria. To satisfy the needs of the piece I had to select imagery which I could record in digital video and in a highly controlled studio environment, with the usual array of systems available to me. The objects would need to be singular, isolated, visually simple, rotating around their own axes (and thus of a vertical characteristic, as opposed to the naturally horizontal spatial movement that is the parallax effect) and yet visually rich and subtle with clear three dimensional properties. The immediate solution was the human figure and thus it was determined that three appropriate figures which by their nature spin around their own axes could (arbitrarily) be Sufi dervishes, ballet dancers and children’s spinning toys. Any reading that might be made of this, and I, as well as others, have come up with many, might be rewarding but are ultimately arbitrary. I leave it to the individual’s imagination as to what it all might mean, as this reflects again upon the inter-dynamics of the work as represented in its central motif, the multiple point of view.

The reasoning for the use of three screens was similarly determined by a simple factor; that together, and arranged as they are, they create an easily constructed and self-supporting structure that in its floor plan models the ocular field that the work is based on – the triangle.

Conclusion

The intention here has not been to justify practice through theory, nor to illuminate theory through practice. It has been to employ resources available in theoretical discourse and artistic practice to evoke and further explore a number of artworks that concern themselves with the relationship between perception and the notion of self. To some degree, it was not my only intention to enact a convergence of disciplines to see how they might inform one another; I also sought to explore their limits through a possible confounding of the intentions of this particular instance of convergence.

Author’s Biography

Simon Biggs was born in Australia, 1957, and moved to the UK in 1986. A self-taught visual and inter-disciplinary artist, he studied Electronic and Computer Music at Adelaide University 1979-81. Since 1978 Biggs has been working with computers and interactive systems within large-scale installation, web-based artworks and other contexts to explore issues around identity and reality as social constructs. He is also widely published internationally as a writer and internationally active as a consultant curator. See http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ for a more detailed biography.

Notes

[1] The subject of Consciousness Studies is explicitly converging with the study of the creative arts, as exemplified by developments at the University of Wales, Newport and the associated CaiiA Star centre for post-graduate studies (Plymouth University).
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[2] Theories concerning the definition of the self relative to the other have become received knowledge in contemporary culture, although there is actually a field of theories, many of which are exclusive of one another. There is no intention here to engage with any of these theories other than to simply identify that they are there, they are commonplace and all have some relevance to the subject in hand.
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[3] This is the conventional CAVE (Collaboratively Actuated Virtual Environment) model, as exemplified by Dan Sandin’s (Illinois University, Chicago) permanent work at the Ars Electronica Centre, Linz, Austria.
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[4] Some works of Char Davies (http://www.chardavies.com/immersence_home.htm) are an example here.
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References

Barron, Stéphan. Day and Night (1996), http://stephan.barron.free.fr/.

Biggs, Simon. Babel (2001a), commissioned by Essex Libraries, UK, http://www.babel.net.uk.

Biggs, Simon. Precession of the Equinoxes (2001b), http://www.littlepig.org.uk.

Biggs, Simon. Parallax (2002a), http://www.littlepig.org.uk.

Biggs, Simon. Tristero (2002b), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, London, http://www.tristero.co.uk/.

Cubbitt, Sean. Timeshift: On Video Culture (London and New York: Comedia/Routledge, 1991).

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977).

Russell, Bertrand. The ABC of Relativity (London: Routledge, 1997).

This article has been designed in PDF and will launch in that application.

Launch Excerpts From‘Portrait Of The VJ’

Author’s Biography

Mark Amerika, who has been named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator” as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, has had four retrospectives of his digital art work. Recently Amerika has begun a new research project devoted to what he calls Life Style Practice (LSP). As part of this Life Style Practice, Amerika integrates his life as a nomadic net artist with international VJ tours, DVD with surround sound installations, hactivist performances, and what he refers to a “cyberpsychogeographical drifting.” Some of the recent digital traces left behind in this emerging Life Style Practice include CODEWORK, DJRABBI, and SOCIETY OF THE SPECATCLE (A DIGITAL REMIX). An extended biography is available at http://www.markamerika.com/bio.html.

Introduction: The Trouble with Flexibility

Design has become an essential part of the contemporary global economy. Graphic, industrial, and Web design, in particular, produce a seductive link from the ‘economic to the cultural’ facets of our lives (Julier, 2000: 20). More to the point, design creates desire – the fuel of contemporary commerce (Helfand, 1999; Lasn, 1999).

The ease of manufacture and “just-in-time” production scheduling mandate an ever-shrinking response time to market feedback. The result is a similarity between products and services (Julier, 2000: 25-27). It is therefore imperative that corporate entities sell an image of themselves in order to differentiate their products from a competitor’s.

The role of the designer has become one of a cultural intermediary who maintains a ‘specific attunement to the swirl of values and tastes within culture’ (Soar, 2002: 571). As a result, the designer is obligated to create something that is not only highly innovative but is acceptable to broad audiences for integration into their everyday lives. The interconnectedness of commercial production and cultural identity is such that the careers of designers are subject to the whims of the marketplace, the corporate entity, and the intended audience’s ever-shifting cultural norms and tastes.

Many designers struggle to navigate between the demands of commercially viable cultural production and personally meaningful work (McRobbie, 2002a). Perhaps buying into the mythology that aggrandizes the struggling artist, young designers often work long hours in insecure jobs for nothing more than a flexible schedule, mediocre pay, and a passion for their work.

It has been posited that this recent promotion of the “entrepreneurial spirit” and the individualisation of creative work is central in the neo-Liberal economic agenda (McRobbie, 2002a). Angela McRobbie’s work on the post-Fordist culture industries in Great Britain highlights many salient features of New Labour’s efforts to dismantle the social aspects of the work environment. Many of the trends she reveals are concomitant throughout the world.

The promise of creative freedom, design stardom, and self-expression drives designers to work in temporary or freelance jobs and to forgo financial security thus feeding capitalism an endless supply of young, fresh talent. The flexible economy and the designer ethos allow capital to offload much responsibility for maintaining and supporting the workforce (McRobbie, 2002b). The individualisation of the work experience for the freelance creative producer subverts the traditional social facets of the workplace and removes the threat of unionisation. Needless to say, as designers and artists grow older a freelance or corporate practice may prove too risky or otherwise undesirable. Options for the middle-aged creative professional may be limited.

This article argues that online environments supplement the design practice by providing some of the social networks that McRobbie argues are dismantled in the new work environment. McRobbie maintains that alternative environments, such as the club or bar, become the designer or artist’s primary social realm blurring the line separating their work and private lives (McRobbie, 2002b). Technologies such as the mobile phone, laptop, and café with Internet access, she argues, work in similar fashion.

I contend that the role of technology is far more convoluted. I will describe the technological tools used by designers to expand their practice. This review is derived from an ethnographic study of design culture websites – websites that cater to all types of artists, designers, and design aficionados – and discussions with their participants.

Drawing on Richard Barbook’s notion of a hi-tech gift economy (Barbook, 1998) and Andrew Feenberg’s open source exchange model (Jesiek, 2003), I analyse communal production and alternative creative culture in the described online spaces within the context of the individualised and flexible contemporary design practice. Both Barbook and Feenberg see code sharing in open source projects as reinvigorating individual and communal agency and slightly shifting power away from the corporate entity. I borrow this notion of gift exchange and lay it over the conceptual framework describing the online design community spaces in an effort to explain how the traditional design practice has expanded with the use of the Internet. What results, I argue, is a wide array of resources, intellectual property licenses, publishing venues, small-scale markets, and collaborative production methodologies that may benefit the small-scale or independent creative producer.

Design portals and blogs, for instance, often provide a number of resources for designers at all professional levels: professional services that support designers and artists, job postings, tutorials, free visual materials, and small-scale marketplaces in which participants can sell their work.

Through this analysis and a comparison with open source movements, I argue that we must appreciate the development of a parallel design practice. This parallel practice perhaps affords the designer more freedom, thus further blurring the lines between traditional art-making and the design disciplines. The work shared on design community sites is often self-motivated and distributed outside the commercial realm where designers and artists are freed from the restrictions imposed by capital. The communities that develop, then, thrive on sharing and reputation-based means of advancing discourse about the production of visual artifacts.

What I hope can be extrapolated from this notion of the parallel design practice is that there may be subtle shifts in the global cultural economy that, while not a sea change, may expand and, in time, alter the creative individual’s cultural practices and, by default, their role in and relationships with the corporate world.

Design Culture Websites – A Virtual Ethnography

To best understand this parallel practice, one must first examine the role of online community in the working lives of designers. The ethnographic research that informs this article happened from March 2000 until July 2005 and was carried out in a number of ways:

• Email correspondence
• Instant messaging
• Review of bulletin board and blog postings
• Informal electronic survey taking
• Telephone interviews.

It is the blurring of the professional and private, work and play divisions that make it somewhat facile to study individual and communal interactions. The primary contacts became part of the study through casual conversation initiated by a prompt that was, more often than not, a question I posed to the individual by email. As the conversations continued, I tried to garner a sense of how the online community functions in their individual practice. I compared their responses with observed long- and short-term behavior and their discussions in online forums.

I spent significant time lurking in online spaces, observing community members, and interviewing individuals directly. In addition to visiting virtual community spaces (portals, message boards, and resources sites) daily, scrutinizing archived chat transcripts, and interviewing the primary contacts, I followed references, topics of discussion, or hypertext links.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that design culture communities are a loose conglomeration of sub-cultural groups and various disciplines. The boundaries defining this study community were much less formally defined and very fluid. From one community space to the next, a variety of notions exist about how the online resources change or supplement traditional design practices. There was consensus, however, on the idea that online resources, information repositories (in the form of blog entries or portal links), community discussions, and portfolio sharing had indeed influenced their practice in some way and often for the better.

A generally positive view of online community and resources was shared across a study community of roughly 220 people. I maintained a core group of seven primary informants with whom I communicated periodically throughout the four years of this study. The bulk of the research, however, comes from the larger survey of designers and creative individuals. The key informants came from diverse backgrounds and had achieved various levels of recognition in their online design communities.

Of the primary informants, two individuals were students who had been lauded by community members and had work frequently displayed on well-known design portals. Two other individuals helped establish and curate collective design culture sites and a third hosted live events and a successful website promoting experimental motion graphics.

The other primary contacts were practicing designers (one Web designer and one traditional print-based graphic designer) who, despite their frequent visits to design portals and participation in online discussions, did not really consider themselves an active part of the online design culture community. The primary contacts lived in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and the Philippines. All seven participants were in their twenties.

When asked how they defined themselves, 57% of the broader study community simply considered themselves “designers”. Another 38 defined their occupation in more specific terms:

Art Directors (4%)
Interactive Flash/Designers (1.39%)
Interaction Designers (5.8%)
Artists (2.9%)
Programmers (3.78%)
Specialists (2.9%)
Photographer (1.2%)
Visual Stylists (1%)
Illustrators (1.4%)
Creative Directors (4%)
Professor/Educators (1.33%)
Students (8.69%)

As my focus was initially on web design communities, many of the participants, in the initial years at least, had concentrated on web design as profession. It is interesting to note that in follow-up interviews in the summer of 2005 with five subjects from the broader survey, only two continued with careers in web design. The other three had taken on co-related professions (design educator, web master).[1]

For the most part, design culture communities mirror other technology-based production groups in the fact that they are made-up primarily of young, educated, white, middle and upper class males. I estimate that, in the United States, less than 25% of Web-based creative talents are non-white. I am using numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and various design collectives and organizations (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000; Ryan Carson, 2003; Organization of Black Designers, 2003).

Obfuscating my numbers is the fact that these creative communities are international. Apart from designers in North America (including Canada and Mexico), there are large contingents of creative producers from Asia, Western Europe and Australia represented in this study. Any review of global virtual community must integrate international constituents.[2]

It is important to note that most of the designers interviewed remarked that, regardless of nationality, they had grown up familiar with a number of visual production tools and technologies, yet had varying technical expertise. Most considered design to be a form of artistic, personal expression. Art-related activities were described as hobbies by many in the community, highlighting a definite blurring of the line between their work and personal time. It is surprising then that design and technology ranked quite low as hobbies or influences (6% technology-related experimentation or development [computer building, etc.]) and 6% design-related activity (designing for personal reasons, visiting design museums, reading design journals). The lowest ranking influence or hobby was any type of virtual or non-virtual social interaction (3%).

These numbers, however, contradict other information obtained through the observation and interview portion of this study. For instance, design portals, are complex sites where work, play, private review, and public discourse happen all at once and many designers have described their visits to these sites either as personal or work-related investigation. I would like to posit that these communities’ culture of production does not, whether good or bad, differentiate between the work and non-work social realm.

The Designer Portal and Blog

While it is easy to assume that Internet-based technologies such as email, chat, instant messaging, and the like expand the flexible economy in an intrusive way for the creative producer, design culture sites certainly fit a similar description, as they are at once a professional and personal social space and a resource library.

The portal borrows from both traditional media types (trade magazines, brochures, print portfolios) and earlier forms of computer-mediated communication such as Usenet discussions (Turner-Rahman, 2004). When visiting a portal, users can create accounts that allow access to job information or visual resources such as user-created stock photography, moderated discussions, and resource links.

Often a significant portion of the portal website is dedicated to hyperlinks to inspirational or otherwise interesting work or cultural artifacts. Blogs work in similar fashion but are more often than not text-based and focused on one author’s or a small collective’s commentary. Blogs also tend to be more chronological in nature whereas the portal may have blog-like elements but may be more dialogical, slowly evolving, and less dependent on daily updates.

Conceptually, blogs and portals seem to work on principles similar to peer-to-peer (p2p) file trading technologies. Simply put, p2p connectivity allows individuals to share files over a network. Software installed on the user’s machine enables the display of downloadable files on other machines while presenting the user’s files for downloading to other individuals. Each individual, then, becomes a node that either serves as an individual computer serving files – a server – or as a supplier of files to a central server.

The user becomes an active part of the network by offering up her files to the sharing community. It is interesting to note that in an initial set of interviews with experimental web designers that over sixty percent described using file sharing in order to download Photoshop and other software that, for many, was prohibitive in cost.[3]

The design portal membership and blog authorship encourage sharing resources and advancing the collective discourse on a host of interdisciplinary topics. The portal or blog is a central locus that fosters the construction of a living document or knowledge base for that community. Portals, in particular, also become a designed object that require a certain level of craftsmanship in order to attract visitors to the site and to show that the moderators are competent in the dialogue of design. The quality of the discussion and the linked resources similarly legitimatise the site.

Linked resources allow for the interconnection of not only the creative producers’ professional representations, such as an individual’s homepage, but also inspirational sites and resources. What results is a complex social network wherein knowledge is shared, discourse continued and advanced, and tentative social bonds are forged.

The practice of sharing visual and technical information lies at the heart of activity on the design portal or blog and it becomes a method of scrutinizing and assembling an understanding of the culture at large or the professional practice in particular. It also reveals that individuals are attempting to connect to one another and expand the communal knowledge base in a manner that can be considered a chaotic and recursive cycle of production and consumption.

Examples and Evolution

There are a large number of design-related portals and blogs. To further complicate matters there is often cross-linking. The entire network of design culture is, therefore, difficult to ascertain. The interconnectedness of the sites reemphasizes the key aspects of the community such as the open sharing of resources. But this sharing highlights the fact that each site varies slightly. Although there may be the same members visiting, each portal or blog has a unique feel due, in part, to a particular disciplinary emphasis, types of commentary or merely the make-up of the regular participants.

The elements most often shared by portals and blogs are: news items, collective resources, links to inspirational work, threaded discussions, and showcases of well-regarded work.

Newstoday [http://www.newstoday.com] has all of the aforementioned elements and is a design culture portal. It caters primarily to the web designer while also hosting a number of resources for fashion designers, architects, motion graphics designers, print-based graphic designers, interior designers, and design aficionados. The site design is divided into several panes: site moderators’ hyperlink resources, public hyperlink resources, public discussion forums, and job postings.

Newstoday’s resources are, more often than not, links to sites that the author or contributor feels are inspirational. Sometimes these resource links feature code that others can borrow and alter to fit their own needs. Others provide personal stock photography, found visual artifacts, custom-designed fonts, and images of quirky, unique or otherwise remarkable (or, in some instances, terribly mundane but humorous) graphical works.

Discussion forums also are broad and centre on virtually any topic including those not specifically related to art and design. These discussions often feature brief commentary supported by links to yet more external Web-based resources. The plethora of topics highlights not only the mélange of the social and the professional but also the international audience. Newstoday is very much a designed object that shows a certain level of design skill and technical expertise. The portal’s visual appearance further identifies its producers as engaged in the broader technical and visual discourse. Thus, it is a popular design culture destination. Similarly, By Designers for Designers (BD4D) [http://www.bd4d.com] hosts a large international audience, yet the site is pared down with only a few select works presented for viewing and a list of hyperlinks offered up by the members of the collective. This community of designers and artists shares an interest specifically in motion graphics as well as animation, linear or three-dimensional graphic design, and filmmaking. The site extends the social aspects of the website through small events or showings in physical venues literally throughout the world. Artists of all kinds come together to share their work and interact in a very relaxed, almost party-like atmosphere. The BD4D website, like the live events, is designed to bring the global collective together and to showcase emerging talent.

What is remarkable, explains Ryan Carson, one of BD4D’s founders, is that the events are organized and paid for by the collective’s members (Carson, 2003). Motivated by passion, community members finance and spend vast amounts of time and energy on their own projects. Few make any money on completed work, in fact, and it is an unwritten rule that it is forbidden to show commercial work during the group’s show times. However, the use of BD4D projects in a commercial portfolio is common and not discouraged.

BD4D designers often spend copious amounts of time crafting intricate imagery using 3D modeling and rendering applications and personal photography and video. The use of commercial imagery or stock photography is, for the most part, frowned upon. Beyond the notion that stock imagery is unoriginal, good stock photography is often expensive and brings about issues pertaining to copyright and fair use.

Stock Exchange [http://www.sxc.hu] is a site that solves this copyright dilemma by allowing amateur and professional photographers to share their work. The website’s database serves as remedy for designers looking for free images or visual resources that are not protected by complex intellectual property rights and regulations. Site participants can upload and download high-resolution images and there is generally an understanding that the image can be used in any context as long as the work is attributed to the photographer. When creating a Stock Exchange account, participants must agree to a contract that states the work uploaded is original and can be used by other members. Images downloaded from Stock Exchange can be used, free of charge, even in a commercial application as long as the photographer is cited on the final product.

Stock Exchange is not the only site offering alternative licensing of intellectual property or free resources. More recently Creative Commons [http://www.creativecommons.org] and Ourmedia.org [http://www.ourmedia.org] have developed in response to stringent intellectual property laws. The Creative Commons website states that the organization seeks to preserve the public domain in an era of tightening intellectual property protections through the development of alternative downloadable licenses, legal codes, and deeds of varying copyright protection.[4]

As more general, and perhaps more evolved, creative online communities, there is a whole host of media, ample discussion, and shared information about projects, resources, and alternative forms of copyrighting creative work. Creative Commons, Ourmedia.org and Australian Creative Resources Online (ARCO) [http://www.uq.edu.au/acro/information.html] act as interface to or, in some instances, storehouse for work stored on the Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org] and other free-content sites. The Internet Archive began as a digital library of current and now-defunct websites but now houses other cultural artifacts such as textual works, video, still photography, and music. Media producers using similar repositories such as Flickr.com [http://www.flickr.com], a site where users share images and illustrations, can define how others can use their work by applying more nuanced copyrights outlined on the Creative Commons site. As a result, licenses from Creative Commons, when applied to media shared by community members, provide open access to intellectual property and allow for more open media resource archives and free culture gathering spaces. Furthermore, the content distribution sites additionally provide a common publishing space for a wide range of design culture producers – not just visual artists and designers.

The Communal Product

The merger of so many visual resources in the more design-specific portals such as Newstoday bring to light the vast range of influences and inspiration for professional and amateur creative producers alike. It also reinforces notions of de-specialization and of entrepreneurial individuation within the broader commercial model. The designer can choose any media or stylistic approach for a particular project and then publish with varying copyright protections. The market often requires novel visual forms, and encourages technology-enabled cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary exploration. The portal, blog, resource repository, and alternative intellectual property protection allow for open exchange.

It is possible that, as McRobbie warns, the technological apparatus also encourages an acceleration of commercial cooptation of creative freedoms and the promotion of an exclusive body of producers – a notion somewhat supported by the demographics of many design portal users. The community, like other technology and design related groups, is predominantly composed of white, middle or upper class males from primarily Western countries, although the demographics are quickly changing (Turner-Rahman, 2004).

Regardless, the technologies fostering shared resources and open visual and verbal discourse inexorably alter the practice of design by allowing for spontaneous alterations to methods of practice. Although cutting-edge productions can be quickly repackaged for commercial products, the expansion of practice through technological channels provides alternative venues for publication and interpersonal communication on a global scale.

In theory, a wider range of producers can enter the discourse. In many instances, however, the work produced by the varying design communities remains within the confines of the community site and never reaches the commercial realm unless promoted in an individual’s portfolio. Within the portal or blog, it seems the more open and extreme products rely on anarcho-communism in an open source method of production as the underlying ideology.

Often design efforts from a host of different disciplines are shared on the portal sites and absorbed by other community members passively or through active experimentation. Some dialogue about an artwork or design and how it was accomplished or simply how novel it may be is spread through whatever communications channels are available – personal conversation, email, instant messaging, online discussions, even live events in physical venues. Yet the filtering and elevation of interesting, beautiful, or otherwise remarkable work happens when certain projects and discussions are shared between portal and blog sites. What results is an open source-like method of communal knowledge-sharing and meaning-making.

Open source is a term that has come to mean the distribution of computer code for individual development of a particular project such as computer applications or operating systems. The development of Linux, as an example, happens under the GNU/General Public Licensing of the Free Software Foundation which allows developers to download the code, experiment by altering that code, and report back to a central website bulletin board to share their findings and revisions.[5]

Over time, online discussions on open source project sites reveal who the key developers are with sophisticated understandings of the code. The more reputable developers become – in the lingua franca – mavens who help facilitate further development of the project by moderating discussions, reviewing code, promoting changes in the code, and by mentoring other potential mavens. The reputation of the mavens is indicative of their contribution to an open source project. The fact that many do demanding work for very little pay reveals that the system works as a sort of gift economy.

Richard Barbrook, in the article “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy,” explains, through the example of the open source development of Linux, how anarcho-communism as a functional model in cyberspace competes with money-commodity systems (Barbrook, 1998). Arguing that cyberspace establishes a complex, symbiotic relationship between progressive ideologies and commercial structures, Barbrook traces the lineage of Linux and other projects and technologies unique to the Internet back to the radical political movements of the 1960s.

Barbrook goes on to describe how Internet discussion tools, file sharing, and email enable an economy based on the circulation of gifts that help establish personal bonds and a reputation for the gift-giver (1998). By extension one could likewise argue that Internet-based community spaces allow for an expansion of the gift economy that extends beyond the intellectual elite, thus bypassing what Barbrook calls the “bourgeois alienation” that has plagued other progressive movements such as the Situationists (1998). In the model outlined by Barbrook one advantage is that:

Despite the commercialisation of cyberspace, the self-interest of Net users ensures that the hi-tech gift economy continues to flourish (1998).

Open source movements and the computer network-mediated gift economy work without the regulations imposed by markets or states and are formed ‘through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas’ (1998). Traditional commercial models work in an environment based on scarcity whereas the networked, anarcho-communist model is one of abundance, where digital files can easily be copied, shared, and altered. To impose secrecy in a system of abundance actually puts an organization at risk of being outside of the community of development and their advances in a specific body of knowledge. Barbrook explains that in order for corporate interests to remain competitive they must, in essence, fund anarcho-communism (1998). The janus-like nature of the flexible economy is apparent in the working practice and private creative exploration shared on portal sites and, as a result, open source takes on different qualities in online design communities. It appears as “competition”, as moderated commentary or feedback, as the ranking of work or as work shared throughout a number of community sites.

There are different versions of the competitive model of open source design projects. For instance, a popular iteration is “Photoshop Tennis” where one designer takes an image, alters it to create a uniquely individual graphical production, and then passes the image along to another designer to alter that image. In another iteration, competitors take the same image and produce independent designs. This is a modern incarnation of the exquisite corpse, a method used by Surrealists to develop an image or text by allowing each contributor to only see a portion of the entire work.

Following the Surrealist methodology in spirit perhaps, this competition often has no true winner but is instead a method of revealing different methodologies, each individual’s unique approach to visual styling and the resulting concoctions. In some instances, the visual object is passed back and forth and the image is inscribed with multiple layers of visual decoration. These projects go hand in hand with other collaborative projects, such as themed websites. They provide a method of sharing personal aesthetics and are an effective way of fostering social interaction and producing communally shared symbols and experiences. These visual experimentations may work their way into personal productions that are in turn shared with the community thus generating a type of visual discourse. On some sites the discussion about visual work becomes a method of mentoring and developing the novices’ skills.

Conceptart.org [http://www.conceptart.org], a community site centered on discussions about concept art and production design for film and video games, has a substantial portion of its discussion space dedicated to the informal critiques of members’ artwork. The depth and quality of the discussions and critiques vary. The breadth of mentors – some who are currently working in the industry – often provides the younger and more inexperienced artists not only with encouragement and critical assessment of their work but also with ample inspirational imagery.

Beyond the work itself are, again, the structures of community that foster an exchange of knowledge and visual productions. One key element is the discussion fora that reaffirm the fact that design culture sites do not exist solely as entities for their creators’ own pleasure but are a fora into which community members can engage in the various verbal and visual discussions. This discussion about exploratory visual work or commercial projects, as facilitated by the technology is troubling to some critics. As Peter Lunenfeld explains:

In the Capital’s seminal essay on the fetishism of commodities, Marx discusses the distortion of social relations brought about by the tendency under capitalism to emphasize the “exchange value” of the commodity over its “use value.” Commodity production impels the development of social relationships among producers. But for Marx, this relationship becomes obscured with the fetishism of commodities – wherein the relationship between producers is taken metonymically as the relationship between commodities. (Lunenfeld, 2001: 5)

Lunenfeld’s critique could be leveled at Internet-based exchange where the commerce of goods is now supplanted by the commerce of tools (Lunenfeld, 2001). Lunenfeld, from a more traditional Marxist vantage point, sees a point when the production of technology spurs continued growth of industries and technological apparatuses (hardware and software) that are designed to give the impression that they will inexorably alter our lives for the better.

Design culture at times certainly celebrates a similar techno-fetishistic and deterministic position: good design will enhance life. Design culture sites often link to commercial work or information about new technologies, for that matter, as a way of advancing the practice by keeping community members aware of the next new thing. Often new products and technologies not only benefit the production of design work but also are packaged in a manner that is of interest to the visual designer. There is an inexorable bond, then, between the technology and the design communities and it could be argued that both thrive on the same sort of techno-fetishism. Again, the commerce of products is now, more than ever, supported heavily by the design industries. Techno-fetishism aside, it is apparent that within the design culture portals and blogs, and the software tools used by visual designers, the artist or designer is capable of both consumption and production of cultural artifacts. Furthermore, in the case of web design in particular, the technology facilitates the production of the community apparatuses as well.

One could argue that, in the quest for new aesthetics and novel approaches to design, the study community increasingly sought and promoted whatever novel inspirational form it could find. While these sources of inspiration are quickly co-opted for commercial purposes, the communal sites showcased a never-ending supply of talent and facilitated an international discourse about practices and alternative models of production and distribution.

Design culture communities, I would argue, sustain exchange-relationships that closely resemble Barbrook’s description of a hi-tech gift-economy. This electronic gift economy consists of individuals sharing information ‘without the expectation of any direct, immediate quid pro quo’ (Kollock, 1999: 220). Peter Kollock distinguishes gifts in the following way: ‘…gifts are exchanged between individuals who are part of an ongoing interdependent relationship’ (Kollock, 1999: 221).

Open source communities host an exchange model similar to that maintained in the academy where one’s research is publicly disseminated to support and extend not only the discipline-specific knowledge-base but the researcher’s own reputation as well. Brent Jesiek, in Democratizing Software: Open Source, the Hacker Ethic, and Beyond, is able to look past corporate mythologies about Internet subcultures in his search for truly democratic technologies and communal structures. Using the work of Andrew Feenberg, Jesiek argues that social values can be embedded in the functions of a technological product. Feenberg contends, as Jesiek tells us, that the open source model squarely places power in the hands of a multitude of producers. Thus the opportunities to challenge traditionally hegemonic structures and ideologies are expanded greatly (2003). The agency allowed by open source community may foster an alternative production model that normalizes the ‘embedding of more positive social and democratic ideals into technologies’ (2003).

In the same vein, the inspirational links more often than not make up the most significant part of the portals, allowing designers to post their own work or resources they deem important. Hyperlinks are therefore the fundamental structure of sharing. Design community sites, then, subtly foster a more democratizing model of community by providing a means of publishing and broadcasting. When established designers seek out – whether through casual solicitation among friends or by personal investigation – and present what they deem notable work, they are, in essence, elevating the efforts and reputation of both novice and established designers and expanding the communal discourse. This type of sharing is not unique in Internet sub-cultures. Computer-mediated social networking has been significantly developed in the short span of Internet history. Regardless, the fact that the designers produce work that they share amongst themselves is not unique either. Design culture community draws on many of other cultural influences by sharing interesting links and resources pertaining to a vast range of visual products designed or not.

Design culture sites can cover a range of issues and are rich with a plethora of visual and conceptual assets. It is important to note that the design community also intersects the professional realm. Often those who share their work make some sort of living in a creative profession yet the work shared on portal sites is a complex construction that is at once designed to promote oneself to commercial interests, and to other artists and designers. These projects can be sold to provide additional support for the designer. For instance, some creative producers create their own DVDs, t-shirts, books, or artwork and sell them on micro-scale ecommerce sites. Producers pay a small fee to the commerce site host and if an item is sold they retain the profit. Making money, however, is not often the priority. Reputation, a desire to share, and knowledge building often trump moneymaking efforts. There is also a wide range of projects that can be classified as experimentation and are marketed as valuable commodities to more than the corporate organization. An experimental design project may, by necessity, be more robust in its purpose and intent than the traditional design work as it is so intricately bound to both the reputation of the designer and the community’s shared experiences and body of knowledge.

Andrew Darley highlights a remarkable aspect of the design community’s sharing when he tells us that new media’s spectacular images are often designed, developed, and delivered for private consumption (2000). Private, in this instance, means that the percipient is alone while viewing a work that was most likely created privately by an individual as well. Unlike the cinema and even video games – which both have also become modes of media presentation for private consumption yet rely on large communities working in a more or less traditional hierarchy – the experience of producing experimental design work could be likened to the reading, writing, and publishing of poetry. Alternatively, one web designer interviewed remarked that it is like a visual jazz improvisation happening on a global scale (Luz, 2002).

Conclusion

Adrian Shaughnessy, in an article entitled ‘From Here to Here’, argued that the discipline of graphic design was dividing into two ‘distinct strands’ – one a traditional business-oriented role and the other a design culture-type movement (Shaughnessy, 2004). Many design culture portals and blogs cater to both of Shaughnessy’s strands of design. While I argue that the technology facilitates social networking, reputation-based methods of advancing knowledge, communal meaning making, and sharing of resources, there is still a fascination and ardent support for corporate design work. However, it seems that a significant number of innovative, independent projects are being published, shared, and celebrated on design culture sites. Thus it seems the power to decide what constitutes a work that advances the practice may be shifting away from corporate entities and developing indigenously within the creative communities themselves. Already we can see that the growth of more general media exchange sites such as Ourmedia.org and Stock Exchange as viable alternatives to a centralized, corporate-controlled marketplace and resources provided under alternative licensing options such as those outlined on Creative Commons. Furthermore, these sites promote the development of alternative modes of practice for the designer. These are based not on the traditional model of capital but on one that is more dialogic, reputation-based, and exploratory. It is possible to foresee a time when the design culture system incorporates more small-scale (even open source) e-commerce sites that allow the designer or artist to be self-sustained in their practice.

Regardless, the communal systems maintained by the online design culture websites and supporting technology represent an emanicipatory use of media. Following Enzenberger’s constituents of a theory of media, open source design culture sites decentralise power, foster collective production, encourage active participation, and the mobilization of the masses (1996). This, perhaps, begins the project of repairing the holes in the social network fabric that were ripped apart by the alienation inherent in the work practices of the flexible economy.

Author’s Biography

Gregory Turner-Rahman is an assistant professor of visual communication design in the department of Art and Design at the University of Idaho. He has spent much of his adult life studying design communities from within as his professional experience spans the disciplines of graphic design, Web development, industrial design, and architecture. He is currently writing a book about online creative communities and open source design cultures.

Notes

[1] Many designers and aficionados within the study community hailed from a university or college (86%) while a small percentage of others were self-trained (4% self trained, 5% other, 4% high school or equivalent). Of note is that of those university students who practiced web design, for instance, only 31% had formal training whereas 63% described themselves as having learned their craft through books, experimentation, observing other work, and by following online discussions. Survey respondents working in other design areas (industrial design, graphic design, architecture) were less likely to consider themselves self-taught but did remark that the Internet is important or very important for continual career development.
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[2] The communities studied were predominantly male (94% male, 5% female) and were also made up of large numbers of younger individuals (86% 19-30 yrs. old, 14% 15-18 yrs. old, 10% 30-40 yrs. old, 1.5% 40+ yrs. old). Among all survey participants, music and movies rated highly as influences on their work (24% listening or playing music, 21% watching movies or videos). Other influences include outdoor activities (14% outdoor activities [bicycle riding, jogging, hiking, kayaking, rock-climbing, etc.]) and fine art (17% fine art activities [drawing, painting, sculpture, museum or gallery visits]).
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[3] The designers interviewed were describing how they began to do web design, and many described doing some form of computer-based artwork from the average age of 8. Although many were exposed to digital imaging software in schools or on a parent’s machine, others remarked that P2P file sharing was the only way to garner access to expensive tools such as Photoshop or 3D rendering and modeling software.
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[4] Individuals can essentially piece together a license with varying levels of copyright protection. For instance, an artist may specify that a work can be copied, displayed, and distributed for non-commercial purposes only. Or, in another instance, the artist may not allow derivations of the work to be re-sampled or distributed.
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[5] The GNU project – GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix – was founded in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a former Artificial Intelligence researcher at MIT. Although the Free Software Foundation, also founded by Stallman, holds copyrights for much of the software released under GNU licenses, the non-profit organization provides the software and promotes an individual’s right to freely copy, alter, and redistribute versions (Lessig, 2004; Stallman, 2005). Sourceforge [http://www.sourceforge.net] hosts nearly 105,000 open source software applications and projects released under GNU licenses (Sourceforge, 2005).
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References

Barbrook, R. ‘The Hi-Tech Gift Economy’, First Monday 3.2(1998), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

Carson, Ryan. ‘By Designers for Designers [Interview]’, (July 2003).

Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture (London: Routledge, 2000).

Enzenberger, Hans Magnus. ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’, in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperature, 1996), 62-85.

Helfand, Jessica. ‘Graphic Design is…’, Adbusters 7.3 (1999): 9.

Jesiek, Brett. ‘Democratizing software: Open source, the hacker ethic, and beyond’, First Monday, 8,10 (2003), http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/jesiek/index.html

Julier, Guy. Design Culture (London: Sage Publication, 2002).

Kollock, Peter. ‘The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace’, in Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 1999), 220-242.

Lasn, Kalle. ‘Design Anarchy’, Adbusters 7.3 (1999): 10.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to grid: a user’s guide to digital arts, media, and cultures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).

Luz (screen name). ‘Visual Culture of Online Design Communities [Interview]’, (September 2002).

McRobbie, Angela. ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies, 16 (2002a): 516-531.

____. ‘Halloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural Economy’, in Cultural Economy (London: Sage Publications, 2002b): 97-114.

Organization for Black Designers. ‘Organization Information’, (2003), http://www.core77.com/OBD/info.html

Shaughnessy, Adrian. ‘From Here to Here’, Creative Review, April 1 (2004): 54.

Soar, Matthew. ‘The First Things First Manifesto and the Politics of Culture Jamming: Towards a Cultural Economy of Graphic Design and Advertising’, Cultural Studies, 16 (2002):570-592.

Stallman, Richard. ‘The GNU Project’, (2005), http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

Turner-Rahman, Gregory. ‘The Contested Surface of the Baroque Website’, Post-Identity, 4.1. (2004),

U.S. Department of Labor – Bureau of Labor Statistics. ‘Characteristics of the Employed’, Current Population Survey. (2000), http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm#annual

Websites

Australian Creative Resources, http://www.uq.edu.au/acro/information.html

By Designers For Designers (BD4D), http://www.bd4d.com

Conceptart.org, http://www.conceptart.org

Creative Commons, http://www.creativecommons.org

Flickr, http://www.flickr.com

Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org

Newstoday, http://www.newstoday.com

Ourmedia.org, http://www.ourmedia.org

Sourceforge.net, http://www.sourceforge.net

Stock Exchange, http://www.sxc.hu

“Distributed aesthetics: form or forming?” We are moving from living, analysing and imaging contemporary culture as an information society technically underwritten by the computer, to inhabiting and imagining relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks. New media are increasingly distributed media and they require a rethink of aesthetics beyond the twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape analysis of the social and the aesthetic.[1] They require a distributed aesthetics. Distributed aesthetics must deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situated, with asynchronous production and multi-user access to artifacts (both material and immaterial) on the one hand, and the highly individuated and dispensed allotment of information/media, on the other. The aesthetics of distributed media, practices and experience cannot be located in the formal principles of their dispersal. This provides us with the conditions for serving information via a network to end-users and renders the following reductive schematisation, recalling all the problems of a communications systems transmission model:

SERVER –––––––––––––––––––– NETWORK –––––––––––––––––––– CLIENT

Nor can we simply derive a distributed aesthetics from the viewpoint of use. There is no singular or “end use” of/for information but rather the endless relaying of media, practices and experience as successive dispersals. These loops of dispersal give us something closer to the mechanics of formation than the analysis of form:

But in both these schematisations, “the network” looms, either as the “black box” to be explained in the first diagram or as something interstitially forming – loose, unpredictable and unprincipled, as implied in the diagram above. A distributed aesthetics, then, might be better characterised as a continuous emergent project, situated somewhere between the drift away from coherent form and the drift of aesthetics into relations with new formations, including social (networked) formations.

At any rate, networks cannot be studied as mere tools or as schematisations and diagrams. They need to be apprehended within the complex ecologies in which they are forming. This can easily become an empty statement. By complex we mean unpredictable, often poor, harsh, and not exactly “rich” expressions of the social. To project positive predictions, hopes and desires onto networks is deceptive as it often distracts by focusing solely on the first, founding and euphoric phase of networks. Consequently this positivism is ill-equipped to deal with the conflict, boredom, confusion, stagnation and other expressions of our playful nihilist culture that turn up in unmoderated channels such as lists, blogs and chatrooms. If we call now for a distributed aesthetics nonetheless, this needs to account for these experiences of stagnation within network formations and for coupling these networked experiences with a network’s potential to transform and mutate into something not yet fully codified.

“The map is not the network.” If we began first with a question and now follow with a gesture of negation, this is precisely because “the network”– so opaque, so ubiquitous and non-formal – is, however, recruited to serve various strategies of representation. Maps of networks abound: software for visualising criminal networks such as ‘PatternTracer’, is easily available online; an entire discursive field – social network analysis – has arisen around the mapping of networks from corporate to terrorist; the noncartographic specialist can now log on to an entire ‘Map of the Internet’ and drop in and link his or her own computer address as a 3-D visualisation in the network of all other addresses.[2] Richard Rogers suggests that mapping networks, especially as an intelligence task, carries with it more than just an aesthetic outcome; we are in the midst of a techno-epistemological impulse in which the form(at) of the map has a structuring effect on how we understand the organisation (structure) and dynamics (movement) of networks (2003).

Theorising networks (as opposed to these tasks of network visualisation) must struggle with the abstraction of dispersed elements – elements that cannot be captured into one image. The very notion of a network is in conflict with the desire to gain an overview. Mapping software, the technological answer to this problem, by its own nature reduces complexity in order to produce a limited amount of general categories, which then can be stuck onto the map and linked. The art of network visualisation deals with limitations of the screen, algorithms and the boundaries of human perception. We can only read – and understand – that many linked elements. Maps make visible what we have already “sensed” before. Maps provoke a sense of recognition. And network maps may also organise our perception of a social in formation without being forthright about the premises upon which this organising impulse rests. What network mapping exposes is a desire to be in the know: ‘a way of coming to know and making particular claims only with a technological apparatus that desires to grow to satisfy its cravings for “really knowing” and, especially “really knowing what our” intelligence also knows or should know’ (Rogers, 2003). Mapping information ­– the aesthetics of contemporary visualisation – provides a sense of relief that the twisted and unstructured info-bits that roam around in our cognitive unconscious are finally laid-out to rest. A beast is tamed.

Network mapping itself underwent a significant shift in geometry and visualisation around the late 1990s (Dodge and Kitchin, 2000: 107-128). As we moved from the superimposition of flows onto geo-political space toward the abstraction of topology, similarly our understandings of what comprised networks shifted. We became interested in relations, dynamics and sociability as opposed to traffic, connections and community. This change in network mapping visualisation has had advantages and disadvantages – we are now aware that networks are different kinds of formations that cannot be understood according to the old distinctions between society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft). But the increasing abstraction of topological visualisation removes us from an analysis of the ways in which networks engage and are engaged by current political, economic and social relations.

Maps reveal the ways in which we perceive things to “be” at a given historical time. The Mercator Map (circa 1569), now analysed from a moment “post” its particular “portioning” of perception along a colonial set of axes, reveals what was at stake politically and economically in making the world run according to a north-south cartography. Perhaps network mapping will similarly reveal the logic of its own will to tame complexity, to make the flows of a network society traceable. It could be more interesting, then, not simply to look at the map but at what desires network mapping is trying to satisfy. If cartography has in the past been linked to imperial conquests of space, what space is there left today to conquer; the space between the nodes or even the space of all potential connections and links to be made? Just as network formations are indications that an unstable reshuffle of the categories for understanding socialities is playing itself out, mapping this rearranging sociality indicates an aesthetics at work to order more rampant and mutant forms of social relations from emerging. It is not surprising that the impetus for network mapping arrives today from the social sciences, on the one hand and from the analysis, tracking and tracing of crime, on the other (see Granovetter, 1973: 1360-1380; Williams, 2001). We ought also to be suspicious about the pervasive Will to Network Mapping.

“The Fou-Code”. Over the past couple of decades aesthetics has been extended, stretched and turned upside down from a discipline that deals with the interpretation of the meaning and structure of the object of beauty into a philosophical praxis that investigates the very conditions of contemporary life. Aesthetics is not the science of “eye-candy”, in which taste is reduced to a matter of mere statistics and samples of information. What we must investigate here instead is the “aesthesia” of today’s networked experience. How do we perceive the socially invisible, yet all too real, relationships that are accumulating around us? Distributed aesthetics, as a project, needs to be understood as a participatory journey of network users, aiming to capture the not yet described, the not yet visualised, beyond poles such as real-virtual, new-old, offline-online and global-local. We should forget about exposing the links that are already there, and, with our capacity to engage a networked logic, forge links to what is in the network but not yet of the network. By this we mean to invoke a project more akin to social aesthetics or aesthesia in which we engage in and with the collective experiences of being embroiled in networks and being actively part of their making. This we can contrast with the abstracted activity of simply mapping quantities of data – such as social network maps – a form of production already captured by the codes and conventions of connectivity.

We don’t need allegorical readings of networks. Networks are not proposals, constructions, metaphors or even alternatives for existing social formations such as the church and company, the school, the NGO or the political party. Instead, we should analyse the rise of networks as an all too human endeavor, as a tragic fall, and not as post-human machines that automate connections for us. Networks are not the answer to global problems nor are they a substitute for forgotten religions or disintegrated communities. Networks are not models to be transposed from one social or political situation or conflagration to another. It is certainly the case that technology provokes networking. But then this provocation is not the be all and end all of the network. We should be wary of techno-contractions like “social software” that suggest technology glues us humans together (again).[3] Instead, we should read – and enjoy – networks as info-clouds that cover the sun. They disperse the bright light of broadcasting media.

Networks are fragmentors. They break up strong signs and experiences into countless threads. These info-bits might in themselves be meaningless but the overall sum of them provides enough distraction to topple the attention monopoly of newspapers and television. This is not done through the classic activist strategy of building up parallel counter worlds. Lists, blogs, chatrooms and other “social networks” are the “long tail” of the media landscape (Anderson, 2004). Networks do not therefore burn-off the media, taking centre stage and continuing to provide the background noise of the chattering classes. It doesn’t matter how big they grow. Instead of anticipating a “takeover” by the corporate sphere and attempting to protect networked and locative media from demise, it is more than likely that business interests will integrate selected parts of the blogosphere. The rest of this online “noise” will probably fade away into digital oblivion. In the meantime blogs, wiki, podcasting and whatever comes next will continue to run under the rubric of media diversification. Nothing is as fluid, fragile – and unsustainable – as today’s network landscape.

In the meantime, we could treat the info-bits that flow our way as short-term solutions to the environmental crises brought about by the breakdown of both massified media outlets and dedicated high-end digital aesthetics. Data are flowing from peer to peer, in networks hardly noticed by authorities. But before the law moves in – and with it, the academics – the crowds will already have moved on to cooler pastures. Let’s not invest some salvation in all of this distribution. Distributed media are both too loose and too large to build a new utopia upon. Their fragmentary nature will have effects but we cannot link them to a “cause”. We may be unable to house the endless link lists, unanswered calls and emails, cute blogs and stagnant conversations under the banner of complete social and media transformation. But we will nonetheless have to find a mode of comprehending their everyday perceptual accretions; the ways in which they make small changes to our social relations with others and with broader groupings such as the media.

“Dead shoots and roots.” What network theory, and with it distributed aesthetics, first and foremost need to tackle is the myth of seamless and perpetual growth. Once upon a time, during the golden dotcom days, it was an insight to present networks as dynamic, ever-growing entities. These days, we have moved to obsessively focussing upon the micro politics of networks within networks (see Krebs, 2003; Muir, 2003) It’s impressive but useless to know that your social network puts you in connection with 371,558 “friends”. 1 + friends is simply an effect of a network, not its constituent relations.[4] The social scientists almost reveal the desires that shape their own trajectories around “social and organisational network analysis” with their talk of “ego-centric” networks. The micro has become awash with the atomised individual and we waste our capacity to comprehend the shapes or shaping of networks by plotting out the link lines of one node to another. In actuality, these lines that appear so connected, seamless and smooth on the network maps, can never account for the human labour required to create the link, to maintain it or the sudden death and change of direction for a network in which strong lines give way and the network changes, even dies. Rhizomes, in fact, have odd shapes and are actually small roots that die off at some point in their lifeline. The problem with a naïve cloning of Deleuze and Guattari’s botany in the networked context lies with a commitment to “growth”. This involves a blinding by the potentialities that the network-as-dream-machine would seem to offer. Here the network and info-capital converge rather than produce friction, complications or even poisonings. Instead, we could say that growing could mean not simply expansion but growing up. There is plenty of quantity in the mediascape and so to simply grow without changing or even dying only multiplies or clones more networks of connected atomised units. What networks need are ideas and aesthetic projects for how they might mature and transform.

Let’s draw a difference between growth and persistence. Growth feeds the lifecycle of capital and capital loves any kind of growth – upwards, downwards or outwards. Persistence, on the other hand, apprehends that something doggedly survives but that its growth or decay depends on other forces, conditions and upon effort. Bits of the network break off and wither and maybe something can endure elsewhere because of this little death. But maybe the whole damn patch of grass just ups and dies one day, and then there is no longer a network in your backyard. Online social formations are more like these small tendrils of growth that shoot and die – the list, for example, lives for a while as its members try to feed it. They work to shape and develop it, providing it with new impetus while the overall form just lumbers along. But then its energy burns out and there is no more growing left to do. Something endures between some of its participants or another effort starts up elsewhere but then that something, that network, has changed too. These processes are not all part of the same growing “organism” or self-organising system. Attempts to homogenise or sustain processes as a singular drive towards growth are endemic to capital. The processes are, instead, lateral, cumulative and de-energised modes of laboring, also endemic to capital but, for the most part, the unpaid arc of its cycles.

“Against biologism.” Networks do not simply emerge. They are cybernetic constructs that, once founded and installed, erupt then slumber and decline, go on and on, fall asleep and wake up again before they die a sudden death or entropically decline. Networks do not follow the simplistic models of linear-mechanics or of evolutionary growth. A critical theory of scalability and sustainability has to go beyond the biological metaphors that speak of contagion, copy-paste epidemics and memes. We have to make a distinction between real, existing patterns and behaviors within technical networks and the wet dreams (or nightmares) of marketing departments trying to give a positive spin on the unpredictable moves of their blogging customers.

Complexity – of data, of connectivity – has been rolled out an excuse for technical and cultural phenomena being too hard to comprehend. Subsequently, it figures that we have to feed all this complexity back into the machine to be analysed. Numbers are too hard so we get a picture instead. Complexity should not be an excuse for deferring the work of human thought and human creation – theoretical and aesthetic – to network software. Complexity is difficult and arduous but not aesthetically unmanageable. Let’s not cede the complexity of networked life to proceduralism. If we want suggestions as to how this complex networked aesthetics might be rendered, then let’s look less to maps and more to sketches and rough that infer a category of “the relational” comprised of potentialities. This would be somewhat different from framing relations within reductive models of utility or connectivity. Let’s look instead to work such as Harwood’s current software research NetMonster (http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?NetMonster). Here variable keywords related to a user’s current image interests or obsessions are used to initialise a crawl for sites that contain text or images related to these keywords. The crawl returns these sites as stripped text and pictures, rearranging these around an image mask based upon the user’s current image obsession, collaging and redrawing the information so that it butts up in convoluted lines of connection against itself.

The links that connect the text and image together in NetMonster’s re-collaged information arise out of a differential between what is pre-linked online – the image’s ‘mediated causes of its own existence’ – and the variables a user introduces into these connections via the mask and the keywords (Harwood, 2005a). There are other aspects to this software in which the crawler automatically attempts to spam the phone numbers and emails from the garnered sites, alerting people to ways in which their information has participated in a link or connection against ‘common sense’. There is an anti-navigational and irresolvable aesthetic oscillation that results from this work. Its informatic rendering is monstrous, rampant and pathological rather than friendly or sociable. As Harwood suggests, the image functions in the unimaginable spaces and indeterminate relations of distributed information: ‘The picture acts as a proposition – frustrated – oscillating between a picture’s ability to say and show’ (Harwood, 2005b).

We need a more complex conception of the network sociality than the concept of “social software” that is currently attached to descriptions of networks of friends or lovers in an online dating database. We need a more complex understanding of the visual plane of information than the pictorial map of the network. Networks are not glued together by software and software does not make us social. Networks are not resolvable into zoomable details of landscapes that must fit the window of a browser. But equally we cannot take the social out of software; in fact, what we need is to be more specific about how the social and its myriad aesthetics are operating through and in software. How is a network really being sustained – computationally and through creative labour? How is the network experience to be thought as felt? Whose labour – creative, manual, skilled, disorganised, etc – keeps it moving along? What intrusions of rhetoric from other images of the social – neo-liberal democratic theory and its dreams of customised participation, for example – break into and intrude upon the fragile links that tentatively form within networked experience?

“Absent links”. Networks should not be defined by the visible links they place on display. Getting “linked in” a network is not materialised through (digital) information. This is what makes it so fake to “ask” a computer to visualise a network or to “believe” in link lists. “Putting” a link in is work, a tedious activity, which requires precision and dedication. Only very few of us develop a routine that leads us to the “felt experience” of linking in the network; an experience that is mixed – one of curiosity coupled with distraction and a drift, off in other directions. Today’s networked existence hops from one medium to the next and then demands that we return back to our links in order to put in the work of connecting again and again.

We are in search, instead, of an aesthetics that comes to terms with conflict, boredom, confusion and stagnation – one that includes social complexity (as opposed to bio-complexity). At the same time, we are dealing with a non-visual aesthetics with respect to networks or at least a visual that is not pictorial, that cannot be depicted as such. What kind of aesthetics, then, does the network herald? We should not forget that our debates are not entirely out of the blue and respond to certain software configurations – which can be changed. A future generation of blogs may not have the option to externally respond to postings anymore. Due to spam, wikis could lose their capacity to alter texts. At the same time, we could see impressive new incorporations of data flows now circling around inside mobile space. These configurations are not merely technical innovations or developments. Software-wise they are easy to write and to implement. Their innovative power does not lie in the complexity of code but in the simplicity of their techno-social implementations. This “simplicity” comes from many directions and forces at once – efficiency, standardisation, commercial viability, but also from user circumvention and invention. We’re not merely reflecting, imaging or imagining when we engage a distributed aesthetics. We are configuring and remaking.

Authors’ Biographies

Geert Lovink is a Professor in Media at the University of Amsterdam and during 2005-6 is a Research Fellow at the WissenschaftKolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of My First Recession (V_2 Publishers, Amsterdam, 2003) and Dark Fiber (MIT Press, 2002). He is the co-founder of the fibreculture and nettime discussion lists and networks. He is also the director of the Institute of Network Cultures. http://www.networkcultures.org

Anna Munster is a new media artist and critic, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. She is the author of Materializing New Media (University Press of New England, 2006). She is a facilitator of the online discussion list fibreculture and a member of the editorial committee of the fibreculture journal. She was the recipient from 2003-2005 of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

Notes

[1] The most complete contribution of a formalist analysis of new media is made by the work of Lev Manovich. This is evident in his book The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), where he proposes a set of formal principles for the analysis of new media but also in more recent texts, such as ‘The Shape of Information’ (http://www.manovich.net, 2005). Although Manovich does not maintain that new media can be analysed through a universal form or aesthetics, the question of emerging forms of culture driven by information as process and flow drive the theoretical trajectory of his work. The medium specificity approach is best exemplified in a text such as Janet Murray’s ‘Inventing the Medium’, her introduction to The New Media Reader, eds Noah Wardruip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 3-29.
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[2] ‘PatternTracer’ is a software package for professional crime investigators that analyses and maps to, ‘quickly and automatically uncover clusters and underlying patterns’, ‘Product Overview –i2: Investigative Analysis Software’ (http://www.i2inc.com/Products/Pattern_Tracer/default.asp). Valdis Krebs’ (2001; 2003) is the most obvious example of recent work being conducted in the field of social network analysis and was responsible for “mapping” the network of pilots and hijackers involved in the World Trade Tower attacks on September 11. The Web site for the ‘Map of the Internet’ is at http://mapoftheinternet.com/.
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[3] There is no standardised usage or understanding of the term “social software”. It is deployed by marketing executives and radical software analysts to categorise two polarised vectors in networks ­– the social and collective understanding and production of distributed software and the deployment of software to produce social ties between individualised subjects. Our concern with a use and elaboration of the socio-technical lies with this latter deployment. See, for example, the article by Stowe Boyd ‘Are You Ready for Social Software?’ in Darwin: Information for Executives, May 2003, http://www.darwinmag.com/read/050103/social.html.
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[4] See particularly the ‘Friendster’ network, which aims to ‘make the world a smaller place by bringing the power of social networking to every aspect of life, one friend at a time’ (‘About Friendster’, http://www.friendster.com/info/index.php?statpos=footer).
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References

Anderson, Chris. ‘The Long Tail’, Wired 12.10, October (2004),
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. Mapping Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 2000).

Granovetter, Mark. ‘The strength of weak ties’, The American Journal of Sociology 78.6 (May 1973): 1360-1380.

Harwood, Graham. ‘Net Monster – Research site: HowItWorks’ (2005a), Kwiki located at http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?HowItWorks.

Harwood, Graham. ‘Net Monster – Research site: Description’ (2005b), Kwiki located at http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?NetMonsterDescription.

Krebs, Valdis. ‘Data Mining Email to Discover Social Networks and Emergent Communities’ (2003), http://www.orgnet.com/email.html.

Krebs V. ‘Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells’, Connections 24.3 (2001),
http://www.insna.org/Connections-Web/Volume24-3/Valdis.Krebs.web.pdf.

Muir, Hazel. ‘Email traffic patterns can reveal ringleaders’, New Scientist (2003), http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3550.

Rogers, Richard. ‘Why Map? The Techno-epistemological outlook’ (2003), https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/whymap/.

Williams, Phil. ‘Transnational Criminal Networks’ in Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, eds. J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001).

Darren Tofts
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Connectivity, interactivity and displacement have accelerated situations of difference. The social concept of networked communities, which preoccupied us in the ‘90s, has its correlative in a particular strand of aesthetics. Distributed and distributable media have made a significant impact upon the way we think about aesthetic practices generally. The have been especially pivotal in drawing attention to the possibility of different conceptions of participation, of different relations between art work and audience. Online forms of distribution, exhibition and interaction, such as net art and collaborative multi-user environments, are important in that it they have modified the spatial and temporal dimensions of what constitutes an art event and an experience of it. They have been particularly affective in temporal and differential terms, in that the diffusion of location, of both art work and participant, has multiplied the indeterminacy of experiential time. This dislocation of participation from a stable event-time has made the experience of art purely at the discretion of individuals. There is no necessary or prescribed synchronicity of URL and IRL (with the exception, of course, of co-ordinated live webcasts or multi-user immersive art events). Distribution, in this sense, is profoundly temporal, a vector of difference in which there is no common time of participation. This discussion will consider the practices of a number of Australian media artists whose work solicits questions about temporality, distribution and participation. In doing so it seeks to account for a qualitatively different set of relations between aesthetics and consumption under networked conditions.

French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ emerged in the 1990s as an influential concept for thinking about alternative models of art and spectatorship. Although contemporary with the advent of digital culture and the emergent media art forms of the 1990s, Bourriaud’s work does not specifically speak to conditions of digital, networked culture. Much of the work on which his theories have been based relate to site specific or performative art events that explicitly rely upon audience interaction and participation. However relational aesthetics can be thought of as a useful starting point for thinking about distribution as it applies to networked culture specifically. Relational aesthetics addresses the concept of art being defined by social interaction, by co-ordinated or impromptu acts of participation that may or may not require specific locations in and times at which to occur. In this respect the similarities with distributed aesthetics are striking. Bourriaud is interested in using the concept to ‘decode or understand the type of relations to the viewer produced by the work of art. Minimalism addressed the question of the viewer’s participation in phenomenological terms. The art of the ’90s addresses it in terms of use’ (Bourriaud, 2001). The primal context of use in relational aesthetics resonates in the primacy of the user in distributed aesthetics. This confluence allows us to appropriate ideas from one form of offline art and adapt them to online practices.

Bourriaud was working in a theoretical tradition of ephemerality that traversed early twentieth century Dadaists, John Cage’s chance operations, the happenings of Fluxus, performance art and the ‘detournements’ of the Situationists (Randolph, 2003). German artist Joseph Beuys derived the term ‘social sculpture’ or ‘social architecture’ to capture the idea of an audience or participants actively shaping in real time both the art work and its potential meanings. Relational aesthetics assumes the centrality of the spectator and the act of reception as a vital component in the constitution of the work. It asks what in everyday, local terms is possible as art and asks how audience’s negotiate such events as aesthetic experience. Stencil art is as good an instance of the art of ephemerality as you can get. The practice of stencil art, like graffiti, is public, highly visible, organised and sublimely ephemeral. It is here today, gone tomorrow. With respect to relational aesthetics, it blurs the conceptual and political boundaries between what is public art and what is not, what is an appropriate space of exhibition and what is not. The resolution of these contradictions is largely the province of the artists and the observer, as there is no aesthetic or social mandate that marks a stencil as art or someone’s back fence as a gallery. In other words, the relations between artist and audience are negotiable and are played out in unpredictable and unstable conditions. The relevance of such precarious conditions to a model of distributed aesthetics lies in the re-definition of art from being spatial to profoundly temporal. The nature of its consumption is highly contingent not only upon if, but when anyone sees the work, before it is either removed or superseded. In this sense stencil art is like Oulippean literary experimentation — a potential art.

The convergence of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics with the advent of a culture of digital connectivity, with its interactive arts and immersive conditions, has meant that a new or at least revived art of contingency is becoming more conspicuous as the signature culture of the early twenty-first century. Such art posits a very different way of thinking about what an audience is in a nodal culture; a culture contoured by a manifold ensemble of distributed and distributable communications media, from the Internet to ubiquitous multimedia audio-visuality (otherwise misleadingly known as mobile phones). Consider the global phenomenon of flash mobbing. Flash mobbing, according to the Melbourne Flash Mob website, involves ‘sudden gatherings of people at a predetermined location at a predetermined time. People in flash mobs usually perform according to a written script, then disperse quickly’ (http://www.flashmob.com). On the 21st August, 2003 seventy Melburnians assembled in an apparently spontaneous manner on the steps of Flinders Street Station at 5.24pm precisely. They donned yellow dishwashing gloves and pointed to the sky before disappearing into the peak hour traffic.[1] A cross between Dada street theatre and a Fluxus happening, this event and myriad others like it occurring everyday all over the world, is grounded in the quotidian rhythms of daily life, such as train travel and being a pedestrian.

Co-ordinated by email, SMS and more recently blogging, such events are motivated by a taste for the ephemeral and the absurd. But also a desire to form temporary, ephemeral communities that come into mediated being and disperse just as quickly. Flash mobbing also tells us something about the ways in which people historically relate to and appropriate new technology, such as SMS, to generate unexpected uses of it. American photo-journalist Craig Stecyk made a similar observation in the 2001 documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys. In relation to the history of skateboarding in the 1970s, pre-cyber-savvy Californian teenagers used word of mouth and graffiti, rather than cell phones and the internet, to tactically appropriate the built environment of storm-water drains, empty swimming-pools and high school embankments of suburbia. In the process they created a cultural revolution. Today’s culture of SMS messaging works in a similar way in relation to flash mobbing and other networked phenomena such as stencil art to coalesce remote individuals into autonomous and temporary networks of collaboration and participation. But both are in their own ways persuasive instances of William Gibson’s aphorism from Neuromancer (1984) that ‘the street finds its own uses for things.’ Referring in the early 1980s to an emergent do-it-yourself culture of appropriation and empowerment in the name of technological literacy, Gibson’s vision is both prescient and retrospective, imagining and recalling spontaneous conditions of social and cultural emergence.

Distributed aesthetics are largely associated with online networked phenomena. Melinda Rackham’s Empyrean (2000-2003) is an indicative work in this respect. Described by the artist as a ‘soft skinned e_scape,’ a ‘zone of electronically constructed 3 dimensional space,’ Empyrean is a vrml world of abstracted presence. It ambiguously locates the immersant (viewer or spectator won’t do here) in a virtual geography that is conceptual as much as spatial. It invites us to consider what it means to be co-present in actual and virtual space, to be simultaneously embodied and represented digitally. The problematic nature of location in the work is an index of its location as a work. While the work is permanently online and always accessible (theoretically anyway), experience of it is discretionary, asynchronous and indeterminate. This is the nature of the internet as space of distribution and exhibition. As an ecology of distance it is, to use Norie Neumark’s phrase, ‘always multiple and relative in its configurations’ (Neumark, 2005: 3). Gallery installations of Empyrean, on the other hand (such as at the Art Centre Nabi in Seoul in 2001), are the exception to the rule. Signified as an event and circumscribed by curatorial time, the work and its potential audience very rarely coincide in space in this way.

Australian media artists such as Rackham have been preoccupied with the very idea of an indeterminate and contingent audience as being an integral component of their work, rather than an external observer of it. The notion of audiences being interactive, rather than contemplative or participatory, heightens the basic challenges associated with generating public awareness of and interest in emerging or new arts practices. To encourage audiences to be actively involved in a work is a potentially confronting gesture, since it disrupts a philosophical comfort zone that has traditionally assigned well demarcated roles for audience and art work alike (though such confrontation is, of course, not unique to media art). Such confrontation can be identified in particular experiments in the pre-history of interactive computer-based and networked art, some of which blurs into the conceptual terrain of relational and distributed aesthetics.

Philip Brophy is Australia’s leading writer on film soundtrack and sound design, responsible for conceiving and organising Cinesonic (1998-2001), a landmark international symposium devoted to promoting the study of sound in film. A practising sound designer for feature films as well as an independent filmmaker and musician, he continues to exert his influence on contemporary media arts practice, especially in relation to the spatial exploration of surround-sound. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brophy was doing stuff that, while not overtly suggestive of distributed art as it is conceived today, nonetheless opened up ways of thinking about art and culture that would become indispensable to media arts in the 1990s and beyond. During this time Brophy’s varied interests in film, video, installation and graphics were concentrated around the activities of a band with a deliberately unpronounceable name, signalled by a sequence of three geometrically arranged arrows. Pronounced like an admonitory clicking of the tongue (like the tutting noise made by Skippy the Kangaroo), the band, for convenience sake, was usually referred to in print as Tsk-tsk-tsk, or Tch-tch-tch. Already, in the title alone, Brophy was messing with our heads, short-circuiting the normative channels of communication and signification with which we go about doing things in relation to life and art. Tsk-tsk-tsk’s distinctive symbol had a familiar, ubiquitous presence on the streets of Melbourne during this time.

Philip Brophy,Tsk-tsk-tsk artwork, 1977

Like a co-ordinate in an orienteering exercise, it signified a terrain being laid out, distributed for exploration. Fliers, bill-posters and other designed ephemera bearing this strange imprimatur announced the imminent activation of a serial work, a decentred performance network (to use a very contemporary term) that would unfold in space and time, in which discrete components could be thought of as linked nodes (to use two more). A live music performance would take place in a suburban laneway at a party in Collingwood or at the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda, a film or video work would screen in a university cinema a week later, accompanied by a printed text and an LP or EP, both produced independently through Brophy’s Stuff publications imprint and Innocent/Present recording labels. This was a combinatory poetic that generated an unknown, indeterminate audience who were familiar with the Tsk-tsk-tsk concept and were prepared to be collaborators in a multimedia circuit of reference, performance and participation. Attendance at an installation or screening, acquiring and reading a text, purchasing a purpose-made record, were conscious choices to participate, to play a role in a kind of rendezvous-art experience. The integration of diverse media elements into what could loosely be called ‘the work’ was entirely the province of an indeterminate audience, as was their understanding of its potential meanings.

Take “What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’?”(1980). For this critical investigation into the structures and meanings of disco music (which had rivalled punk as a phenomenon of the late 1970s), Brophy conceived of exploring this question through a series of multimedia iterations. Part of this process was the invention of Asphyxiation, a fictitious pick-up band for the occasion. Asphyxiation conducted a series of musical performances, featuring singing and dancing, at an installation at the George Patton Gallery at Melbourne University. The physical installation was interpreted as a minimalist space with musical instruments set out as sculptures on plinths, fluorescent tube lighting on the walls, as well as a series of stylised silk-screen images depicting the clichés of disco fashion. A monotonous soundtrack reinforced the idea of the gallery as an other space, a ‘Disco’.

George Patton Gallery, Melbourne, 1980. Photo: Judy Annear

Brophy deliberately circumscribed the word in inverted commas to register the fact that the entire installation was a reflexive commentary on the audio-visual language of disco as a musical form, as well as a confrontation of its cultural meaning as ‘the most recent and prolific enigma yet to seduce the mass-market.’ A detailed program note, which was more of an essay, added a deeper, analytical dimension to the installation and live performances. A record, made by Asphyxiation, entitled “What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’?” was released by Innocent Records. The entire project, under the title of “What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’?” was not a unified thing to be encountered and consumed. It was a kind of epiphenomenon and, in general terms, was indicative of the many other projects that Tsk-tsk-tsk conceived around themes ranging from muzak (Venetian Rendezvous, 1978) to rock and roll (Nice Noise, 1978). It presumed the interaction of a co-ordinating agency that was beyond the artist, fictitious or otherwise, that cohered a series of related, contiguous media events into a conceptual, if not material whole.

Philip Brophy, Asphyxiation art work, 1980.

To name the band you had to make a commitment to collaborate in the pervasive circuit of reference, performance, publication and multi-media events that constituted the Tsk-tsk-tsk cultural program. Knowing that it was something to be spoken was the germ of a poetic involving signs and acts of interpretation. In this respect the significance of Brophy’s exploration of collaborative poetics was noted by Paul Taylor, one of Australia’s leading art and cultural critics of the time. Writing in 1981 in the first issue of Art+Text magazine, Taylor discussed Tsk-tsk-tsk as an example of what he referred to as ‘Australian New Wave’ (Taylor, 1981). Drawing on Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘second degree,’ Taylor outlined an artistic style that exploited quotation and repetition, the self-conscious use of familiar, usually subcultural images, sounds and meanings. For Taylor, this style was made for an audience literate in the information flows of mass media, an audience highly receptive to cultural signs and the relations between them, as well as their own relations to them. His general theoretical account of the connections between artist, spectator and work uncannily brings to mind models of interaction with which we are very familiar today in the context of relational and distributed aesthetics:

In the realm of the “second degree,” those abstract relations which connect the artist and spectator to the artwork are organised around a sense of participation wherein the spectator’s role is openly affective. There is a recognition that the work is incomplete without the spectator and that its meaning exists externally – in the space of language and culture (Taylor, 1981: 24).

Brophy had an intuitive understanding of the ways in which different combinations of media can galvanise an audience into unique modes of participation. But more crucially, he wanted to liberate the concept of what art could be by moving away from the singular idea of the art object— arguably the defining characteristic of what we refer to as distributed aesthetics. In so doing he opened up new ways of thinking about audience interaction. What he has called ‘post-object art’ refers to the replacement of art, as a privileged, identifiable, graspable thing, by gatherings or accumulations of events, performances and other methods (Brophy, 1988: unpaginated). Works such as “What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’?” exemplified a genuine intermedia practice in which there were no boundaries limiting what could be possible in the name of an art event. He also conceived of the idea of intermedia installation as a spatio-temporal concept years before Nicolas Bourriaud conceptualised the idea of relational aesthetics in the late 1990s.

By the late 1990s the idea of audiences interacting with serial, distributed media that provisionally formed the basis of the work, was becoming very familiar and more recognisable within popular culture as much as media arts practice. Consider the exploitation of trans-media in the film industry. By this I mean the way in which a feature film is promoted as one element in a series of related media events. A case in point is The Matrix Reloaded (2003). Already part of an ongoing sequence of films (The Matrix before and The Matrix Revolutions after), The Matrix Reloaded was released as part of an ensemble of media that broadened the context of the film into a cultural event. Notwithstanding the now standard accompaniments of soundtrack and interactive website, the film was linked to a console video game, Enter the Matrix, as well as a series of nine short animated films, the Animatrix, representing different stories set in the hyperreal world of the Matrix – both of which are promoted on the official Warner Brothers web site as an integral part of the overall Matrix experience. Of course there is a commercial imperative here, despite the somewhat twee overtures to an essential narrative dimension to these other media (‘without the game, you won’t see the entire Matrix Reloaded story’). But despite the obvious couching of commercial expedience in terms of cultural innovation, such spin-offs reveal how pervasive the idea of interaction and extended distribution had become within popular culture as a whole.

Nor, for that matter, was it confined to commercial cinema. Art-house cinema, too, had embraced the potential of interactive media as a means of heightening and extending the audience’s involvement in the film, which is now reconfigured as something more like a personal aesthetic choice to commit to a work over time— a commitment once reserved for the great romans a clef of literary modernism, such as Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Joyce’s Ulysses and Kakfa’s The Castle. Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases: a personal history of uranium is an audacious attempt to utilise the “new visual languages”, such as the Internet and other interactive, distributable media, to create a complex multi-text that unfolds over time. A serial work par excellence, aspects of the narrative and the projects of the eponymous hero were introduced and archived on www.tulselupernetwork.com, then developed more extensively in the first of three feature film releases in 2003, as well as in forthcoming television programs, print, CD-ROM and no less than 92 DVDs (92 being the atomic number of uranium). Still an ongoing work in progress, The Tulse Luper Suitcases will surely test the outer limits of interaction and distribution, even in a culture apparently besotted with the concept.

Martine Corompt, This is my World (2001) Photo: Dominic Redfern.

The limits of tolerance and involvement have also been put to the test in media art works. Sometime in 2001 a strange, cartoon-like character took a disquieting stroll through a suburban shopping centre in Melbourne. The presence of this clearly artificial entity was heightened by its exaggerated features and its slightly melancholy, lost look. This was Leanne, the lead singer of a fabricated all girl pop group called Household Names.

The creation of Martine Corompt, Household Names first appeared on the scene in 2000 in a work of the same name that traced the rise and fall of the musical aspirations of a group of disillusioned yet ambitious young girls. Household Names explored issues to do with transformation and the pressure to alter physical appearance in order to make it big as a ‘household name’ in the pop music industry. For Leanne and the other members of Household Names, such change meant mutation and desperation, a radical deformation of everything they had been. This is reflected in the various representations of their synthetic rise and fall from fame on Corompt’s website, in the form of Margaret and Walter Keane waifs, gelflex sculptures and comic book characters. Their sense of confusion with the cost of such change is directly expressed in the subsequent work, This is My World (2001), in which Leanne made her transubstantial appearance at Northcote Plaza shopping centre in Melbourne’s north, leaving the digital world of the computer and the gallery installation behind.

Martine Corompt, Household Names (2000). Comic strip and gelflex sculpture.

Martine Corompt, Household Names (2000). Comic strip and gelflex sculpture.

Corompt’s development of these characters and the exposure of their saga under the collective, decentred network of events that make up This is My World is suggestive of the kind of audience integration described in relation to the work of Philip Brophy. It is both relational and distributed; a hybrid media event of offline and online components. Interactivity for Corompt is interpreted in terms of bringing two worlds into unpredictable connection, enmeshing an audience into an impromptu encounter of unformatted outcomes in which they must, conceptually at least, play a role. The interactive component of the work involves the unwitting ‘audience’s’ encounter with this dislocated lost soul and their attempts to understand its presence or avoid it altogether, as she walks aimlessly around the shops or sits in wide eyed silence on a bench, holding her preposterously large, hydrocephalic head upright. Corompt, a.k.a Leanne in mufty, has commented on the strangeness of this encounter, of a general discomfiture as people avoided even acknowledging that Leanne was there. This irresistible and unwitting engagement of the audience in a performance is an example of what Shiralee Saul has called ‘audience manipulation’, a reversal of the usual spectator/performer relationship whereby the audience feels under scrutiny, involved in an experience not of their own making (Saul, 2003).

Martine Corompt, This is My World. First FloorGallery, Melbourne, 2001.

By taking Leanne beyond the interface of the screen, Corompt opened up a space of engagement in which less obvious, unseen modes of interaction between work and viewer can be explored. The response Leanne received during her walk around Northcote Plaza is telling: ‘It was strange, nobody paid any attention to us. They would look away, no one wanted to be involved. They thought that it was a set-up, like Candid Camera, and no one wanted to make a fool of themselves in public’.[2] Leanne’s presence at Northcote Plaza was out of place, disjunctive, unnerving. Yet this indeterminate coming together of events is suggestive of the differential relations of distributed and relational aesthetics. It manifests an unexpected new ground in which the event, the avatar and the audience occupy a temporary space of uncertainty, dislocated from the normative stabilities of things being in their appropriate place. The wonderful irony of the title of this work – This is My World – implies a metaphysical boundary dispute over terrain, as well as a politics of difference. But it also resonates with an unresolved uncertainty: whose world is it and what am I in it?

Such indeterminacy is the nature of distributed aesthetics; not everyone will experience the same thing. Nor, for that matter, is it guaranteed that any one person will experience every trace within a distributed art event. I wonder, for example, if anyone can truly say that they scoured every item in the excessive and delirious volume of ephemera assembled in Nat and Ali’s installation not only, but also, honk for art in the 2004 exhibition at the Ian Potter Gallery in Melbourne. It is in the nature of relational aesthetics that participants will encounter difference and that the nature of participation will be different for everyone. The same is true for distributed media, from hypertext fiction to multi-user domains. This is the conclusion drawn by Daniel Palmer in his extensive discussion of the logic of participatory media culture (Palmer, 2004). Palmer persuasively argues that the cultural phenomena of contemporary media – reality television, cable tv, digital games, media art – have given rise to qualitatively individualistic modes of viewing and consumption. For Palmer what is at stake is a shared sense of time and participation. The public sphere of common engagement has been ruptured by massive privatization and a proliferation of available viewing times and discretionary options to individuals. The same can be said of networked or distributed media. The notion of shared frames of reference and the possibility of viewing or interpretive communities are redefined in terms of personal experience and a new individualism, in which the collective and socially discursive context of art is a discretionary option.[3] And in the context of a convergence of relational and distributed aesthetics, a potentially accidental option at that.

Consider what must surely be one of the strangest performances ever staged on the Internet. In 1997 in Crested Butte Colorado a group of conference delegates at the Digital Storytelling Festival sat in a theatre watching a projected image of an Internet chat room. The room in question was The Palace, one of the first graphic-user interface chat environments that succeeded the text-only domains of the early 1990s. The delegates were watching Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot being performed in real time in a virtual room in the Palace (appropriately called the ‘Waiting Room’). Here was the commingling of a collective, dedicated audience, congregated in the same place at the same time to watch a specified event, with an indeterminate, remote and decentred audience of online lurkers who may or may not have been aware that they were in fact an audience, watching an online drama unfold. Furthermore, many of the telepresent inhabitants of the Waiting Room would have been unaware that they had become performers in a meta-drama of recursion. Like the play-within-the-play in Waiting for Godot (when Vladimir and Estragon watch Lucky and Pozzo perform), the very mix of determined and indeterminate spectators of the play in the Palace was for the Colorado audience part of the spectacle itself. Watching an online performance of Waiting For Godot was an instance of the larger inquiry into net invention, the critical investigation of the creative uses of online spaces such as the Palace. Scott Rosenberg, writing of the event, observed that in a ‘post-performance discussion, the performers and their audience came to the same conclusion: the hovering possibility of interference – the ever-present threat of street-theater-style interference – was precisely what was most compelling about the show’ (Rosenberg, 1997). This had been dramatically confirmed by the fact that casual passers-by, who happened upon the Waiting Room, insinuated themselves into the performance. Rosenberg points out, with great pleasure, that at one point an avatar named Muscleman (‘a recumbent beefcake model straight out of a men’s underwear ad’) interrupts one of the official actors with the question, ‘Why are you waiting for him, anyway? I forgot.’ And who said nothing happens in Waiting For Godot?

Illustration by William Duke, 1997.

Distributed and relational modes of art represent different ways of conceptualizing communities, but they do so at the expense of some historically entrenched assumptions to do with the social nature of participation in the artifacts of cultural production. Such theories have been pivotal in enabling the articulation of different kinds of aesthetic theory, of aesthetic theories of difference. For better or worse, this has been especially important in the context of the clarion call of the late 1990s for appropriate paradigms with which to discuss and critically evaluate things such as net art and collaborative online networked media events. The shift from fixed location, public gallery-based art to ambient, distributed and customisable art continues to exert pressure on the practice of criticism. Within the network of distributed aesthetics, strange, unpredictable attractions can, as we have seen, emerge between spectator and spectacle. But even stranger relations can take place between critics and readers, especially when there is no shared basis of familiarity with the work (let alone understanding or critical appreciation). In this the aesthetics of distribution are indicative of our changing habits of consumption as much as our changing conception of what art is and can potentially be in a networked world.

Author’s Biography

Notes

[1] For an image of this event, see http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/01/1062403447291.html?oneclick=true.
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[2] Martine Corompt, quoted in Saul, 2003.
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[3] See Darren Tofts, ‘f2f 2 url & b ond: space/time and the dissemination of community’, Transformations: Online Journal of Region, Culture and Society, (December, 2005), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/index.shtml.
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References

Bourriaud, Nicolas. ‘Public Relations: Bennett Simpson Talks With Nicolas Bourriaud’, Artforum (April 2001). Reproduced online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830815.

Brophy, Philip. ‘The Non-Event of Sound in Video Art’, Scan 1, (August, 1988), reprinted in ReStuff, ‘Media, Theory, Technology’ (1991): unpaginated.

Flashmobs, http://www.flashmob.com.

Neumark, Norie. ‘Relays, Delays, and Distance Art/Activism’, Introduction to Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds.) At A Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2005): 3–24.

Palmer, Daniel. ‘Participatory Media: Visual Culture in Real Time’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne (2004). http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000125.

Randolph, Sal. ‘Notes on Social Architectures’, (March 2003), http://www.highlala.com/projects/socarch.html.

Rackham, Melinda, ‘empyrean:soft-skinned space’, http://www.subtle.net/empyrean/.

Rosenberg, Scott. ‘Clicking for Godot’, Salon, (October 2, 1997), http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1997/10/02godot2.html.

Saul, Shiralee. ‘Review of This is My World‘, ABC Online, (2003), http://www.abc.net.au/arts/digital/stories/s474111.htm.

Taylor, Paul. ‘Australian “newwave” and the “second degree”’, Art + Text 1 (1981): 23–32.

Images Courtesy of Melinda Rackham, Philip Brophy, Martine Corompt and William Duke.

Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed instead a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters. Distributed aesthetics, then, concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be a sketch of reconsiderations of the operations of cultural memory or of phenomena such as endurance performances. But what we propose, through gathering together the disparate pieces in this fibreculture journal issue, is that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of this distributed aesthesia. In various ways, all the texts here take up the mode through which ‘the network’ – the juncture and disjunction of here and there, you and I, social and individuated – functions as the crucial operand in dispersing and contouring perception, art practice and aesthetics.

It would be unwise, however, to assign distributed aesthetics the role of the ‘new’ new media. As Darren Tofts cogently demonstrates in his analysis of the burgeoning Australian media arts scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, certain network formations pre-date the current raft of theorisation. By re-visiting work from the 1980s by artists such as Philip Brophy and the band Tsk-Tsk-Tsk, which included street stencil art, live performances, video events and gallery shows, Tofts invites us to unpack media art as a temporally staggered and distributed event. The importance of drawing our attention to these pre-figurations of networked aesthetics lies in both highlighting the rich and remediated history of media arts and in sobering the frenzy around the fad for relational aesthetics doing the global rounds of art galleries and conferences. Like the Flash mobbing that arises form current distributed media, these earlier media art events depended upon a participatory audience prepared to facilitate information about the works’ distributed times and places. Geert Lovink and Anna Munster, on the other hand, discern a particular aesthetic dominating contemporary imaginings of the network, which they title ‘the will to network mapping’. In a series of speculative propositions that seek to move towards a social rather than formal aesthetics, Lovink and Munster prise this image of the network as an ever-growing euphoric entity to be charted via links and nodes away from biologistic and organisational metaphors. Instead, they suggest, networks are human constructions and their ‘aesthesia’ must come to terms with all too human experiences of frustration, boredom and labour that comprise life lived in and with distributed media.

From an altogether different perspective, Greg Turner-Rahman empirically explores the practices of resource, knowledge and skill sharing among online design communities that amount to a literal distribution of aesthetics. He offers us a different version of design practice, which is often only considered from the point of view of its corporate environment where the one-way transmission of brief from client to designer holds sway. Instead, Turner-Rahman compares an imaginative if more marginal set of designers who are operating in ‘open-source’ mode. Yet this is not an essay that is simply celebratory of the ‘network way’ again. We are invited to think through the felt tension of changes in design culture as it attempts to straddle both entrenched corporate and emerging online modes of production.

One of the most satisfying aspects of working on this issue of the fibreculture journal has been the response we have received from artists to the meshwork of issues covered by distributed media, art and practice. Satisfying because these responses tend to experiment with how to do distribution rather than worrying about the finer details of what it should comprise. In the extracts from ‘Portrait of the VJ’, Mark Amerika splices the cut and paste rhythms of computerised text with the slide and sampling of distributed audiovisual performance that characterise the art of VJjing. The VJ is a provocateur whose improvisational and hybridised practice recombines traditional art forms such as film with experimental writing, electronica and video, software and net art. In his own VJ art Amerika explores and performs the complex agency of images and sounds, often on-the-fly and comprised from a palimpsest of memories, perceptions, experimental digital effects, and geophysical and virtual networks. Such ‘visual hypertextuality’ is also a feature of Simon Biggs’ distributed and shared environments. In Babel, Biggs confounds the conventional geometry of vision – typically represented by an inverted triangle where the apex equates to the singular eye of the Cartesian subject – by creating a multi-user remote networking system so that what we see simultaneously includes the multiple perspectives of other viewers at dispersed physical and online locations. The installation Parallax also challenges the supposedly homologous relation between vision and self by creating a collective and interactive visual experience, effectively interspersing the behaviour of virtual objects in the screen with the multiple movements of inter-actors within the installation space. Keith Armstrong’s Intimate Transactions provides us with another practice-led contribution to research on the felt disjunction of networks/artworks. Armstrong’s essay is valuable in that it demonstrates that aesthetically working through the design of embodies and networked interfaces can also produce a theoretical and practical framework for artists. He names this ‘ecosophical’ – a thinking through of artist, interface, participant and artwork as a mutable ecology that produces change and difference for all nodes and interrelations.

If artists are busy distributing the event and object that we might once have called an art work, how are audiences and institutions reacting to and even re-constituting themselves as part of net-art-works? Although we may have heard quite a lot about the ubiquity of audience and the disappearance of the gallery with respect to online art, nevertheless exhibitions, installations and institutions stubbornly remain in all their localisation. Yet as Vince Dziekan points out, art galleries are increasingly both virtualised (their Web presence often producing entirely different aesthetic and cultural modes of engagement) and their infrastructure digitised. What, then, does this mean for the site-specificity of such institutions? Rather than take an online gallery as exemplary of such forces of distribution, Dzekian gives us a detailed polemic that brings distributed aesthetics into contact with the National Gallery of Victoria. Here we get a sense of the ways in which an institution wrestles with the experience of being dispersed between informatic and physical space and how its curatorial practices might negotiate this tension.

Of course as denizens of new media art we are already familiar with the splitting and conjoining of ‘the virtual’ and ‘the physical’ through analysis of virtual reality art work throughout the 1990s. In her article ‘Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics’ Edwina Bartlem challenges the notion that immersive VR or VE art and distributed or networked art are of a different experiential or perceptual order. Both immersive and distributed aesthetics, she argues, provide the conditions for a mediated yet fully engaging telepresence, which can effectively shift our understanding of art spectatorship from passive to performative mode and transform how we interpret and experience community, the human-technology relation and our own corporeality and consciousness. Susan Ballard is also concerned with a thorn in the side of new media theory, albeit a somewhat older one – entropy. Resonating with a problem that is of concern for other authors in this issue – namely, the transmission model of distributing signal – Ballard argues that entropy is not the downside to information being pushed around a space. Rather than the decay of signal, art that harnesses the material forces of leakage and dispersal might actually constitute a kind of networked experience. In examining the ways in which participants, computers, installed spaces and networks inhabit some recent art exhibited in New Zealand, Ballard suggests that fragmentation assists the pieces to materialize in their exhibition space.

What is insightful about the particularity of these analyses from Dzekian, Bartlem, Ballard and Armstrong is that they dig for frayed and uncharted elements of networked media, art and culture instead of lauding the technical as a necessary ‘connector’ of experience. Overall – and as is fitting for this issue’s theme – there seems to be no formal system, no set of objects and no one technology that can serve to ground a distributed aesthetics. But there are certainly enough shifts and cracks occurring to suggest that however we inhabit and imagine networks this habitat and this imaginary have by now thoroughly permeated and reshaped contemporary experience.

The editors would like to thank the many anonymous referees who helped with their insightful comments in their reports and for their time. In addition we would like to thank the authors for their patience in putting this issue together. Thanks also to Andrew Murphie for his skill and patience as executive editor.

Lisa Gye
Anna Munster
Ingrid Richardson

December 2005