Models and Frameworks

Narrative and Anti-narrative; linear and non-linear; author and audience--all these dualities seem to clearly define positions in advance of our consideration, and the questions these positions all appear to raise about audience and artwork and interaction have already been asked and various answers have been found--all of which are readily available as the "common knowledge" of so many of our collective assumptions about media and how media do/should act.

The underlying problem we have is that these models and the questions they generate are all already old, heavily discussed and well-known. There is little challenge made to the idea that "aura" is diminished by "reproduction." It is an established fact, to question it is to suggest a heresy. That this situation obtains means that these models are thoroughly academic in nature, and the history they support (or supports them) is no longer open to question.

Simply put, then, is the problem: we need new models that are independent of these assumptions, and specifically question the established frameworks themselves, rejecting them as appropriate.

Why does "participation" really matter--and how is it different from "interaction"? My feeling is that this may be the site where things can begin, but only if we start by rejecting the intellectual-ideological baggage of established theories and be willing to question (if not entirely reject) what has been previously accepted. To participate is very different than to interact. Participation implies a high degree of equal, peer to peer engagement where all the agents are involved in the creation of the parameters (constraints) of the work.

Interactive Ideology

[These are simply some notes prompted by David Rokeby's piece.]

It has become a commonplace assumption that when something is interactive, it is not only more democratic, but is also "open" as part of a general "questioning of authorship." Both these interpretations of interactivity may be not only inaccurate, bu specifically misleading, providing a mask for the reassertion of traditional modes of working while creating an illusion of the opposite.
Rokeby writes "The question of domination raises an important issue. For many people, interaction has come to mean 'control'. People look to interactive technology for 'empowerment', and such technologies can certainly give the interactor a strong sense of power. This is clearly the attraction of video games. In these games, the mirror transforms the interactor's gestures largely by amplification, but what is actually offered is the amplification of a gesture within a void, a domination of nothingness, the illusion of power. In particular, this is a fantasy of power bereft of responsibility. In the recent Gulf War, the video-game fantasy of power was reconnected to the power of actual armaments. In the process, the sense of responsibility was lost; the personal acountability of the pilots was cleverly amputated, dissolved by the interface.

"Interaction is about encounter rather than control. The interactive artist must counter the video-game-induced expectations that the interactor often brings to interaction. Obliqueness and irony within the transformations and the coexistence of many different variables of control within the interactive media provide for a richer, though perhaps less ego-gratifying experience." [1] It is unclear how the set of concerns with ironically divesting his audience of the sense of "control" that typically accompanies interactivity can be seen as other than an assertion of control by forces extrinsic to the audience--in this case, the author via an automated system. Expecting his audience to accept this passively is a basically authoritarian stance.

At the same time, we are expected to believe that interaction offers a breach to the apparent control and dominance of authorship. There is a paradox here that becomes evident at the level of praxis.

The big question we should be asking of all these "interactive" systems is in what way do they teach us to accommodate the status quo? Interactive systems are inherently domineering--they allow certain actions, disallow others and teach their users into positions of accommodation and adaptation to the parameters of a human-designed system that does not allow variances or enable most alternative uses. The image of artist within such a system is demiurgic (demagoguery) assertign its dominance while denying its presence.