Teorie vědy 2/2004:

"ARCHEOLOGIE INTERAKTIVITY"


Obsah:


Erkki Huhtamo
Od kybernetizace k interakci: příspěvek k archeologii interaktivity. 5

Jonathan Crary
Modernizace vidění. 25

Lev Manovich
Obrazovka a uživatel. 41

James M. Moran
Domácí tvorba a kulturní reprodukce. 65

Michel de Certeau
Čtení jako pytlačení. 89

Michael Cahn
Váhání mezi odpadem a hodnotou: ke kulturní hermeneutice sběratele. 107


kabi.net

Lenka Dolanová
Proměny filmového plátna. 131

Pavel Sedlák
Interaktivita: mezi participací, interakcí a interfejsem. 151


recenze

Denisa Kera
Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media 193

Kateřina Krtilová
Vilém Flusser, Chvála povrchovosti 197


nekrolog

Daniel Just
Jacques Derrida 203

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FROM CYBERNATION TO INTERACTION: A CONTRIBUTION TO AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY
Erkki Huhtamo

Although the concepts of “automation” and “cybernation” seem to be out of date and irrelevant for contemporary discourse on new media in general and interactivity in particular, Erkki Huhtamo claims in his essay exactly the opposite. He notes that one of the common features of many technocultural discourses is their lack of historical consciousness: for the technorationalist logic which dominates thinking about media today the old is always obsolete and useless, be it a piece of hardware or a theoretical concept.
His archaeological approach to media stresses the reiterative nature of discursive aspects of culture, the stereotypical formulations which tend to come back, again and again, and adapt to new situations, especially in the reactions of public to new media. Huhtamo calls for understanding cultural processes as multilayered constructions in which there is no necessary synchronicity between the features of an invention, the ideas of its creators, and the meanings actually given to it in some cultural context. It is this methodological approach which he tries to use for reintepretation of the concept of interactivity: to map contemporary interactive media by relating them to other manifestations of the human-machine encounter and by tracing some of the paths along which their principles have been formed.
In the discourse on automation in the 1960s a clear distinction was being made between “automatic machines” and “automation” as a general principle. In spite of the different emphases of either the early spokesmen or critics of automation a common “master-discourse” can be discovered in their formulations, leading to essentially similar conclusions: intercourse with the machine leads either to extending man`s capacities or to his dehumanization and alienation. There has – despite many efforts – also never been a clear demarcation line established between the concepts of automation, cybernation, and mechanization. These were very often used as synonyms.
Huhtamo pays attention to the way the early imaginary about the computer was shaped by the popular media, by its “appearances” in television shows, newspaper cartoons, and popular science stories. All these would present the computer as a “familiar alien,” the signs of life it manifests were strongly mediated both by the media and by the computer`s operators and programmers.
Comparing the attitudes of the operators of automated machines and the users of interactive systems, Huhtamo arrives at marking the shift from the “waiting operator” to the “imaptient user.” Whereas with automation one’s role is restricted to control and occasional interaction, the interactive system requires repeated and rapid actions from the user, it is not based on waiting but on constant (re)acting. These two attitudes, however, don’t have to be seen as absolutely clear-cut and mutually exclusive as Huhtamo`s analysis of several interactive artworks shows. Interaction can thus be seen as part of the gradual development of the computer from ideas that were first discussed in connection with automation – a phenomenon that at first sight may seem to be its polar opposite.



MODERNISING VISION
Jonathan Crary

In his essay on “modernising vision” Jonathan Crary presents a correction to the dominant models of western visual tradition based on the idea of continuous and ever-increasing progress toward verisimilitude in representation (the camera obscura, for example, is typically portrayed here as a sort of embryonic form of later technologies such as photography or cinema). Crary argues that it is equally important to stress discontinuities in the evolution of discourses and practices of vision and analyzes the shift from the classical model of camera obscura to the model of subjective vision articulated in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
The classical model of camera obscura was grounded in several presuppositions. As an epistemological model it was an apparatus guaranteeing access to objective truth about the world, assuming it is possible to draw a line between the outside (world) and the inside (mind) and that the relationship between these two spheres is one of correspondence. The most radical change brought about especially by the new physiological studies (Goethe, Müller…) of the early 1800s was the insertion of the human body into the discourse on vision and the creation of a new kind of “productive” observer.
The collapse of the camera obscura as a model for the status of an observer was part of a much larger process of modernization, even as the camera obscura itself was an element of an earlier modernity. By the early 1800s, however, the rigidity of the camera obscura, its linear optical system, its fixed positions, its categorical distinction between outside and inside, its identification of perception and object, were all too inflexible and unwieldy for the needs of the new century. A more mobile, usable, and productive observer was needed in both discourse and practice – to be adequate to new uses of the body and to a vast proliferation of equally mobile and exchangeable signs and images. Modernization entailed a decoding and deterritorialization of visio



The Screen and the User
Lev Manovich

Manovich expands his notion of the interface by undertaking two “genealogies” of the most pervasive medium between the humans, the physical and the virtual spaces - the screen. The first genealogy follows the relation between the space and time of the viewer and the space and time of the representation (physical space). In the case of the static screen/image (paintings, photography) and the dynamic screen (cinema) the time of viewing is different from the time of capturing of the image. The image changes in real time reflecting changes in the referent and the interaction with the viewer in the case of the real time and interactive screens of different instrument displays, video monitors, computer screens etc.. In his second genealogy Manovich is analyzing the emergence of a medium that is not based on a screen - the development of VR systems that he calls the “simulation of interactive three dimensional environments without a screen”. He highlights the altered relation between the screen and the body of the viewer that is mobile. The VR changes the logic of the Western “representational apparatuses” by which the body must be fixed in order to see the image or interact with it. It opens up a possibility of fully immersive simulation technologies that offer continuity between the virtual and physical space rather than discontinuity and rupture. However, the user of the VR becomes a “captive of the machine in a psychical sense”. His body is imprisoned in a much radical way that leads to the confusion of the representations with his perceptions and to merging of his retina and the screen.




THE HOME MODE OF CULTURAL REPRODUCTION
James M. Moran

James M. Moran in his study The Home Mode of Cultural Reproduction: From Ideology Thesis to Habitus tries to present the home mode, that means snapshot photography, home movies, and home video, as a significant field of amateur practise, often misleadingly disregarded as an expression of naïve, consumer and false consciousness. Introducing positive social and cultural functions of the home mode, such as representation of everyday life, balancing between competing demands of public and private identities, establishing continuity between generations, creating the image of home as a cognitive and affective basis, helps him to evaluate the home mode in its positive relation to the social order. For this purpose, it is necessary to come across several theoretical approaches, explaining structured redundancy of amateur media practice. One position, the so-called dominant ideology thesis associated with functionalist theories, approaches the home mode practises and artefacts as determined products and determinate producers of capitalist values confirming prevalent social order and serving to sustain the status quo. Second position, which Moran identifies with Pierre Bourdieu’s general theory of practice, sees the home mode as a continuation of deeply structured habits, such as family representation, already embedded in material practices, appropriating amateur media technologies to express a coherent worldview. The issue of the home mode production is to be freed from persistent negative connotations, and presented as a practice providing an authentic, active mode of media production for representing everyday life. The home mode production changes, as the models of social, cultural relations and conditions change. It may start to serve new goals, and reflect new needs. Wider social context, formation of alternative modes of coexistence (ranging from single mothers or fathers, homosexual relationships to new types of families we choose, consisting of relatives, friends, and colleagues) must be taken into account, if we want to provide a complex theoretical analysis of the changing motivation to capture, chronicle and document our lives in the era of the explosion and inflation of images.



READING AS POACHING
Michel de Certeau

The “Reading as Poaching” chapter from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life challenges the traditional notion of media recipients and audiences as essentially passive and manipulatable. De Certeau traces origins of this notion to the Enlightenment conception of education (educational popularization) which was supposed to transform manners and customs of society and so remodel it. An important element of this idea of producing society by a “scriptural system,” of “imprinting it by and like the text” is a dividing line drawn between the authors and the readers or, more generally, between the “producers” and the “consumers.” The ones who produced were then privileged over the ones who did not produce and consumption was understood in terms of a “receptacle.”
De Certeau points out the ways the activity of reading was misunderstood in the Enlightenment ideology and tries to reconceive it in a more active and productive fashion: the reader is not obliged to obey author’s intentions or to pay attention to the “literal meaning – a product of social elite;” he or she may rather fragment the text and recompose it in many new possible ways.
For de Certeau readers are travellers who move across lands belonging to someone else, nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write. Most importantly, it is the body of the reader where the movements of his or her activity should be rediscovered. The ways of reading have historically led to a withdrawal of the body, to distancing of the text which results in much greater autonomy of the reader and his or her ability to convert the text through reading.



BALANCING BETWEEN WASTE AND VALUE:
TOWARDS A CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS OF COLLECTING
Michael Cahn

In his essay on the “hermeneutics of collecting” Michael Cahn analyzes three areas of collecting as examples of a certain gnoseological structure, of a logic of seriality in which attention towards an object is never fully concentrated and satisfied because it immediately transfers itself to a search for a new object. The American “garage sales“ are the starting point of the essay: Cahn claims that their meaning is not in the fact that unused objects may become useful again since cultural values are more important than use values – the consumer system is overpowered by the system of collecting. Unlike other forms of getting rid of trash and garbage, the garage sale is a form a spectacle and does not serve only the needs of the poor. Collectors come to them to look for a specimen of whatever kind missing in their collections, nervously and full of anticipation walk around the objects displayed. It is their goal to find a new acquisition, although it is never their goal to finish and complete their collection.
Excavating objects from their former settings and rearranging them into new constellations is also the point of another realm discussed by Cahn. In the seventeenth century new approach in science was developed, guided by attention towards the marginal. Everything strange or exotic was collected in the Cabinets of curiosities (natural objects in the so-called Wunderkammern, art objects in Kunstkammern). These collections of rarities (which were the foundation stones of museums) reveal similar mixture of diffused and concentrated attention, of distraction and contemplation as the garage sales. Cahn discusses the relationship between an individual object and the collection and concludes that in the collection each object is in a way worn and loses its uniqueness. This is one of the reasons why a collection can never be complete and has to be understood as a process rather than a structure.
The Latin words legere and collegere point to the affinity between reading and collecting. The Commonplace books are a lucid example of reading similar to collecting – looking for places and passages in the text that are stored and potentially reused in a new text. Such a reading is always in a sense a form of proto-writing. Here, again, this kind of textual collecting is characterized by incessant balancing between concentration and distraction, between a single object and its series, between value and waste. As such it presents an important reconsideration of our traditional models of human-object relations.



Metamorphoses of the Film Screen
Lenka Dolanová

The following is an excerpt from Lenka Dolanová’s M.A. thesis “Moving Images” are Entering the Gallery (Charles University, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Art History, June 2004), which demonstrates the changing relations between moving images and the gallery space from the 1960s to present. The notion of “expanded cinema” (developed by Gene Youngblood, Peter Weibel and others) is still being used to refer to artworks that in some ways expand the criteria of classical cinema. The early installations, inspired by conceptual tendencies in art, suggested new possibilities of recipients’ participation – the recipient becomes an integral part of the artwork. As the moving image expands into space, it interrelates with sculptural installation and gains new physical dimensions. Thus it can help us localize in the 1960s and 70s certain precedent of contemporary art. In regard to the new media’s installations-projections, one can however search for even much older predecessors of the contemporary media art.
The intermedia performances which combined staged action with film developed mainly in the US and often took place in the specially designed spaces. Other artists developed the interconnections between sculpture and film (for example Robert Whitman in his film “sculptures” from the 1960s). Moving image in the gallery space often gains the dimensions inspired by the classical visual art forms (diptych, polyptych, cupola). On the other side,the artists in Germany and Austria worked in a more aggresive manner, using film as an instrument of the offense against the public, often with a clear political overtones. In their actions they took the film out to perform directly on the street.
The former Czechoslovakia gained fame thanks to several “inventions”, staged at the international festivals Expo. In 1958 in Brusel it was polyekran, the simultaneous film projection for several screens situated in the space, invented by Emil Radok and Josef Svoboda. Later in Montreal in 1967 Radúz Činčera presented his Kinoautomat, the interactive movie the action of which evolved according to the choices of the groups of visitors. However, the current technology enables a new level of interactivity (open interactivity as it is called by Lev Manovich) which does not work with the elements given in advance but develops in the real time. An example we could see at the last year´s festival Ars Electronica(2003) during the performance called Messa di Voce (Putting the Sound) which experimented with the interactivity between the voice performers and projected visuals on the wall behind them. The voice and movement of the actors showed the direct impact on the image component of the performance and suggested so the possibilities of the open interactivity.

The cases of today´s interactive installations (by Christian Ziegler, Jeffrey Shaw, Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takena, and Luc Courchesne, as an example) demonstrate the tendency to actualize the models from the “prehistory” of interactivity (panorama in 18th century). These works of art enable emphasized visitor´s activity and – in contrast to the historical models – offer themselves to the visual angle of the single person.


INTERACTIVITY: IN BETWEEN PARTICIPATION, PERFORMANCE AND THE INTERFACE
Pavel Sedlák

Carrying on the premise of algorithmic principles representing one of the most radical challenges to the artworld the author outlines links among basal concepts such as the image evolution, interface, immersion and virtual reality from the perspective of the humanities. Algorithmic principles have recently been introduced by several media theoreticians as a possible basis for methodological innovation linking art of computer and pre-computer eras. Isolation of elementary operators together with their subsequent construed combinations places the rules according to which the whole creative process is undertaken into a very centre of a theoretical research. Moreover, such process tides over the object construction while bridging the traditional aesthetics and particular aspects of action theory. The definition of interface in terms of a shared context for action goes beyond just technical descriptions in order to offer possible interpretation of cybernetic praxis employed in realm of contemporary artistic creation. A crucial role of the interface within cultural practice opens up views connecting action rules with participatory forms of audience response and bearing the potential to alternatively develop the notion of a (social) performance. With focus on examples of both historical and the most recent application of information technologies to artistic expression there are some of the essential features of the so-called interactive art captured and creative strategies in the domain of immersive interactive installations highlighted. Special attention is dedicated to the immersive techniques of VR systems as they are subject to critical scrutiny seeking linkage with some of phenomenological ideas such as an active embodiment. Interactive installations stimulate still the reflection of dynamic processes of integration between the system (virtual, variable and viable image) and its environment (e.g. interacting participant) while introducing into the context of art theory formerly alien concepts, for example, of adaptation and/or intelligent behaviour. This text is an attempt to frame reception activity in the field of new media art with multiple perspectives including the innovative definition of the interface that does form on an essential level the modalities of interaction. Within responsive environments the artistic focus is on a system capacity to receive, analyze and interpret various inputs as well as to formulate outputs. With increased potential of computing and display power this capacity is measured in terms of a complexity offered in the process of orchestrated action on the side of a participating audience. Moving from participation to performance two basic modes of audience interaction are finally introduced using the textual metaphors of world and game in order to conceptualize altogether immersion and interactivity. In this context, the cybernetic feedback loops have been reframed by the theories of ergodic design helping us better understand the triadic structure of signs, reception activity and mediating layer of the interface.