Interactive States

Cinema and Digital Media

Mike Leggett

Flux The 1 q~Os - the limits of the photoplay are reached - in Russia,
Germany and France the constraints and demands of the Producer
Showman are challenged - it is the artists who know what the audience
want.

Flux describes the state of film culture back then - could the present
state of ’digital culture’ be described similarly now? Such proposals are
tautological as there are few parts of the wider culture which are not
touched in some way by the ubiquitous microprocessor or silicon chip -
from the personal computer and the cell phone(card) to the washing
machine, the car and the toothbrush. Delivered after a short gestation,
the pixel, the byte, the digital video camera are seamlessly integrated
into contemporary practice. There are few photographic surfaces or
projection screens where the term ’new media’ is regarded as anything
but a recent technology, a development path to which image
practitioners have constantly contributed. The time-based technologies
that have been used to fix light to a time signature have thus been in
constant flux, each component in the tool chain being constantly honed
and eventually replaced. The act of making an image has been wholly
integrated within this evolution, procedures and technology defining
outcomes alongside the imagination and the skill of the artist.

Such a blending reminds us that the root of the word is tekhn6 from the
Greek word meaning ’art’. It came into usage about six centuries ago,
at about the point oral culture was beginning to use the new technology
of graph or writing which was to move Indo-European culture toward a
state of empirical consciousness dominated by literacy and numeracy.

A fuzzy epistemology of the flux around the term ’new media’ will move
from ’interactive multimedia’ and towards anticipating an interactive
cinema, or one reliant on reflex and cognition, agency within the
architecture of the virtual and the actual, now, here, there and then.

Overview Memory: - passive - active - dynamic?

Where does the machine mind’s facility lie? Testing, comparing,
retrieving, postulating - the contents of two frames side by side, or in
sequence - only a representation of past events? Where? How? When?

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The web’s search engine sets out to create links to the archive (and the
established epistemology}1 to help describe the contemporary and
invent the future.

Objects Movies that have migrated from cinemas to galleries and exhibition
Ephemera halls most directly are those that confound expectation, disorientate, for
Processes instance, by foregrounding material process and refuting immersion
Network within the narrative process. Film as Film recreated a cinema within the
Hayward Gallery (London, UK, 1979), hung images on walls, an event
challenged the politics of
Instances that celebrated the modern but
contemporary (1) connoisseurship whilst avoiding the exhibitors’ realpolitik of gender.
Objects Another challenge, The Video Show at the Serpentine (London, UK,
197~), placed production and exhibition in the same space, on-the-fly,
LIVE! Artists’ installations were like so many garage bands arriving for a
gig and equally ephemeral, except for those represented by dealers
who (unlike most of the film makers) could become part of a collector’s
~
holdings.
~
-
Burning the Interface <International Artists’ CD-ROM> (Sydney,
Australia, 19g6)’ was another pioneering survey show, a selected
inventory that was both didactic and revelatory, with the art arriving on
1 ~crn shiny discs (that promised the collectors’ patronage) or via
telephone cables strung into the space and appearing on the face of
modified office equipment - the computer. The discrete encounter with
~
these early interactive multimedia works, while recreating the intimate

a~
space between book and reader, and often mirroring the artist’s
working space for the visitor to encounter, was a restraining experience
~ for many accustomed to the physical ’performance space’ of the gallery
? and museum. In the words of one recalcitrant reviewer: ’Peering at a
monitor is an impoverished aesthetic experience.’2

As Natalie Daniel asked at the time:

So where does multimedia art go from here? It poses problems

for exhibitions in terms of both space and time. Unlike more
j traditional or conventional art forms, such as painting or

~,
~ sculpture, there is a precise limit, for instance, to how many
people can ’view’ the work at one time. A general gallery-
going public may therefore find the nature of this type of
exhibition limiting and frustrating. This raises the question of
placing single-user works in a multi-user public space
Space Odysseys (Sydney, Australia, 2001) ’sensation and immersion’
morphed the timeline from work made in the 1970s (Bruce Nauman’s
Triangle Room 1978-80) and the 1990s (James Turrell’s Between the
Seen, 1991) using the fundamental architectural technology of electric
light, form and colour, to the most recent, the premiere of Luc

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Courchesne’s The Visitor - Living by Number (200~ ) which combined

the nineteenth-century panopticon with the twentieth-century video
camera and the twenty-first-century voice-controlled, computer-based

image projector. It was prototyping on immersion module in which the

user/visitor, one at a time, orientated within a rural setting inhabited by
spectre/residents.
Ephemera These are the bits and pieces that float around the main activity but
which are essential and concomitant to the flux - they are the plasma -
and are attached to emails, or downloaded from remote sites, or found
in a myriad of internet byways - they are the ephemera of the machine.

1/0 (Input/Output) - read and then return/write to memory (why else was
writing invented? Surely not to conduct discourse ...).
Code, the ephemera of Human/Computer Interface (HCI) linking
Intention with Outcome (I/O), the new age of scribes, cutting and
assembling code ’objects’ (Object Oriented Programming), like so many
shots hanging in the vast trim bin of internet code ’libraries’. For
example, jM~4~ is a software tool requiring coding skills and is used by
the Australian group Lalila for video installations - customising it to their
needs was in conjunction with two other collaborators, more
experienced in the fields of code writing and jMax, one in Germany,
the other in Canada. ’[V]ideo is analysed in real time, generating
sounds. We only allow ourselves to manipulate the video, meaning that
video is our musical instrument - so we function in a video image
manipulation space but the aim is building an audio performance.&dquo;
Thus they are able to make available to all, on their website, ’an
extensive library of video data stream manipulation objects, which can
be used seamlessly with audio manipulation objects. 15

Processes Lalila now share their acquired code-writing talents with the
international community who tend to cluster around specific objectives
and interests, and have found that the pride of contributing abilities is a
motivating factor across the open source ’movement’. The ranges of
expertise are wide but each contribution is regarded seriously as a
learning process for all, with stages where outcomes become apparent
but where the process never ends. Lines of code from one project might
conceivably end up in another but as Deleflie observes: ’It is like
receiving a compliment whenI see someone else using my code.’6
the individuals and small groups creating the conditions for
These are

’things happen’: online, offline (in the studio or the gallery), for other
to
groups or individuals, making art yes, but also making the many other
things that a vibrant culture needs, the telematic culture identified by
Roy Ascott 30 years ago,’ that increasingly is using not only words but
pictures and sounds to communicate and absorb. Fundamentally

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processes are non-linear, are greatly influenced by speed (of

communications, and the actions and reactions that can then flow), and
the texture, the feel of the images and sounds conveyed - a collective
poetics, made unremarkably by the cohort of artists and practitioners
engaged by the exigencies of digital media.
Network Groups of otherwise unrelated individuals, sometimes large in number,
across the globe, are creating multimedia manifestations of a thousand
kinds - for instance, The Hackers Conference in the Netherlands in
2002 where a tent city on a local university campus generated its own
electricity and borrowed only the university’s ’thick-pipe’ into the internet
to stream four parallel sessions to the rest of the world. Cultural diversity
can engender social change through the kind of machinations possible
on the internet. ’Hacking’ means being able to program, usually using a

~ fourth generation language (4GL), the ’family metaphor’ iteration used

jt
&dquo;
in Linux. The significant difference the Linux operating system is bringing
about within the use of ’open source’ code can be connected to the
context in which its ’first generation leader’, Linus Torvalds, operated.
He is a Finn whose mother tongue is Swedish and he is one of those,
as the linguist Professor Martin Vermeer has observed, who are not at
home in one national culture only, but in several, whether on- or offline.
’[L]anguage is the gateway into a nation’s culture and way of life ...
i knowing one more language inevitably widens one’s perspective....
I~ Literacy today means also computer or IT literacy and becomes an
impossibility if not even the operating system is available in localised
form.... Open source offers an easy and attractive way to localise all
software.&dquo; From the globe to the region.

Instances archival Kino Eye (Dziga Vertov 1924): from the market to the farm -
didacticism for the urban proletariat, about food origins; for the rural
proletariat, about city markets; and agit-prop trains - ’all education is
political’ - the kinoscope.
Anti-melodrama, anti-escapism, free-form Constructivism with industry
and technology the
asheroes. The meat sequence is presented in its
entirety, in reversed (backwards) motion (an instance of Kierkegaard’s
_
maxim on memory: ’Life is lived forward, but it is understood
It backwards.’ A filmic process, as the projector handle is cranked, that
returns the meat (and the propaganda) from the proletariat to the
~ peasants - city/country, collective/cooperative, hand/mind, film
material/narrative nutrition.

(in another place at a similar time, Henry Ford had visited a Chicago
stockyard and observed the packed meat coming out of the slaughterhouse
in cuts - he reversed in his mind’s eye the process and established in 1913
the first moving production-line assembly of the model T.)
Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov 1925) explores the system

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crf film by demonstration, the ending dialing with the future and the
other new media about to affect the lives of the new nation. In the
Workers’ Club the radio with a loudspeaker, the Radio Ear, linked with
the Kino Eye (objects) - as the workers read (ephemera) whilst in the
cinema, sound is made visible (process)i anticipating the expansion of
sound, film, telephone and radio to the nation (networks).
Here istechnology at work and the worker is the icon, the hero, the
masses who are the audience of individuals. Visual indexing and
symbols of distance, time, speed and acceleration - cutting bench
rewinds - speeding frames, speeding trains. Speed - blur - flux.

instances Interaction, as opposed to reflection,

is at odds with the ’real’ world, or
contemporary (2) what could be called most the non-virtual world. Within most
certainly,
public spaces, including between the walls of most galleries and
museums, the passive regard or reflection upon an artwork (or art film)
is accepted as a sign of respect for the integrity of its maker and the
aura of the object itself. The pursuit through more active means of the

personal prerogative within a work is somehow regarded as an

aggressive form of self-seeking by the viewer, questioning traditions of
authorship and challenging the inviolability of inherited artefacts. The
visibility, amplification level and accessibility of the mediating process is
absent. There is little space created for even a reflexive response, let
alone the possibility for interaction.

Interface/interact? In the Gallery what conditions need to prevail for us to interact?

In the Work what conditions will encourage us to interact?
In the Studio, at the point of production, how is interaction qualitatively
different from the two conditions above?

So if we are ’expected’ to become performers, what are the conditions

that will encourage us to interact? The design craft skills and guile of the
artist in devising an Interface has been going on for longer than the
past decade. Darren Tofts asks:

What, or more specifically when, is an interface? (The

assumption is ) that it only exists in the cybernetic domain,
...

when someone sits in front of

a computer and clicks a mouse.
An interface, the contrary, is any act of conjunction which
on
results in a new or unexpected event. A door-handle, as Brenda
Laurel reminds us, is an interface. So too, (quoting Loutr6amont),
is the ’chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing
machine and an umbrella’. James Joyce didn’t write books.
Marcel Duchamp didn’t create works of art. John Cage didn’t
compose music. They created interfaces, instances into which
someone, (you), intervened to make choices and judgments that
_ they were not willing to mc~ke.... You are empowered, you are

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in control. Cough during a John Cage recital and you are part of
the performance. That’s an interface.9

Computer mediated ’interactive multimedia’ examples test bed

interfaces, moments of disorientation, on CD-ROM and maquette scaled
installation, indicating directions for an interactive cinema.

~
Portrait One (Luc Courchesne 1990)&dquo; - interaction, through sometimes
~ risque conversation with the on-screen persona of Marie, the simulacra,
p the cyborg, is patently a fiction. The ’virtual relationship’ that we strike
up with Marie:

forces us to think about the authenticity of our involvement or

commitment to relationships in the larger scale of social life ...

the duty of reciprocity and response, which in this case is also

the duty to play. Luc Courchesne raises the important issue of
how we meet others in a telecommunications environment, and

~,
F
of how we meet ourselves, through others, in a virtual
environment such as the CD-ROM or, more generally, in the
context of digital media that will increasingly surround us.&dquo;

Tvvelve (Favourite Things) (Chris Hales 1996) - both the touch-screen

and CD-ROM versions&dquo; are very advanced for their time, enabling in
the privacy of the home (CD-ROM) or in the public performance space
of the gallery (touch-screen), the most gentle exchange with a document
on childhood. The work uses colour not words to indicate navigational

options, revisiting the multi-screen, multi-projector film works in 1970s

Britain, by expanding the numbers of frames within a composite whole
~
and placing options and consequences within the constrained and
!~ personal space of the artist’s world - sequence (and some meaning) is
)~ affected through this interface. Hales produced some 14 experiments in
this idiom between 1995 and 2002 delivering them as a package to
venues together with a specially made A4 landscape-sized screen, and
stand.

The Visitor:Living by Number (Luc Courchesne 2001) - again a single-

user piece but using voice to control navigation options
interactive
presented, for reaching a space populated by several interlocutors.
’Behaviours’ and ’codes’ have to be learnt (quickly as other users wait
in the queue), both within the system and within the narrative space.

The traditional Human Computer Interface - HCI - relies heavily on

metaphor derived from the mechanical age: the printed page, the
Outcome
(provisional) desktop, the graph paper, the map, the film soundtrack dubbing sheet,
etc. These two-dimensional spaces have acquired the bevel edge, two,
three and four pixels broad - embossed frames, windows, work areas,
palettes, icons, trash cans and so on. There is a tension here between

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the tools of the Enlightenment from where so many of our disciplinary

patterns derive, and the tendencies within popular culture and post-
modern interdisciplinary studies to, as it were, measure and compare
less but experiment and juxtaposition more.

The convergence of contemporary media meets an elongated strand of

history which has invented and speculated about technologies to extend
and enhance our individual psychic states and our ability to
communicate and express them to others. The process of convergence,
however, alters the states, the outcomes becoming as different as
between a consciousness of meat production and the anticipation of
profitable automobile manufacture. Even the contemporary fascination
with ’Virtual reality’ is nothing new.

The Greeks oracists and rhetoricians, who before the alphabet had
been handed down, developed an elaborate form of artificial memory,
described so fully in Yates’ Art of Memory. 13 Ars memoria, ’a series of
loci or places. The commonest, though not the only type of mnemonic
place system was the architectural type.... We have to think of the
ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building
whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised places the
images he has [previously] placed on them.’(p. 18) The first movies it
could be claimed then, were a conceptual model made by the Greek
rhetoricians, complete with wide shots, tracking shots, panning, tilts,
close-ups and flashbacks, all played in the cinema of the mind’s eye, a
’Classics film narrative.&dquo; The imaginary perambulation allowed the
speaker, like today’s interactive multimedia, to have options for
changing the pathway through the discourse.
The computer-mediated interactive installation, its articulation within the
medium-to-large scale physical public space and determinations of the
coding and decoding of the experience of encounter, has been
developing a steady level of acceptance amongst audiences and their
various agencies. The contemporary art gallery and the international
Biennale, the didactic tool of museum and touch-screen guide, the
recreational platform in club and arcade, all have enabled widespread
personal interaction with electronic assemblages. As with multifarious
consumer items that appear daily, these customised machines are

assuredly pupating into a new phase that further blurs the roles of
producer and performer.
The embodiment of the visitor in the physical space and the mediated
system through the acknowledgment of both their tactile and non-tactile
presence, has since then become a priori the direction taken by those
artists working in actual space (whilst sometimes annexing the virtual
space of the internet). In many cases, artists and designers have
contributed significantly to the design parameters of hardware and

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software tools, even where resources for production, exhibition and

maintenance have been minimal. For many, the encompassing of the
visitor within the work has been central, their physical proximity to their
work not only causing change within the work but often including the
invasion of their physiognomy, the capturing of their appearance, the
sapling of their presence.
In Swarm (Alex Davies 2003) 1.5 the system unrolls across a wide-screen
(cinemcrscope) format a series of vertical frames that mix images of
figures with images of space, a representation of the space in which
you stand. They flicker as the vertical frames are replaced, as if from

~
j~
tjJhk some scanning mechanism, replacing what was there with what is

tt~ there, now - yourself, your companions, replaced again, in different

frames, by strangers, whose images were clearly captured and stored
on some earlier visit. The visual rhythms are heard and change in pitch
’
and volume as the greytone densities vary to the pulse of the picture
sweeps, as you, the visitor, move towards and away from the spectres
on the wall, locating as you do, the precise locations of the tiny lenses
that form part of the screen. These cameras can form images where
light is scarce, such as in the darkened space of this provisional
cinema. They trade your image for your inclusion in the mystic writing

~ pad of the palimpsest into which you have entered.

f Presence and proximity achieve for the visitor an interactive encounter
which unsettles and disturbs as vividly as it may be brief. It is in contrast
to the cinematic apparatus that delivers ’a sensorium’, an immersive
spectacle on the screen, whether flat, circular or spherical or optically
virtual. That moment of frisson at the point of disturbance, which whilst
signaling incorporation of presence, often implies terms for extending
~ that moment into an encounter which could in a moment of flux, allow
JJE the balance of power between artist and visitor to be comprehended
and negotiated, if not reversed.
~
Notes 1 Burning the Interface <International Artists’ CD-ROM>, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Sydney, April-July 1996 and then to Adelaide, Brisbane,
Perth and Melbourne (Australia), curated by Mike Leggett and Linda
Michael.
2 John MacDonald, Sydney Morning Herald, May 1996.
3 Natalie Daniel, ’Multimedia Art - Constraining or Liberating?’
Convergence, 3, (Spring 1997), p. 109.
no 1
4 All the quotes for this section come from Mike Leggett, ’Software Imaging
Synthesis’, Photofile no. 68, (Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney
2003).
5 Lalila is at http://www.lalila.net/ (accessed 1 January 2003).
6 Mike Leggett, ’Software Imaging Synthesis’, Photofile no. 68 (Australian
Centre for Photography, Sydney 2003).
7 Roy Ascott, ’ls There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’ Art Journal, 49, no. 3
(Fall 1990).
8 Professor Martin Vermeer is a research professor at the Finnish Geodetic

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Institute. From an article ’Linux and Ethnodiversity’ originally on

http://linuxtoday.com/.
9 Darren Tofts, ’The Bairdboard Bombardment’, 21C, no. 2 (1995), p. 38.
10 CD-ROM version on Interact No 2 (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 1995).
11 Jean Gagnon, ’Blind Date in Cyberspace or the Figure that Speaks’, ibid.
12 Chris Hales, Twelve (Favourite Things), CD-ROM (Digital One, London
1996).
13 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Pimlico, London 1992, first published
1966).
14 In a of Nature Neuroscience, a study included a range of tests
recent issue
carried people who were highly ranked in the World Memory
out on
Championships. Whilst their brain capacity and structure was determined to
be average it, it was found with functional magnetic resonance scanning
(fMRI) that the regions associated with navigation and memory were more
active than in a control group attempting the same memory tasks. The
contestants confirmed they used the ’method of loci’ strategy in which the
objects to be remembered were placed along an imaginary pathway that
could be retraced when recalling the items in order. ’The longevity and
success of the method of loci in particular may point to a natural human

proclivity to use spatial context - and its instantiation in the right

hippocampus - as one of the most effective means to learn and recall
information.’ Dr Eleanor Maguire et al, ’Routes to Remembering: the brains
, 6 no. 1 (2003) pp 90 - 95.
behind superior memory, Nature Neuroscience
15 Artspace, Sydney, Australia, May 2003.

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