Chapter 1: INTERACTION EVERYWHERE
If the last decade of the 20th century is to be remembered
by one word, it would have to be ‘interactive'. The computer age brought
with it many promises, from speed and efficiency to the street directory
for the global village. It connected us to the world in new and unforeseen
ways, integrating people into networks – virtual communities that were
every bit as real as our families and the people next door. With the computer
network, interaction – once the province of face-to-face communications – extended
its reach across impossible distances. This new social connectivity was
part of an overall ‘computerisation' of society and culture. Once the puzzling
behemoths of science-fiction films, computers rapidly became just another
familiar household technology.
Prior to the advent of CD-ROMs, multimedia and the World
Wide Web in the early 1990s, computers had already found their way into
domestic life in the form of video games. This association of computers
with entertainment and game-play indelibly fixed the computer and its modes
of interaction as part of available culture. In this respect, the popularity
of video games is the first and most pervasive instance of the computerisation
of society. Interactivity, as a concept, was natural to game-play. However,
game-play, with its logic of pursuit, strategy and problem solving, offered
a paradigm for engaging with electronic media generally, requiring two-way
or reciprocal interplay between itself and the user. Video and computer
games also introduced styles of engagement with computers that would find
resonance in our first encounters with computer-based artworks. Interaction
was quite different from our experience of television and cinema, or paintings
in an art gallery, which were decidedly one-way encounters; that is, the
work was not capable of responding to our engagement with it. As art and
culture became increasingly computerised, we found ourselves once again
wrestling with the advent of a new technology and its terminology. Terms
such as ‘digital art', ‘computer art' and ‘interactives' emerged to categorise
the ways in which artists were engaging with new-media technologies. By
the end of the 1990s the aesthetics of interaction, grounded in the video-game
paradigm, had become a familiar way of doing things in the name of culture.
The age of interaction had arrived.
This brief introduction is suggestive of the main themes
and objectives of this book: the relationships between art and new technology,
between words, concepts and the cultural phenomena they signify. In introducing
a book dealing with media arts in Australia , drawing attention to such
things is important. Words and concepts bring many assumptions with them
that may need to be looked at more closely. In fact, I'm already doing
it myself. Media arts in Australia ? Why not ‘digital' arts in Australia
, or ‘interactive art' in Australia ? What's wrong with ‘new media' art
in Australia ? In deliberately avoiding the use of such terms I am critically
engaging with the very notion of interactivity and its associated concepts.
If the art of the last 10 years or so was all about interactivity, does
this assume that previous art was not? Are there varying degrees or different
kinds of interactivity? And what is all the fuss about interactivity anyway?
The concept of interaction clearly requires some explanation.
In using the term ‘media arts' I am introducing some assumptions
of my own that inform this book and the ways in which it sets about the
business of conceptualising and describing its subject. First, I have resisted
using the term ‘digital art' because it is too reductive, foregrounding
the computer as the decisive factor in the art-making process. Terms such
as ‘painting' or ‘sculpture' don't carry the same resonance, instead implying
a relationship and a practice, an interface (that's another word we'll
get to) between an artist and a medium. At a time when artists were trying
to win the confidence of a bewildered public with their new fangled ‘interactives',
terms such as ‘digital art' were not particularly helpful in dispelling
popular cynicism to do with art and computers. Secondly, I have also resisted
using the term ‘new media art' because it is the one term most closely
aligned with the concept of interaction and therefore even more reductive
than digital art. It assumes interaction is a process to be explicitly
associated with computers and digital technologies generally (collectively
known as new media). The implicit contrast between interactive new media
and non-interactive old media makes no discrimination as to the nature
of the interaction being invoked. Furthermore, the labelling of a particular
art form in terms of a persistent novelty (new media art) assumes that
it lacks predecessors. This is certainly not the case. In fact, most of
the misunderstanding surrounding the development of art practices associated
with computer-mediated technologies stems from the application of the term ‘new
media art'. Instead, I have adopted the term ‘media art' in recognition
of a historical continuity of technological experimentation with media,
old and new. I have endeavoured here to describe, in the context of Australian
artists, the kinds of interactivity that applies to particular kinds of
media arts practice.
Media Arts in Australia is specifically interested
in arts practices in which the computer is the predominant medium, integrating
and synthesising a range of diverse media. Its chronology is narrow and
deals with works produced from the early 1990s to the present. Media arts
have come to be regarded as the signature form of this period, the art
of its time. But the discussion of media art is not exclusively an issue
to do with emerging technologies and how artists use them. It also concerns
the ways in which artists explore the social and cultural implications
of the very technologies they are working with. The intervention of the
computer has given rise to complex new forms of knowledge, disturbing new
ways of thinking about what it means to be alive in the age of advanced
technology. It has contributed to the development of extraordinary scientific
and medical procedures, ways of exploring the human body that leave few
of its mysteries intact. It has enabled us to think differently about personal
and collective identity, but at the same time prompted us to question how
far the human–computer interface can go before we compromise the very idea
of humanness itself. It has required us to reconsider our established notions
of space and place, of what is real in a world of virtual realities, cyberspaces
and World Wide Webs. Being ‘online', whether in role-playing games, chat
rooms or email, has rapidly become a parallel form of experience. It has
become immersive, every bit as compelling and familiar as the intense reality
of bodies, of weight, substance and dimension. Along with interaction and
interface, immersion is another key word. It is a particularly useful term
that will also help us to clarify the nature of interactivity as it applies
to media art.
Computer-based art didn't simply appear as if from nowhere,
so it is important to look at the influences, practices and attitudes to
art, culture and technology that laid the foundations for a media arts
culture in Australia . While Media Arts in Australia is concerned
with a specific time, it is also timely, a portrait of something that is
ongoing and unfinished. This book describes art forms that are still evolving
and finding their place in culture and society, as well as the critical
debates around what they mean and how they should be named, discussed and
valued. It would be folly, and indeed presumptuous, to think that a book
such as this can or should be in any way definitive, purporting to be the
final word on media arts in Australia. That story is still being written. Media
Arts in Australia is a glimpse, a pause in a dynamic field of artistic
experimentation, an opportunity to fix our bearings on a time when art
in Australia went interactive.
INTERZONE : Contents
Chapter 1: Interaction Everywhere
Chapter 2: What is Media Art?
Chapter 3: Precursors and Visionaries
Chapter 4: Cyberzone
Chapter 5: Artificial Nature
Chapter 6: Story Spaces
Conclusion: Towards a Media Arts Culture
Endnotes
Timeline
