This document expands on the main themes of the SenseBus Project with writing by the participants and links to relevant texts found on the web. If you find links you think are relevant to the SenseBus project use our Links Collection Page to submit them. More links are available there and Links to art and robotics and general robotics aswell as a number of technical resources can be found on the main ARG links page. Be sure to check out the ARGlist where you can take part in the debates of the ARG via the web page or email.
Interactivity
How does the introduction of interactivity to art change the relationship
of the artist and the receiver of the art?
Interactive art goes well beyond the bounds of a new medium and describes a
completely new set of activities, experiences, ideas and meanings.
Interactive art is substantially different from all preceding forms of art
in that it requires active participation of the public to be complete. A
triad is formed by the artist, the artwork and the public. The requirement
for a participant to complete interactive art is not theoretical or
academic, as it has been with traditional art.
There are a number of levels of interactivity and we have to be clear to
about which variety we are interested in and which we are not. A limited
number of pre-determined options verses complex responses to multiple
inputs and feedback loops where the artist cannot predict the result as
suggested in the SenseBus Home. This approach has as one of it's
challenges, the problem of balancing response which is recognisable as
such, with a level of complexity that only registers as chaos.
Transforming Mirrors : Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media
Simon Penny criticises the false choice of the very limited form of
interactivity known as screen based multimedia in "Darwin Machine ". He states "Interactive media artists do not create instances
of representation, they create a virtual machine which itself produces
instances of representation based on real time inputs". Especially give
consideration to the ideas that follow the heading "The Esthetics of
Interactivity" in the same document.
"Networked Interactivity" by Sheizaf Rafaeli is an analysis of "interactivity " as computer mediated communication.
Critical Art Practice
Alex Galloway - What is digital studies?
Networking
Mark Amerika examines the importance of network distribution to culture.
Collaboration
Sense-Abilities triumphed as a collaborative effort among
sculptor Ritsuko Taho who was invited from Boston and five persons with
disabilities. A
review of the exhibition .
Some simple behaviours that help teams workeffectively
.
Cultural Technologies
Roy Ascott in explains that - "Any discussion of the museum of the future
must necessarily respond to the computer-mediated practices which define
the canon of late 20th century art." in his article "The
Museum of the Third Kind"
Extended-Body: "Interview " with
Stelarc for Digital Delirium
Society and Technology
How does technology fit into our social structure?
"Computer communications is one of most powerful, most influential, and
least stable areas in the new world disorder." Unstable
Networks
by Bruce Sterling, pin pointing the fault lines in the Information Society.
Artificial Life's concerns with autonomous agents, representational apparatuses or technologies, self-propagation, self-organization, and emergent behaviour links it into the spheres of interest embodied in the SenseBus project.
"The core activity of a-life research is to synthesize lifelike phenomena in
artificial media such as computers or robots, in an attempt to understand
living systems in all their complexity."
Nell Tenhaaf suggests in her article 'As Art Is Lifelike - Evolution, Art, and the Readymade', that A-life bridges the gap between the humanities and the sciences that has occured since the two areas split apart during the Enlightenment, and poses this as a oportunity for artists to engage with technoscience. She sees "a-life as a set of
representational strategies with great creative potential."
"Underpinning a-life practices is a composite of current physics, chemistry,
and biology theory which, if it can be summarized at all, is concerned with
the dynamics of order in a broad continuum of nonliving and living systems.
It is also concerned with synergistic methods for representing such
dynamics. The representational dimension of a-life is key to understanding
its impact and importance: its foundational features, including the very
obvious one of creation itself, are driven by the pull of analogy and the
power of metaphor, which operate conceptually to establish the parameters of
research and also determine the development of the representational tools
themselves. Today, these tools have extended from computer simulations into
evolutionary robotics and evolvable hardware."
Roemer van Toorn - Architecture Against Architecture
Critical Art Ensemble - The Technology
Of Uselessness
debates the saviour/oppressor dichotomy of technology.
Steve Mann uses the Situationist technique of "detournement" to shake up complacency
regarding everyday
surveillance scenarios. He does this through anecdotes which are an inversion of
such everyday experiences, for example a department store where the use of cameras is
strictly prohibited but the ceilings are dotted with the tell-tale "dark domes" of
corporate security. He calls this technique "Reflectionism" His hope is that
society will recognise the inequity of the situation and move to resist this
dangerous infringement of our privacy.
Failing that he suggests that our only protection from continual surveillance is to
"shoot back" with our own
personal video surveillance devices as a form of self defence. If you accept that the
camera does lie then it is unsafe to depend on the cameras mounted on the lamp posts.
You must demand the right to gather evidence of your actions with your own personal
surveillance system. Steve Mann calls this proliferation option "Diffusionism" and has developed a
number of wearable devices to
enhance the safety of individuals navigating the
surveillance environment
David Rokeby's text is a very good discussion document for the SenseBus group. It touches on most of the major issues facing artists working with interactive technologies. Degrees of freedom or control, subjectivity, authority, structural models, responsibility, surveillance, transparency in interfaces, collaboration, transformation and manipulation, representation, structures embedded in software, autonomy, reductionism and over-simplification.
In considering the degree of creative involvement that the "interactor" is given by the artist, David states; "Computers are the greatest expression of man's desire to control. They are a pure representation of authority. They are constructed of the utterly unambiguous 'elementary particles' of presence and absence, on and off, one and zero."
"Interactivity is not a characteristic of the medium. It is a
process-related construct about communication. It is the extent to
which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially
the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of
earlier messages."
Notes for a few concepts most relevant to current work being done by
artists and theorists in the field of digital studies:
Which aspects of technology have greatest effect on culture?
What strategies can be adopted to ensure that technology benefits all?
A cultural critique of technology from an architectural viewpoint with a
strongly situationist slant. He proposes an alternative to "the criticism
of negation".
"The greater part of the critical tradition attempts to ignore the spectacle.
It is a criticism of despair. The critic seeks the authentic, the spiritual,
the bodily, the craftsman like or the unsullied. He believes in a better
world that is unaffected by the technological revolution. This is the
criticism of negation."
