Page 264 - Cyberculture and New Media
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Seppo Kuivakari 255
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desistance. Desistance cuts through history in a way that it violates the wait
for perfect technological modes, violate against the passivity of waiting.
Participatory art as such, we might agree with Frank Popper, ended
in deadlock in the 1970s, but continued life under “interaction” in the art of
Jeffrey Shaw, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Myron W. Krueger. For Popper,
interactive art, with its vast number of experiments and innovations in
different media, presents the flow of data (pictures, texts, sounds) and a
catalogue of cybernetic, intelligent structures, environments and networks in
a way that the viewer could now project some effect on this flow, to alter the
structures with interactive environment or navigate the networks and
participate in this way in altering and changing the content and form or art –
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even in creation of art. Popper understands interactivity differently as, for
example, Söke Dinkla does: interactivity means here not the one and only
path from the closures of participation art in the mid 1900s. Altering of the
structures and thereby the decay of the mimetic through participation not
necessarily means interaction.
Krueger has elaborated closely different responsive environments.
According to him, interface design should concentrate on features and
possibilities of man, instead of arguing for the technological development.
Interaction should be unstraining and talkative to the body of man as a whole.
Krueger launched the concept “artificial reality” in 1973 in order to represent
the responsive, computer-controlled environment, which took an aesthetic
approach to the human/computer interface. In 1972 he spoke of his
experiments with artificial reality installation called Videoplace (1969-1973):
Videoplace’s main aesthetic statement is that response is
the medium. The composition is the relationship between
what you do and what you perceive as being the computer-
generated consequences of your action. The quality of the
computer’s perception of your actions is even more
important than the responses’ visual or musical quality.
Realistic graphic environments are irrelevant unless you
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can interact realistically with them.
He declares that in the term “artificial reality”, “reality” refers to the
causal laws that operate between your body’s movements and their effect on
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the graphic world. “An artificial reality perceives a participant’s action in
terms of the body’s relationship to a graphic world, he wrote, “and generates
responses that maintain the illusion that his or her actions are taking place
within that world”. Krueger is playing with the suppositions presented by
ecological media theories: Videoplace celebrates the unexpected possibilities
provided by technology and simultaneously indicts the currently restricted
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means of interacting with computers. For Krueger, an environment has no