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
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