Page 265 - Cyberculture and New Media

256 Desistant Media
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self-sufficient values. “Realistic” interaction, though, demands intelligence
from the system. Resisting the immersing mode of virtual reality as a mode
of linkage to technology, Krueger’s ethical pre-mission is that man should
maintain his/her freedom and mobility. When a participant performs an
action in a Videoplace interaction, he/she does not necessarily know what the
system’s response will be. It may be based on what happened before, or it
could offer an element of surprise. Krueger says we need surprises to keep
people interested in responding. That is why we have always focused on fun
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types of interactions, and on instantaneous response.
This already implies desistance. We move rapidly from Duchamp’s
dream and John Cage’s notions of change to a direction of surprise and
possible joy. But “participation” as such must be questioned when the user’s
actions are blurred by the intelligence of the machine.
Although Krueger uses terminology familiar to us mainly from
ecological media studies, he says that artificial reality works could also cut
and mutilate us – in an act of desistance, presumably. But with a reading
from Krueger we can believe that Oliver Grau’s stress on the idea that artistic
visions reflect a continuing search for illusion through technologically
advanced media is true only in part: we must question here Grau’s thought
that without exception the image fantasies of oneness, of symbiosis allied to
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media are utopian . This is a task not proper to Krueger’s oeuvre as an artist.
This argues also against the idea of “joy without harm” that
Aristotle, in the Politics (VIII, 1341b), attributes to catharsis in its
specifically medical, homeopathic, “pharmaceutical” function (catharsis used
pharmakeias charin). This is also an argument against how Freud posits
mimesis (that is, to use his own term, identification) as what makes the
“cathartic machine” itself possible. Freud transfers Aristotelian recognition
(anagnorisis) to the relation between stage and audience in such a way as to
“interest” the spectator in it. Krueger’s play with the participant tells us
something about how Freud actually introduces something that does not
belong to the Aristotelian “program” but explains the connection between
catharsis and mimesis that had remained unthought throughout the entire
tradition, namely, that tragic pleasure is essentially a masochistic pleasure,
and thus maintains some relationship with narcissism itself: “reality” in the
concept of “artificial reality” is connected to the causal laws that operate
between one’s bodily movements and their effect on the graphic world.
Artificial reality is an enriched reality beyond computer by the actions of the
user, a reality that speaks to people by responses like sounds, images and
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lights. It could greet, introduce itself or even say goodbye.
Theatrical pleasure, stresses Lacoue-Labarthe, is thoroughly
masochistic: the only pleasure that comes from suffering is prepared –
formally – by this supplement of pleasure which itself, however, implies
pain. The modern “break” occurs with the introduction into the tragic conflict