bradley hyppa

WHY INTERACTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART:

The Postmodern Characteristics of the Interface

Why interactivity? With the entire language of visual communication available to the artist, not to mention its history, why does the viewer (and why should the viewer) be active? Are the paintings and sculpture of the modernist era not interactive as they connect the mental processes with the physical positioning of the body? So maybe the initial question is, what is interactivity in art and how does this interactivity go beyond the relations of artist, image/object, and viewer found within and throughout the cannon of art history?

Interactivity is interchangeable with a postmodern dynamic for transmitting ideas. In “What is an Author” Michel Foucault traces the role that the author has played historically on the circulation of knowledge. For Foucault, the author effectively closes the discourse by invoking an authoritative position to the reader. In removing the author from this position Foucault muses on the possibility,

“I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced.”[1]

Through interactivity and the careful coding of the interface, the artist is able to be the “founder of discursivity” rather than “transdiscursive.” The distinction being, rather than merely placing the work in correlation with other texts and this juxtaposition itself giving legitimacy (transdiscursive) a founder of discursivity allows for their work to be a template, a starting point for further inquiries, advances, clarifications. This is what I feel interactivity brings to art and why its practice should not be disregarded.

With the great potential of prying open the discourse of art or possibly a discourse on discursive practice itself, interactivity mediated by a technologically aided interface does not immediately bring these notions into question. Again it is my belief that corollaries can be constructed through the coding of the interface; in short, the creation of the interactive language. In the opening chapter of the The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt Julia Kristeva writes,

Another humanity, we might say peremptorily, can be heard not only in their thought but also – and this is essential, for it signals the depth of the phenomenon – in their language: a humanity that takes the risk of confronting religion and the metaphysics that nourishes it, confronting the meaning of language.”[2]

For if one is going to “confront the meaning of language” it is also necessary to confront its discourses and the limitations these place on the circulation of knowledge. Therefore the interface is the mediator between the symbolic order found within normative reality and the intentional codification of rules found within the interactive space adhering to the prerogative of the artist. Yet unlike the popularized media pervasive in contemporary society, the interface will not readily give instructions on how to properly behave or submit to the law of the father. The interface should allow for inquiry, deliberation, maturation, and contribution. A series of discoveries that empower the viewer in space over time to not only confront the rules of the system before him, but also that which surrounds him, permeates throughout existence, and defines him.

While in motion, the constructs of societal organization open themselves to be interrogated by the kinesthetic exploration of the body. Michel de Certeau writes,

“The motions of walking are spatial creations…the act of walking is to the urban system what the act of speaking, the Speech Act, is to language or to spoken utterance…considered from this angle, the pedestrian’s uttering displays three characteristics that immediately distinguish it from the spatial system: the present, the discontinuous, and the “phatic.” First, it is true that a spatial system order sets up a body of possibilities (e.g. by a place) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall); the walker then actualizes some of them. He thereby makes them be as well as appear. However, he also displaces them and invents others, since the crossings, wanderings, and improvisations of walking favour, alter or abandon spatial elements.”[3]

The walker inevitably begins bound to the path of routine, but in acclimating his utterings is able to test the limits of the social structure, view the possible deviances, and create new routes for which to exist. Compare this to stillness, the points in which our perspective is dominated by position and where the surrounding constructs fade away, hidden by our immobility. By highlighting this binary relationship, one is able to communicate through the interface a need for perpetual motion or progress as an integral element in the comprehension of the social dynamic and its confined discourses.

With the assistance of the interface, the interactive space becomes metonymous for the larger social landscape it exists within. Rather than metaphorical, it is the metonymic relationship, which is of most importance to me as it allows for transferable experience that works in two ways: for the viewer to project themselves (their history, relationships to space, and language) into the viewing space and also carry out into the greater reality

the productions of the interactive space. De Certeau comments on this as being both synecdoche and asyndeton. He writes,

“Thus handled and shaped by practices, space forms itself into enlarged anomalies and separate islets. Throughout such swellings, diminuations, and fragmentations – the task of rhetoric – a spatial sentencing is created, a sentence-making of an anthological (composed of juxtaposed quotations) and an elliptical (made up of gaps, slips, allusions) kind. The perambulatory figures substitute journeys with the structure of a myth for the technological system of a coherent, totalizing space, a “linked” and simultaneous space, at least if by “myth” we understand a discourse regarding the site/non-site (or origin) of concrete existence, a narrative cooked up out of elements drawn from shared sites, an allusive, fragmented tale whose gaps fall into line with the social practices it symbolizes.”3

These are the characteristics of interactive spaces, informed by the interface, and available to the user within its boundaries.

All of this brings us back to the initial questions of this paper: What is interactive art and why is it necessary amidst the already canonized genre of visuality? It is my belief that what is interactivity is not the proper question, but why persists. It is my belief and what I hope to have outlined in this paper, that interactivity allows for the visualization and simultaneous experience of critical discourse in a metonymic manner rather than a metaphorical illustration. In doing so, the viewer is empowered with the ability to carry out into society a discursive agency discovered within a non-concrete site of dialogue. While art in general has this quality, interactivity contains an inherent moment of original amazement that is unique to the work itself rather than the medium. The viewer must learn, adapt, manipulate, insert, reflect, define, and authenticate on an individual basis that is solely their own. Creating and existing within a transformative space that lies outside of the dictates of closed discourse inviting the creation and contribution of new possibilities to the work that could not and would not exist without participation. It is thus a realization of potentiality found everywhere awaiting discovery by the individual herself.

WORKS CITED

de Certeau, Michel. Practices of Space

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithica, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1979.

Kristeva, Julia. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. New York, NY.: Columbia University Press.

[1] Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithica, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1979.

[2] Kristeva, Julia. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. New York, NY.: Columbia University Press.