New Materiality - remote theorist - Noah Wardrip-Fruin
"e and eyeToy" - Noah Wardrip-Fruin
The Tate's "material gestures" hang cuts across time, but I find my mind settles, first, on the moment of abstract expressionism in the U.S. This work brings the artist's gesture into a particular relationship with artworks shown in museums.
This might be contrasted with the nearby moment of the Happening - the attempt to incorporate the live gesture, including the audience gesture, into artwork that was self-consciously unshowable. The blurring of art and everyday life, as a book title of the Happening's most famous proponent would have it later.
Now we enter a moment in which, through interaction, we see the gesture of the audience being incorporated into showable art. This work moves beyond video art, which included the audience as an image of itself. Now the audience, while perhaps also visible as an image within the work, becomes data - one of the fundamental components of digital media. In work such as that selected by Camille Utterback for the "New Materiality" installment of "e and eye" the audience's gesture is seen to drive the work, to fundamentally produce what we see. The audience's gesture can drive the work by providing data because the artist has begun to work with a particular material: digital computation.
This isn't a new material for art. Lytton Strachey's nephew Christopher used one of the first modern (stored program) computers, the Manchester Mark 1, to create parody love letters as early as 1952. And the combination of artist-authored computational processes with the audience gesture isn't particularly new either. Myron Krueger's pioneering work in this area has more than three decades of history behind it.
But the art community largely ignored Krueger's work when it was new. One can imagine a scenario in which work of this sort would have remained marginal in perpetuity. Instead - some two decades after Krueger's initial work and before the last few years (about which more in a moment) - the inclusion of the audience gesture enjoyed a period of privileged status in the digital arts. It was almost automatically interesting, perhaps even radical, for a work to be driven by the "interventions" of the bodies of the audience. The Happenings were invoked as precedent for this and other forms of computationally-driven interactive art. Momentum built, and by the early years of the millennium there was a wave crashing ashore of digital artwork driven by - and prominently featuring - the audience's image, silhouette, or traced gesture/movement.
Then, in 2003, Sony managed to do what other computer game companies had not quite managed - taking the audience gesture into mainstream gaming. Before 2003 video cameras had been part of some arcade games, and Sega had released (only in Japan) the Dreameye camera for its Dreamcast console, but Sony's EyeToy for the PlayStation 2 leapt the fence between gaming geekdom and the mainstream. Suddenly, interactive digital works driven by audience gesture weren't just sellable to art collectors (which they hadn't been in Krueger's time) but to the consumers of entertainment products. In the digital art world a question began to present itself: How could including the audience be automatically radical in the gallery, when gallery visitors may have just seen a group of beaming 9-year-olds (or half drunk 22-year-olds) having a decidedly unradical experience in front of EyeToy: Play or one of the many other mainstream games employing Sony's camera?
To point this out isn't to say that I find the EyeToy uninteresting. In fact, I'm setting up a PlayStation and EyeToy in the hallway outside my office, so that passers-by can get in a little play time on the way to the department's conference room.
But it is to say that we need to start thinking more carefully about this sort of work. Utterback's selections provide us a good opportunity for just that. Her own Untitled 5 (2004) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Subtitled Public (2005) were both produced after the "audience gesture boom" - and by practitioners who have consistently approached such work from a more thoughtful perspective.
On one level, these pieces are not that different from standard EyeToy games. All are systems that relatively immediately communicate how the movements of audience members can be used to interact with the work, as well as the role that the bodies of audience members play in the visual field. Further, video documentation from Sony, Utterback, and Lozano-Hemmer demonstrate that Untitled 5, Subtitled Public, and EyeToy: Play all encourage playful engagement with the system and with other audience members.
What is different is in the design of the systems, and how this structures audience experience. The mini-games of EyeToy: Play set up clear goals for their players, and sort interactions into "successful" and "unsuccessful" categories. Interactions that succeed lead to a higher score and increased challenges (generally along the vectors of speed and number). Unsuccessful interactions end the game. While this could generally be said of many games, the designation of these as "mini-games" is meant to serve as an indicator, to prospective purchasers, that such simple descriptions exhaust what there is to experience of these games. Absent here are the well-drawn fictions of a game such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, or the complex systems of a game such as SimCity, or even the ongoing progression of one of Super Mario's outings. And what is true of EyeToy: Play is also true of its successors (EyeToy: Play 2 and 3) and most of the other games that employ the EyeToy: mini-games are the order of the day. The game industry seems to have little idea how to create a system of even the complexity of a standard computer game that employs the audience gesture centrally.
Untitled 5 and Subtitled Public, on the other hand, employ nothing like a numeric score, or even the framework of successful and unsuccessful interactions. These works are not structured to orient the players toward goals presented and tracked by a simple system. Rather, they orient their audiences toward the systems themselves. While the means for interaction are as simple to understand as those of an EyeToy mini-game, the potential system responses to interaction are rich for exploration. In other words, what motivates the audience is engagement with a complex system, and a growing understanding of it, rather than a simple set of game mechanics and the mini-goals that they present.
When first discussing the "New Materiality" event with John Cayley and Utterback, I was reticent to draw a literary connection with these thoughts. But having considered it further I can see that there is at least a literary analogy to be made. What is it that makes The Long Goodbye more interesting than many detective novels? What is it that makes Mrs. Dalloway more interesting than many stories of party preparations? It is because they offer us something more than "Whodunnit?" or "What happened next?" They set up a world of language in which we can consider interesting questions, rather than get little reward from anything but a race to the conclusion. And so with Untitled 5, Subtitled Public, and EyeToy: Play. The last of these only rewards a race to meet the simple goals it sets for us, while the artworks offer much more in return for the contribution of our gestures to the operations of their systems.
[Bio:]
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, artist, and scholar. His writing/art has been presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, VR Caves, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Expressive Processing and has recently edited three books: The New Media Reader (2003, with Nick Montfort); First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004, with Pat Harrigan); and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (forthcoming, also with Harrigan), all published by The MIT Press. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Communication department of the University of California, San Diego; a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization; and a blogger at http://grandtextauto.org.
e and eye
a remote theorist/critic was invited to write a short text for each evening event ...
