‘Spatial Reconfiguration in Interactive Video Art'

SECTION 1 I N T E R AC T I V E S O U N D I N P R AC T IC E oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 13 12/17/2013 8:53:40 PM oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 14 12/17/2013 8:53:40 PM C HA P T E R 1 S PAT IA L R E C O N F I G U R AT I O N I N I N T E R AC T I V E V I D E O A RT HOL LY RO G E R S Video art has always been immersive: but it can also be performative and interactive. New forms of technology and easy-to-use audiovisual interfaces have enabled artists to hand the compositional control of their sounds and images to visitors. However, in order to physically participate in video work, audiences must cross a sacred divide that has, until relatively recently, been a fundamental component of music performance and art exhibition. Once in the heart of the video work, visitors are able to dissolve the boundaries that separate performers from audience, and artwork from viewers. But they were also given the chance to draw together diferent disciplines, to combine music and image to form new intermedial structures. Although New York City–based video artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo describes his audiovisual work as “video sculpture,” for instance, he encourages interactive, spatial audiovisuality through the use of knobs, sensors, and sotware such as Jitter, a visual language program for Max/MSP that enables users to process video in real time. In order to take “cinematic experiences and mak[e] them into real-world interactions,” many of his pieces feature tiny projected people, oten trapped inside everyday objects, such as blenders, suitcases or glass utensils. In Jitterbox (2007), a piece described by Barcia-Colombo as an “interactive video jukebox,” a small dancer appeared trapped in a glass dome atop a 1940s radio (see Figure 1.1). he visitor was able to change the channel of the radio, choosing between several songs from the 1940s: as the music changed, the dancer responded to the new beat, changing style and time according to the will of the user. Canadian dancer and artist Marie Chouinard explored a diferent route to audiovisual interactivity in her 2004 participatory video installation, Cantique 3. Installed as part of the Monaco Dance Forum, the piece consisted of two large monitors, each linked to a lat-screen interface. On one screen, a man’s face was seen in close proile; he looked toward the other screen, on which a woman’s proile peered back at him. he touch-screen panels showed ive lines resembling a musical stave: a small, frozen image of the man sat on one stave; and a snapshot of the woman occupied the other. oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 15 12/17/2013 8:53:40 PM 16 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO FIGURE 1.1 Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, Jitterbox (2007). © Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, video artist. Two “players” were invited to interact with the touch-screen “mixing boards” by moving the frozen images along, and up and down, the lines. When the face of a character was touched by their player, the corresponding large image was activated so that it burst into motion and guttural, abrasive vocalizations that ranged from hoarse whispers to frenzied, onomatopoeic shrieks: “We are in the presence of the birth of language . . . and its critique,” explained Chouinard. he two players composed with their images simultaneously, initiating an audiovisual counterpoint whose responsive, process-driven structures were controlled entirely by the composerly desires of the visitors. Invited to set the Jitterbox in motion and to create an audiovisual composition for Cantique 3, visitors became physically and aesthetically integrated into the artwork. With this in mind, interactive video can be understood as a facilitator for spatial merging. But what happens when visitors are asked to participate in—or even control—an intermedial discourse? Can internal and external spaces really be combined? And what occurs when a traditional musical, artistic, or “cinematic experience,” is turned into a “real-world interaction,” subject to constant reconiguration? he crossing of physical and aesthetic borders enabled by video technology when it arrived on the commercial market in 1965 accelerated several strands of creative experimentation that had already begun to blossom during the twentieth century. Speaking of the interpersonal actions between people operating within the segregated performance space of drama (and by extension, the music concert), Richard Schechner (1968, oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 16 12/17/2013 8:53:40 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 17 44) identiied three “primary transactions”: the communication between performers, between performers and audience members, and between individual members of the audience. While everyone present at a dramatic or musical event takes part in at least one of Schechner’s transactions, the nature of each interaction difers between cultures, ideologies, and eras. Since the nineteenth century, for instance, the modern concert hall has developed a physical and conceptual segregation between a “performing space and a listening space” (Blesser and Salter 2007, 130). Remaining physically separated from the creative sonic hub, listeners sit in silence, thoroughly immersed and emotionally engaged in the music, yet unable to afect the low of sound. he concert auditorium’s design, Christopher Small (1998, 26–7) argues, not only “discourages communication among members of the audience,” it is also planned “on the assumption that a musical performance is a system of one-way communication, from composer to listener through the medium of the performers.” While it is important to note that listening is rarely a passive experience, the physical separation can prevent a concert from becoming performative. Modern gallery spaces—or what Brian O’Doherty calls “the white cube”— are oten organized in a similar way: with walls painted white and noise kept to a minimum, visitors to the “neutral void” are asked to look but not touch; as in Small’s concert hall, they remain separated, at least physically, from the artwork presented (O’Doherty 1976, 15). Although there are examples of earlier interactive, performative music and art, it was during the twentieth century that a sustained attack on the rigidity of viewing and listening conventions was launched from many quarters. At the heart of the dissolution of “one-way communication” lay the promotion of unrepeatable, inclusive music performance, the embrace of unique audio conigurations found in John Cage’s chance-determined pieces, Berio’s graphically notated works (which give performers a great deal of interpretative input), Stockhausen’s use of broadcast radio (which is different for every performance), and Terry Riley’s fragment-controlled improvisations among others. Despite operating according to diferent aesthetics, the result of such experimentation was music that was structurally diferent in each performance and musical progressions that could be determined to a greater or lesser extent by performers or the audience. As composers began to loosen control in order to give performers and audience members a sonic, structural control over their music, visual artists began to reconigure traditional exhibition spaces by pulling visitors into the physical heart of their work. Although forms of reciprocal communication can be found in many schools of visual practice, it is most clearly articulated in installation art, an impermanent sculptural practice deined by Erika Suderburg (1996, 4) in terms of spatial activation: “ ‘installation’ is the art form that takes note of the perimeters of that space and reconigures it.” he reconiguration of space can be found in the earliest examples of installation art in France, such as Yves Klein’s completely empty gallery space, Le Vide; and Arman’s response, Le Plein, in which the same gallery was so full of found objects that visitors were unable to get in (Galerie Iris Clert, Paris: 1958, 1960). A similar aesthetic developed in America, where Claes Oldenburg, in he Street, and Jim Dine, in he House, assembled artifacts found discarded on the streets of New York in the city’s Judson Gallery in oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 17 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM 18 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO 1960. In December of the following year, Oldenburg rented a New York shop for two months, where he installed he Store, an exhibit that functioned at once as studio, commercial gallery, and shop. Oldenburg and Dine sought to merge public and art spaces by bringing the street indoors, while simultaneously encouraging the audience to enter the installation’s environment rather than to view and objectify it: to integrate interior and exterior spaces. In her critical history of installation art (Bishop 2005), Claire Bishop explains that the genre not only reconigures the “white cube,” it also initiates an “activation” of viewers who, confronted with assembled fragments, must decide where to stand in order to interpret, or complete the piece. As the century progressed toward the late 1960s, the philosophical shits in art aesthetic, as in music, prompted a fundamental relocation of focus from the ixed object to a process that could include, to varying extents, the viewer. Emerging together with video art in the mid 1960s, performance art—in the form of “happenings,” “events,” “actions,” and so on—dealt another strong blow to traditional methods of art and music consumption. Writing in 1979, RoseLee Goldberg noted that artists oten invited performance into their work “as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions” when a creative progression had “reached an impasse”: “Live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the conventions of established art” (Goldberg 2001, 7). In this way, the inclusion of live performance and theatricality into artwork contributed to the devaluation of the commodity value of art, as pieces created were oten not repeatable (at least not exactly) and could not be collected or sold: “performance was the surest means of disrupting a complacent public” (154). At the time, however, performance and video artist Vito Acconci expressed a hatred for the designation “performance” because it evoked the theater, a space divided into two areas separated by a “mystic gulf ” (Wagner) that kept apart actors and audience: the word, Acconci explained, suggested a “point you went toward,” an “enclosure” that could provide only “abstractions of the world and not the messy world itself ” (Kaye 2007, 74). he lure of a “messy” potential in performance was explored by Cage and Allan Kaprow, orchestrator of the Happening, among others, who encouraged spontaneous participation from their audience members in order to better integrate the segregated spaces of traditional performance and exhibition environments. Writing about the reasons behind his recourse to the live gesture, Kaprow explained that his inspiration came from the public arena rather than from the artworld; live performance work was not only an attack on “the conventions of established art,” but also on those responsible for maintaining its sanctiied ediices (Reiss 2001, 15). Many of Kaprow’s Environments, for instance, were located outside the gallery space, functioning in lots, courtyards, and other public spaces where it was easy for anyone to get involved: “here are no clear distinctions between . . . art of any kind (Happenings) and life,” he explained (Kaprow 2003, 73). However, he also worked in traditional spaces, where the aesthetic of inclusion assumed an even more radical edge. Visitors to his exhibition at the Hansa Gallery, New York, for instance, did not “come to look at things,” but rather were placed at the center of a dynamic and malleable event and given the option to interact according to their “talents for ‘engagement’ ” (11): “there are freedoms for the oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 18 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 19 viewer . . . but they are revealed only within the limits dictated by the art work’s immediate as well as underlying themes.” Although there were restraints, these boundaries did not provide a prior meaning, or “inite object,” but rather encouraged participation in a continually changing process. In order to do this, Kaprow reasoned, the artist must possess a “disregard for security,” a willingness to fail (20). As music was expanding out of its traditional spatial parameters into the audience’s space during the 1960s, and as art reached out toward the spectators, inviting them to cross the normal threshold between work and receiver, the two disciplines began to come together. he introduction of portable, relatively cheap and easy to handle video equipment in the middle of the decade provided the inal nudge toward a truly intermedial fusion of music and art. Early on, video was used as part of audiovisual multimedia performances, installations, and Happenings in order to re-mediate and enlarge preexistent practice. he video format was unique in its ability to record and transmit sound and image at the same time in a cheap and convenient manner. For this reason, artists found that they could easily sound their visual experimentation while musicians could visualize their music with little or no training. Because of video’s potential for audiovisuality, many key players during the medium’s earliest years were trained musicians: Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, and Robert Cahen, for instance; others, such as Tony Conrad, Bill Viola, and Bruce Nauman, although not musically trained, were nevertheless heavily involved in music as performers or composers. Video intermediality had a particularly profound efect on the visual arts that, unlike music, do not traditionally require realization through performance. As video introduced a temporal element into the static arts, allowing images to unfold though time like music, a shit from art-as-object to art-as-process was initiated, a transition that contributed to the “dematerialisation of the art object” during the twentieth century (Lucy Lippard, in Oliveira et al. 1994, 28). Performance art fed luently into early video practice, partly because many practitioners, such as Paik, Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, Ulrike Rosenbach, and VALIE EXPORT, were involved with both disciplines. Kaprow’s desire to include the public in his work by making the gallery space part of normal life was a sentiment that lay at the heart of early video work: “As a medium that is economically accessible and requires minimal technical skills to master, video is ideally suited as a vehicle for the close integration of art and life,” explains Tamblyn (1996, 14). Emerging from within this discourse, early video artists and composers treated the new audiovisual technology like a performer, a technological presence able to improvise audiovisually and to be reactive to its changing environment via a closed-circuit feed rather than exhibiting prerecorded or preedited footage and sound. Of course, not all video includes sound; nor is all video work installational or sculptural. As an artistic tool, video has been used to create single-channel works, guerrilla-style documentary, and work for broadcast television. Yet in its earliest years, the video format required separate technologies for recording and playback: as a result, the easiest and most revolutionary way to make use of the medium was as a live oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 19 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM 20 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO component of multimedia events. And it was here, in the real-time, experiential mobilization of a live audience, that video’s audiovisuality most clearly arose. 1.1 Immersion hrough the use of a closed-circuit feed, or by taking over an entire room, video work can immerse its visitors completely. Moreover, once across the normally forbidden threshold that separates work and life, visitors become the material of the piece, able to assume varying levels of compositional control by pulling together all three of Schechner’s primary transactions. With reference to new media, Frances Dyson identiies a change in engagement toward “ ‘being in’, rather than ‘looking at,’ virtual environments,” a perceptual relocation that enables the visitor to occupy real and ictional spaces at the same time (Dyson 2009, 2). As a result, Dyson explains that immersion becomes: a process or condition whereby the viewer becomes totally enveloped within and transformed by the “virtual environment.” Space acts as a pivotal element in this rhetorical architecture, since it provides a bridge between real and mythic spaces, such as the space of the screen, the space of the imagination, cosmic space, and literal, three-dimensional physical space. (1) Immersive environments that remap spectatorial habits from one-way communication to two-way activity help to bind spectator to spectacle by removing the barriers of passivity and the physical space between viewer and art exhibition; listener and music recital. Neuropsychology has articulated the spatial reconigurations that immersive, or interactive, environments can enable by identifying three diferent spatial interfaces: personal space, which is inhabited by the body; peripersonal space, which “is the region within easy reach of the hands”; and extrapersonal space, which includes “whatever lies beyond peripersonal space”: Although the brain uses diferent representations and approaches to interacting in diferent spaces, there are ways to “bridge the gap” between spaces, allowing the brain to work in one space using the same approach that it uses in another. It has been found that the brain can naturally bind personal and peripersonal space, but binding extrapersonal space is more diicult. (Shoemarker and Booth 2011, 91) he use of tactile interfaces in Jitterbox and Cantique 3 helps to bind personal and peripersonal space with the extrapersonal by transporting the user into the virtual worlds of Barcia-Colombo’s singing radio and Chouinard’s gesticulating faces; but by “bridging the gap” between the two physical locations, the extrapersonal becomes synonymous with the mythic space identiied by Dyson. he result can be unnerving. he invitation to step into a mythic space is most clearly articulated in works that not only defamiliarize the traditional gallery area, but also replace it by asking visitors oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 20 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 21 to step into a separated arena. Tony Oursler’s video environments, for instance, transport visitors into a brand new world where they are immersed on all sides by videoed images in the same way as a listener is immersed in music at a concert. In System for Dramatic Feedback (1994), visitors walking into a darkened room are greeted by a rag doll, its face animated by a video projection that shouts “No! No!” If they dare to enter ater this warning, they ind themselves in a complete environment in which a pile of ragdolls with animated faces twitch and jitter and a large screen shows rows of cinema-goers eating popcorn with inert faces, a trope on the passivity of cinematic, and by extension, art consumption. Once in this environment, explains the artist, “the division between media and real world has dissolved” (Oursler 1995). Bodily immersion also lies at the heart of much of Bill Viola’s work, with audiovisual environments such as Five Angels of the Millennium (2001) and Ocean without a Shore (2007) dissolving awareness of the original surroundings and transporting visitors straight into an extrapersonal, communal space. For the visitor, the result is akin to participating in a music recital, jumping through the frame and into a painting, or dissolving into the ictional diegesis of a ilm. In her exhibition Eyeball Massage at London’s Hayward Gallery, Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist presented numerous versions of spatial merging within a single gallery space, asking the viewers constantly to oscillate between diferent modes of engagement. In Lungenlügel (“Lobe of the Lung,” 2009), visitors were invited into an area set of from the rest of the gallery space by four video walls and hanging layers of material and encouraged to sit, lie or stand on a bed of cushions. Once across the threshold of the whole-room installation, visitors could choose where to sit, where to look, and for how long to stay. Immersed in a continuous, atmospheric wash of sound (by Anders Guggisberg) that evoked “the sounds of the moving luids inside of our bodies that we don’t pay much attention to normally; a melody of heartbeats, things moving inside your stomach” (Rist 2011, 15), color-saturated images roamed across the main articulated projection frame, while visual counterpoints licked across the screens to the side and back. he form of immersion demanded by I’m Not the Girl who Misses Much (1986) was less relaxing; in order to see the videoed artist singing and miming to the Beatles’ song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (1968), visitors had to stick their heads through small holes in a suspended box; once inside they were able not only to watch and listen to a video of Rist dancing to the Lennon track, but also to witness at close proximity the heads of other visitors who had happened upon the installation at the same time. 1.2 Interactivity But while an audience is invited into the spatial heart of immersive video environments, they are not always able to contribute to the structure, content, or low of a work. Here we can articulate a distinction between immersion and interactivity. As we oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 21 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM 22 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO have seen, music is immersive: and yet the performance of art music is not traditionally performative. Listeners are immersed in sound, which is able to move through their space and to surround them entirely. hey may also be transported into the soundworld where they are able to perform a personal dialog with the music. But they nevertheless remain unable to change the course of the performance itself. he same is oten true of immersive video environments, such as Oursler’s System for Dramatic Feedback and Rist’s Lungenlügel. Other artists have pushed through the immersive barrier to enable visitors to assume a hands-on creative role. he possible levels of video interactivity, which have characterized video work from the beginning, are manifold: a work can interact with a space and initiate a dialog with the visitors within it; sound and image can be manipulated by visitors in order to create individual audiovisual pathways; or visitors in diferent locations can be drawn together via technological intervention. We saw above that early video enabled performative intermedial spaces by inviting visitors into the realm of the projected image and amplified sound in order to better probe issues of public and private spaces, democratic decisions, and interpersonal connections. Once a fundamental element of a piece, audience members could introduce “flexibility, changeability, fluency” into the creative formula (Cage, in Goldberg 2001, 124). Tracing the etymology of “inter” to the Latin for “among,” Margaret Morse explains that the suffix to interactive “suggests a linking or meshing function that connects separate entities”: interactivity, she continues “allows associative rather than linear and casual links to be made between heterogeneous elements” (Morse 1990, 18; 22). In interactive video work, the “meshing function” operates not only between media (in the form of intermedia), but also between a work’s components and those who choose to engage with it. The significance of the visitor to this mesh was explained early on by video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, who described the Kitchen Videotape Theatre, which they founded at the Mercer Arts Center, New York, as “a theatre utilizing an audio, video, and electronic interface between performers (including actors, musicians, composers, and kinetic visual artists) and audience”: within this theater, video work was considered as an “activity” rather than an “art a priori” (Steina and Woody Vasulka, in Salter 2010, 120). One form of video interactivity relies on a visual or audio contribution from visitors. he illusion of bodily transference into the mythic space of the work, for instance, can be achieved by presenting visitors with their own videoed images. Early video work in particular achieved an interactive component largely through exploration of the closed-circuit feed, which could use images and sounds from the audience to produce a responsive, site-speciic form of mimesis and transformation, a process of inclusion that lay at the heart of Les Levine’s early work Iris (1968). Installed in Levine’s studio, Iris was a closed-circuit feed that promoted an interplay between three video cameras—which recorded visitors as they moved around the performance space—and a stack of six television monitors. With their images presented through the monitors in real time, visitors oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 22 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 23 were able to change how the installation looked and the speed with which the images progressed, initiating a performative interplay between mediated space and the “real” space of the work, as the artist explained: I don’t tend to think of my work purely in psychological terms, but one must assume some psychological efect of seeing oneself on TV all the time. hrough my systems the viewer sees himself as an image, the way other people would see him were he on television. In seeing himself this way he becomes more aware of what he looks like. All of television, even broadcast television, is to some degree showing the human race to itself as a working model. It’s a relection of society, and it shows society what society looks like. It renders the social and psychological condition of the environment visible to that environment. (Youngblood 1970, 339) Iris remained in a constant state of lux, with each moment of its existence utterly unique. At irst, visitors reported unsettling psychological issures when included as a key component to a video work. Recalling Iris, for example, theorist Gene Youngblood suggests that visitors are made to feel self-conscious because the work turns the viewer into information. he viewer has to reconsider what he thought about himself before. He must think about himself in terms of information. You notice people in front of Iris begin to adjust their appearance. hey adjust their hair, tie, spectacles. hey become aware of aspects of themselves which do not conform to the image they previously had of themselves. (339) By drawing together the processes of videoing and experiencing, creator and receiver, video existed in, and moved through, the transient time and space of the visitor by displacing them into their own unsettling extrapersonal space. his method of visual transportation lay at the heart of many of Paik’s musical works, such as the TV Cello (1971), an instrument constructed from three television monitors linked to a closed-circuit feed of the audience; when a cellist (Charlotte Moorman) played the sculpture, not only were electronic sounds produced, but the images underwent associated forms of distortion and manipulation. he increasing institutional support for video work by major galleries and museums from the mid-1980s onward, the increasing availability of funding for moving image and audio art, and accelerated technological innovation have provided increased opportunities for artists to use the meshing function of video interactivity in a variety of ways. While early pieces such as Iris and TV Cello physically repositioned the visitor into the heart of the installation, the irst interactive video disc that enabled viewers to determine their own course through a work was Lynn Hershman Leeson’s LORNA (1983–4), a work that acted as “a natural progression from time-based sculptural strategies” (Leeson 2005, 77). In Iris, visitors became visual material whether or not they acted for the camera; as explained in relation to the Happening, the spectator became an “important physical component of the art environment” regardless of their will to participate (Kaprow 2003, 93). Leeson (2005, 78) diferentiated between these works oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 23 12/17/2013 8:53:41 PM 24 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO and her new form of engagement, explaining that true “Interactive systems require users to react”: A (pre)condition of a video dialog is that it does not talk back. Rather, it exists as a moving stasis; a one-sided discourse; like a trick mirror that absorbs instead of relects. Perhaps it was nostalgia that led me to search for an interactive video fantasy—a craving for control, a longing for liveness, a drive toward direct action. his total, cumulative, and chronic condition I sufered from is reputedly a side efect . . . of watching television. (Leeson 1990, 267) In order to give her visitors the opportunity to react to LORNA, Leeson provided them with a remote control similar to the one her videoed agoraphobic protagonist used to change her television channels. Lorna appeared unable to make her own decisions and sat staring at her TV monitor, overwhelmed (we are told) by alienation and loneliness. Juxtaposed against her inability to act was the heightened free will of the user, who was able to alight on various objects in Lorna’s virtual room in order to release a sound or video module. Depending on the objects selected, or the choices provided (there were three options for the phone, for instance), the user released a diferent narrative for Leeson’s character, which resulted in one of three possible endings (Lorna either shot herself, shot her TV, or decided to move to Los Angeles). Despite this interactive freedom, however, Leeson points out that “these systems only appear to talk back. hat they are alive or independent is an illusion. hey depend upon the architectural strategy of the program. However, there is a space between the system and player in which a link, fusion, or transplant occurs. Content is codiied. Truth and iction blur . . . ” (Leeson 1990, 271). Evoking ideas of a spatial interaction—or “transplant”—Leeson’s description of her work is predicated on the ability of visitors to step across the threshold of the white cube and assume control over her work’s structure. While LORNA only “appear[s] to talk back,” more recent work makes use of technological advances in order to allow visitors a truly inluential role over an installation’s progression. Mary Lucier’s Oblique House (Valdez) (1993), installed in an abandoned car dealership in Rochester, New York, asked visitors to step into a house haunted by the sounds and images of people who had encountered a loss as the result of a natural disaster (the 1964 earthquake), or a man-made catastrophe (the 1989 oil spill) in the city of Valdez, Alaska. At irst, monitors situated in the corners of the room were silent, showing only facial close-ups of three women and one man. As visitors entered the space, sensors near each monitor picked up their movements, prompting the images to lurch into slow-motion life and embark on their testimonials in highly resonant, processed timbres. Via movement, visitors were able to set of several recollections at once, resulting in duets, trios, and quartets for the departed. As the stories combined, a common thread of pain and solace emerged from the cacophony, an ever-changing soundscape composed by the visitors. David Small’s and Tom White’s video installation Stream of Consciousness (1997–8; later retitled An Interactive Poetic Garden) gave a diferent form of control to the user. Here, a rock garden housed several linked pools. Water lowed down through the pools oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 24 12/17/2013 8:53:44 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 25 before coming to rest in a large, glowing basin onto which words were projected from above. Described by its creators as an exploration into the “open-ended active and passive modes of interaction,” the installation invited visitors to manipulate a hand interface in order to direct the text, halt its low, or “change the content of the words themselves” in order “to evoke the luid contents of consciousness” (Small and White, n.d.). By interacting with a word through the interface, visitors could create a blue aura around the text: when a word was pressed directly, it appeared larger until additional words began to form. As water in the pool moved, older words were discarded as the liquid drained from the basin to leave, eventually, only the words chosen by the user. Site-speciic, An Interactive Poetic Garden had to be performed in real time, existing only at the moment of interaction; moreover, the work was performative—embracing the “lexibility, changeability, luency” enabled by the creative vitality of each user. Video performer and sound artist Camille Utterback explored similar ideas of creative interactivity in her 1998 installation Vicissitudes, a work that made use of specialized, yet user-friendly, technology in order to embrace “the messy world itself ” (Acconci, in Kaye 2007, 74). Like Cantique 3, Utterback’s work explored the nature of language and linguistic constructs, but this time operated through sensor-based apparatus that allowed the installation to respond to the movement of visitors as they moved in and through the gallery’s space. he work comprised two audio-tracked interviews, which were linked to physical props located in the exhibition area: in one recording, people recollected the moments in their lives in which they felt happy, or up; in the other, they recalled situations that made them feel unhappy, or low. Visitors were invited to make use of the props: when the ladder was scaled, for instance, the volume of the irst audio-track increased; when a visitor lay on the chalked outline, the second soundtrack became more audible. “Many of our linguistic constructs rely on physical metaphor, though they have become transparent to us due to their common usage,” explained the artist: “hrough its interface, this piece explores the embodiedness of language itself ” (Utterback 2004, 224). Asked to navigate through the piece according to their “talents for ‘engagement’,” visitors were given responsibility over the sound of the piece, able to compose with the available material to produce a soundtrack with a large amount of variability, a control that replaced the autonomy of the artist-composer with the impermanent nature of audience-controlled process art. Forms of bodily engagement also form the basis of Christa Erickson’s work. he artist has asked visitors to sit on a swing (Invertigo, 1997) or play on a seesaw (MNEMONIC DEVICES: See/Saw, 2000, 2007). In Whirl (2007), an installation in which “memory and nostalgia is revealed as a warped phenomena,” the bodily interaction apparent in Erickson’s earlier work became even more personal (see Figure 1.2). A pinwheel was linked to a record player and a video projector: when a visitor blew the wheel, the installation burst into life, linging a group of children wildly around a circle swing and sending warped life into a vinyl recording of nursery rhymes. As the visitor ran out of breath, the sound and images slowed to a standstill, awaiting reactivation by another gust of life-giving breath. While Whirl occupied a similar aesthetic position—to fuse art and life—to that of Kaprow and others, it also oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 25 12/17/2013 8:53:44 PM 26 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO FIGURE 1.2 Christa Erickson, Whirl (2007). Installation Still Image. © Christa Erickson, artist. activated a form of fragile memory by highlighting not only the content and its relationship to the viewer, but also the technology, as old and new forms of audiovisual equipment interacted with one another. Tropes of nostalgia and reminiscence also lie at the heart of Erickson’s motion-tracking, interactive installation Search (2005–7), a work that poeticized the movement of people across spatial environments by posing oncoming visitors with a silent, frozen picture of a globe and a hand; as they approached, however, the image burst into motion as the hand began to spin the globe: “Today’s global culture has accelerated the creation of many diasporas. People move, travel, lee, and are displaced for personal, economic, environmental, and political reasons. Many long for home, family, culture, and moments of respite in a busy world,” explains Erickson (2005–7). In order to evoke the nostalgia for an absent home, the visitors’ movements generated streams of words, which emerged then weakened; at the same time, sound began to materialize, becoming increasingly melancholy and noticeable when a visitor stood still: here are two categories of words. One set relates to wandering, including active words like drit, roam, lee, migrate, seek, etc. he other set are what one might desire when they stop moving, including words like home, refuge, respite, family, shelter, etc. hese words mix and merge on screen as traces of bodies in motion. (Erickson 2005–7) oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 26 12/17/2013 8:53:44 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 27 Whereas earlier works, such as Levine’s Iris and Paik’s TV Cello, contributed to the “dematerialization of the art object” by using the visitor as compositional material, thus ensuring a continually diferent audiovisual progression, more recent work, such as Whirl and Search, required the visitor actively to participate; to “react,” as Leeson would say. 1.3 From the Miniature to the Communal While the degree of participation in reactive work continues to grow, the type of spatial interaction required remains highly variable. The examples above have been informed by a desire to use the meshing function of video; to obscure or dissolve the boundaries that can separate work from visitor, art from life. However, they have all operated from within the white cube. There are many examples of early video work that was performed outside of the gallery, a move beyond the institution particularly favored by Paik. But the first video equipment was large and cumbersome, and such events could be difficult to achieve. Recent technological innovation has enabled video artists to produce work that can intervene more easily in real life. Such interventions can occur in one of two ways: either through a miniaturization of experience, or by operating in enlarged, communal arenas. The use of touch-screen technology, for instance, has promoted a variety of interiorized interactive audiovisual experiences accessible from beyond the gallery environment, ranging from Brian Eno’s generative iPhone and iPod touch app Bloom, which invites the user to create ambient musical phrases and a variety of colored shapes simply by tapping the screen, to the interactive iPad component to Björk’s recent Biophilia project, in which apps accompanying songs allow the user not only to access musical analyses and information, but also to assume compositional control over a song’s structure: “each app isn’t just a music video or even an instrument: it’s something in between,” explains interactive media artist and Biophilia designer Scott Snibbe (Björk n.d., Tour App Tutorial). This “something in between” thrums most clearly in the “Crystalline” app, an interactive journey that enables the user to tilt the iPad in order to construct her own unique structure for the song. Given control over a set of crystals, the user navigates a system of tunnels: upon reaching a crossroads, she must choose her direction. Each choice leads not only to a new visual experience, but also determines the structure of the song, of which there are numerous possible versions. Other new forms of audiovisuality can encourage interactivity not only between user and machine, but also between participants: a form of social interrelation that can expose the personal listening spaces promoted by Eno and Björk to a peripersonal— even extrapersonal—audience. Andrew Schneider explains his Prolixus (2007), part of a oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 27 12/17/2013 8:53:46 PM 28 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERACTIVE AUDIO FIGURE 1.3 Andrew Schneider, Prolixus (2007). © Andrew Schneider, artist. series of wearable devices, as a contraption that “makes it possible to say things to yourself as other people” (Figure 1.3). It is a matching set of interactive video mouths to be worn over the users own mouths by way of the helmets to which they are aixed. hey each consist of a ive-inch LCD screen attached by metal rod to a bike helmet. he LCD displays either the wearer’s mouth or the matching wearer’s mouth. Switching between the two mouths requires the users to either slam their heads into something hard, or slap their own or each other’s helmets. . . . he signal from the wired camera behind each screen is fed into the helmet’s DPDT relay, acting as an A/B switcher. he other feed for the switcher comes from the wireless receiver also mounted on the back of each helmet. he wireless transceiver on one helmet is tuned to receive the wireless signal from the matching helmet and vice versa. his means that each helmet’s LCD screen has the potential to display either wearer’s mouth at any time. . . . A wearer can only discern what is on his or her own screen by looking into a mirror, or judging the reaction they are receiving from their surroundings. (Schneider, n.d.) Schneider’s interactive video mouth probes the boundaries between diferent levels of personal space, allowing the user at once to recede into their personal world, but also to see this safe interiority exposed for close scrutiny by the other user and those experiencing the contraption. he Prolixus, then, not only initiates, but also highlights the osmosis-like low between work and receiver, between inside and out. Other artists have sought to create more communal, large-scale audiovisual interventions. hose involved with the London-based group Greyworld, an audiovisual collective whose work focuses on public, environmental interventions that are oten temporary in nature and can be installed without permission, have created particularly musical installations. For Railings (1996), for instance, a Parisian street balustrade was tuned to sound “he Girl from Ipanema” when an object such as an umbrella was oxfordhb-9780199797226.indd 28 12/17/2013 8:53:46 PM SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO ART 29 passed along it. Here, viewers become direct participants, with the sole ability to sound the installation and thus bring it to life: as Kaprow said about his earlier work, “Art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is uncertain” (2003, 82). However, the desire to merge the identities of real and videoed environments has not just led to the situation of audiovisual work outside the white cube; it has also resulted in a direct interaction with it. Lee Wells, for instance, has installed interactive video pieces along airport terminal tunnels (Video Forest, Kimpo Airport, Seoul, 2009) and across bridges (Bright Nights, Manhattan Bridge, New York, 2009). he 2- and 3D video mapping created by the Netherlands-based company Nuformer works toward a similar transformational end. Moving images roam across public buildings such as theaters and government buildings. Accompanied by sound efects and music, the images convert familiar structures into medieval cathedrals, jungle scenes, or underwater worlds, or make them appear to burst or shatter entirely. As we have become increasingly familiar with the audiovisual forms that now ill our world, the mythic spaces of video art have expanded into our everyday lives. Yet those working with video have embraced the messy potential of the medium to create immersive and/or interactive audiovisual environments from the outset: to promote art and music practices as an activity, not an art form a priori. In order to achieve this, artists and musicians have had to loosen their creative control by ofering to an audience a set of parameters that are open to varying levels of manipulation: they have to embrace a willingness to fail. Born into an arena of intense musical and artistic experimentation, the video format enabled an enlargement of creative ideas that were already being articulated in other genres. But its methods of delivery and ability to transport images and sounds across spaces—to move visitors into their extrapersonal space—lent itself particularly well to dissolving traditional forms of one-way communication to form real-world interactions that were, and are, subject to continual reimagination. References Barcia-Colombo, Gabriel. 2007. 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