Systems of Viewing: The Spectator Interface in Media Art

Melanie Wilmink Dr. Sheila Petty FILM 810 April 12, 2013 Systems of Viewing: The Spectator Interface in Media Art Within the systems of artistic curation, it is generally agreed that there is a shift taking place. It is a shift in the roles of the curator, artwork, and viewer, which are increasingly intertwined and inter-mediated. With the advent of hybridized artistic activities, the definitions of art, artist and curator are being blurred and therefore we must fundamentally reconsider traditional exhibition practices which would isolate them into separate activities and order them into hierarchies. In order to understand how to address this shift, we might begin with the work of Architectural theorist and critic, Sylvia Lavin. In her text, Kissing Architecture, Lavin describes the root of the shift as a reaction to Clement Greenberg’s style of modernist contemplation where the “spirit of modernity was revealed when the viewer’s response to an object was purely and laboriously cognitive without affect” (18). When the world began to recognize the biases inherent in that style of aestheticism (namely its hierarchical patriarchal and imperialist tendencies which ignore alternative viewpoints), there arose a need for a different type of approach. With Greenberg’s Modernist aesthetic epitomized by architecture, Lavin suggests that this new approach may be connected to characteristics of media art—primarily in its ability to layer and create “slippage” with older forms of practice. Introducing this premise, she writes: ...a new medium... and a new sensibility—postfeminist certainly, but more acutely one of intense affect—could simply and with devastating generosity slip itself in and over the old medium of architecture and its even older sensibilities of authority and autonomous intellection, thereby enveloping the increasingly archaic figure of the architecture in an entirely new cultural project (4). Though her text specifically focuses on the role of moving image art in an interaction with architecture, I would suggest that we can extend this notion to the general activity of media art on the environments, objects and subjects around us. Lavin's text is a strong example of how media art creates affect on our bodies, and asks us to encounter it in a mediated way—a way that is quite different than from traditional visual arts. I propose that we consider this encounter as an interface, which we define as the common boundary between two surfaces (ours and the image) and also as something which allows for two separate entities to operate jointly (“Interface”). The idea that an interface can create connections, and therefore activate a response, is in direct opposition of Greenberg’s distanced, un-affected spectator, and therefore we can consider the interface as a new conceptualization of engaging spectators in a non-hierarchical form of viewing media art. It is an attempt to balance the power structures often present in gallery and museum exhibitions, and to acknowledge the differences required for a variety of artistic methodologies, not the least works by marginalized communities, which can be visualized by understanding the hybrid needs of media art. This essay will examine a variety of possible strategies for interfacing media art and spectators, including: hybridity, process, memory, interactivity, erotics, and spectacle, all of which draw on a selection of historical and contemporary theorists. This approach embraces a plural and multicultural way of building knowledge, which draws from many voices while developing conclusions. It is an important aspect to consider within curatorial practices, as museums have historically struggled to open their discourse to minority voices, who have often been subdued and erased within the hegemony of the institution. Whether it is colonized cultures, queer, feminist or multicultural practitioners, they have struggled to be visible under traditional, hierarchical methodologies. This is not to say that curators should only work within collaborative and community-based contexts where the act of curating itself is opened to the group. Rather, it is an adjustment to our understanding of interactions between the spectator and object. Although several of the examples used in developing these strategies (like the work on memory by Henri Bergson), draw on an Enlightenment approach that places the human subject and individual high on an system of knowledge and authority, my desire is to push it beyond an isolationist, humanist view, into a understanding of our engagements with the world as a system or network. Equal flows of information back and forth, with no node privileged above any other. Some nodes may receive more input or focus at some points in time, but that does not place them permanently on a hierarchy. It is a fluid, changeable system that can adapt to the needs and surroundings of its users. We use specific interfaces and methodologies as the need arises, then allow them to run autonomously in the background while we have no direct need for them. Of particular interest here, is the writings of Harvard academic Giuliana Bruno who, like Sylvia Lavin, focuses on the intersections between media and and architecture. Her 2007 text Public Intimacies uses architecture as an allegory for a variety of ways that we experience art, develop memory, and frame our public spaces. The text itself is exciting for its blurred approach to the boundaries between writing, art, cinema, memory and space, but more than that, it suggests an indirect way of contemplation that defies normative, linear critical thinking. Near the end of the text, Bruno describes the patriarchal urban design where women were linked (and chained) to the home, not only by literal architectural design but also by the way that home was conceptually developed as a stable, fixed location, where women stayed until men returned from their travels. She writes that “[t]he anxiety of the (male) voyage is the fear that, upon return, one may not find the same home/woman/womb one has left behind” (166). Bruno then suggests that in order to change these stereotypes, a shift in understanding domesticity/femaleness as fixed might be necessary. She suggests an “(urban) voyageuse” who disrupts the traditional notions of stable home in favour of a wandering. Bruno notes that “[w]andering defines this cartography, which is guided by a fundamental remapping of urban dwelling. A constant redrafting of sites, rather than the circularity of origin and return, ensures that spatial attachment does not become the desire to enclose and possess” (166). In this description, we begin to see the importance of redefining spatial and temporal interactions of traditional spaces. Rather than suggesting a straightforward refusal of being in the home, she suggests a transformation of our understanding of what home can be. This fluidity aligns with Lavin’s idea of “slippage” as a way to transmute the seemingly solid and inflexible surfaces of architecture, and describes a co-existence and equal partnership rather than a hierarchical binary. By seizing the impulse behind Bruno’s “voyageuse”, we can imagine exhibitions that embrace circuitousness, palimpsest, fluidity, process and the erotics of touch, which may in turn offer spaces of dialogue for the Others which exist in opposition to the traditional Western, Caucasian, Male, and Capitalist approaches of exhibition design. As previously noted, the interface operates on two levels: as a meeting point for surfaces, and as a “means or place of interaction between two systems” (“Interface”). For our purposes then, the metaphor of interface is twinned: as a skin or boundary and as a form of interactive communication. As a skin, the interface becomes interesting for its sensuousness. It is, in fact, also a form of communication—relaying external perception to our consciousness, and as such, it links to the embodied senses like touch, taste and smell. This embodied and affective view of the interface is echoed in the writings of Lavin and Bruno. Their theories value the human body as a crucial aspect of engagement with the object, but more than that, establish our perception as unstable—fed by our memories, the actuality of the object, and the histories of both. Giuliana Bruno envisions the screen itself as porous skin between memory, the imaginative space of art, the museum’s archival drive, and movement (3-4) and Sylvia Lavin questions the role of the architectural surface “as signifier, screen or umbrella” and asks “what happens when this surface is stroked, encased, veiled, enveloped and consumed by the ‘software’ of media and other material furnishings?” (33). Both of these theorists consider how we can affect this skin, and imagine how it will react. The anthropomorphism of an object as having a skin, and having reactions, is already beyond the rationality of modernism. It is an imaginary and (feminine) empathic space of consideration, where there is a possibility of an equal flow of information between any two structures. In the second meaning of our metaphor, interface seizes this possibility of two-way communication. Instead of simply facilitating a perception, the interface here activates a connection where one participant can affect the other (and vice versa). Imagine a computer, where we interface to gather information; the user activates the technological interface to access information, and the information (as well as the systems it resides in) affects the way the user thinks, acts, and reacts to the world around them. Many examples of contemporary media art offer literal opportunities for interaction, where the viewer activates a portion of the work, but I would rather consider this interaction in the context of the two-way flow of information. The artwork has its own narrative, which is provided by its physicality and artist's intent, however once installed, the artist’s input ends, and it is up to the object and spectator to forge a relationship on their own. Often it is the curator’s role to facilitate this understanding, and traditional curatorial tools might include naming and labelling, didactic texts, or other educational materials which might convey the artist’s response to the work, all of which reinforce the hierarchy between Curator, Artist, Artwork and Spectator. However, using the metaphor of the interface as skin and communication, we may find more indirect and subtle systems to enact this mediation. Taking a lead from Giuliana Bruno’s writing style and methodology, the first interface system is Hybridity. Media art holds a fringe place in art history, developing out of cinema (which itself is a hybrid of the panorama, still photography, theatre and other art forms), and it has transformed the way we understand the very nature of art objects through the intangible artifacts of video art, projection, media installation, new media and digital art. In her article “Expanded Cinema: Proto-, Photo and Post-Photo Cinema”, seminal Expanded Cinema academic, Jackie Hatfield defined cinema as a medium that is “...not yoked to the material combinations of a medium... the cinematic experience can cross media boundaries or be achieved through a range of combinations” (263). In this text, she continues on to discuss the development of cinema into Expanded Cinema, which enabled viewers to create affect in the art object, and challenged the notion of information as one-directional (263). By considering cinema as a hybrid medium, Hatfield shifts the discussion around cinema as a narrow field (single-screen, theatrical works presented on film), and embraces a whole range of liminal works that may not fit into that category (or for that matter other categories of “video art” or “sculpture”). This need to categorize is a symptom of the Enlightenment (which set the stage for early Modernism), a movement which was deeply interested in cataloguing and naming as gesture to control and delimit the world. It is a colonialist act which separates groups into categories, and sets up structures of power within them. Within media art, there has historically been a deep divide between artists that would consider their work “video art” and those that would consider themselves “experimental film”. Although this divide still exists to some extent, there seems to be contemporary blending between those two worlds. Galleries and museums are showing works by filmmakers like Stan Brakhage (Brakhage) and Jonas Mekas (Mekas), and visual artists like Shirin Neshat (Neshat) and Lynn Hershman Leeson (Hershman Leeson) have made feature films to showcase in cinemas. By blurring the boundaries of their work and the definition of what they do, these artists have opened up possibilities for dialogue and for engaging audiences that would never have accessed their work in their primary venues. As curators adapt, this fluidity in art forms will likely require forethought and equal flexibility by presentation venues, as well as increased support for interdisciplinary presentations which may require planning for video, painting, installation, sculpture, cinema and new media in one exhibit. Since a single space will never be able to perfectly accommodate the needs of all of these mediums, the space itself will need to be changeable—offering flexibility in lighting, spatial configuration, hands-on spaces, audio installations, indoor/outdoor spaces and much more. Sylvia Lavin’s Kissing Architecture offers a selection of examples of works that embrace this hybridity. Her text deals primarily with the ways in which media art is able to fluidly change space without any physical modifications, and includes the work of Pilpotti Rist and Doug Aitken, both of whom installed projections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rist’s work turned the rigid, sleekly masculine interior of the museum into a warm, pink and feminized space, whereas Aitken enveloped the shell of the museum with a new layer of projected narrative. Lavin describes these installations as a “kiss” between artwork and architecture, and proposes the kiss itself as a “theory of confounding mediums” (26). She notes that the juxtaposition of art and architecture is not one overpowering the other, nor is it “a collaboration between two that aims to make one unified thing; it is the intimate friction between two mediums that produce two-ness—reciprocity without identity—with opens new epistimological and formal models for redefining architecture's relation to other mediums and hence itself" (54-55). By placing ourselves alongside, and rubbing up against the Other, we are able to build knowledge in completely unexpected ways. It is here where interdisciplinarity ties into the importance of opening up spaces for marginalized voices—working with the hybrid interface to enrich our experiences, understanding and creativity. Cultural theorist Jill Bennett describes this palimpsest of knowledge in her article “Aesthetics of Intermediality”, where in discussing the work of Gabriel Orozco, she writes that the artist overlays paint over photographs in a “gestural… convergence of media” (434). Here the notion of gesture becomes particularly important to the act of intermediality, suggesting an emotional movement, slippage of boundaries, and embodied action. For Bennett, intermediality is an act of co-production (between the artist and the subject, theorist, viewer etc.) (443). She highlights the importance of intermediality to the development of knowledge in her analysis of Aby Warburg’s “Mnemosyne Atlas”, which was an alternative research project consisting of overlaid and recombined images as an analysis of art history. With its layering, re-organization and linkage of a variety of images in a visual diagram, Bennett calls on Warburg’s research as an exemplification of non-linear and non-linguistic research. She writes that “Mnemosyne is not an art work, nor even a finished object. Having been subject to continual modification by Warburg, it is best understood as the embodiment of a method: a means of studying the internal dynamics of imagery, and the ways in which formulas emerged in different contexts and periods in history” (438). As such, it is an epistemology, or way of building knowledge. Bennett also continues on to note that the manner of linking the images as juxtapositions or in terms of their “symbiotic” relationships (as well as its continuous incompleteness) makes it an object always in the process of “becoming” knowledge. It is continually developed and expanded, including new knowledge as it is inputted. In many ways, the diagram of this process would resemble a web or a network, integrated into our notion of interface as a series of data pathways, which are activated by a variety of users, all operating on an equal plane. By understanding knowledge as a process, we are able to reconsider our approach to art. Many new media artworks have expanded the relationships between the viewers and artworks through interactivity, and this has completely changed the ways that we approach an art object. The second interface, therefore, is Process, which includes both the knowledge building process and notions around interactivity. One of the key thinkers on this type of interface is British artist and theorist, Roy Ascott who, in his essay “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision”, proposed the concepts of cybernetics, telematics and behaviourist art as a new system of critical thinking around aesthetics. In opposition to traditional ways of engaging with art, which Ascott describes as the transmission of a clear meaning to a passive spectator by the (genius) Artist, this approach is referred to as Behaviourist Art (111). This new method begins to distort the hierarchical movement of information from the artist to the viewer by redistributing the power from the Artist as a creator to the artist as a Mediator. Ascott asserts that rather than authoritatively conveying a message, the role of the artist has aligned itself to providing “a matrix for ideas and feelings from which the participants in his work may construct for themselves new experiences and unfamiliar patterns of behaviour” (114). The artist therefore becomes an intermediary in the process of developing a relationship between the artwork and viewer, with the content of the artwork simply being the process of developing communication and feedback between the two entities (114). By labelling this system as a matrix, Ascott already draws us into the language of computer technology and systems of organization. In addition, instead of drawing on the more traditional language of the mathematical grid, which would align with controlled, linear and patriarchal systems of knowledge, the roots of the word “matrix” are actually feminine, referencing the womb as a “the environment in which a particular activity or process begins” (“Matrix”). This feminization calls to mind processes that are fluid and organic, rather than rigid and mechanical, and associates to the body, senses and emotions. It presents contingency rather than control and as Ascott notes, asks us to consider the radical idea that art does not pertain to what things “are… but with what they do, how they behave and what they have done to them. The behavioural interest could only find expression in an unstable and uncertain visual structure that invited the participative behaviour of the spectator to resolve the equilibrium” (115). This idea shifts the power of the relationship away from the artist as a master, and places the responsibility on the spectator to activate the interface between the art object and their own subjectivity. Here, the process of engaging is the interface. Ascott imagines art as the interface device for experiences, describing a series of six behavioural tendencies in art, including: art as a behavioural analogue (or a way to explore something else indirectly), art as a behavioural trigger (which elicits a response in the viewer), art as a behavioural environment (which alters awareness of the surroundings), art as a behavioural structure (where external manipulation affects change), art as a behavioural ritual (where the action of making art is all important — action painting, surrealist games, readymade etc.), and art as a behavioural synthesis (interdisciplinarity). Although Ascott understands the art itself as the interface to something else, it could be argued that it is possible to reverse the polarity of the equation, and have the behavioural affects in the environment act as an interface to shift the viewer’s attention from their ego-centrism to the dialogue being presented by the art object. In a sense this would then limit Ascott’s notion that art has no message, and re-balance the equilibrium into a feedback loop between art, viewer, artist and curator, all as equal participants. Some excellent examples of this type of feedback loop are brought up by Jackie Hatfield, when she describes how “unlike ‘front-facing’ configurations, in the closed-circuit environment or monitor-based installation, the audience’s physical engagement could be actively orchestrated and the act of viewing integrating as process, beyond the boundaries of the screen” (263). Like Ascott, here Hatfield draws on examples of works that utilize the exhibition space as sculpture, and attracts attention to the viewer’s body within the space. However, she also pushes beyond the notion of merely making the viewer aware of the space around them by noting the aspects of interactivity pushing the “boundaries of the screen”. Here we can imagine the artwork merging with the viewer’s consciousness in a way that might shape them and their way of thinking. Hatfield writes that the physicality of interacting with an image space creates an active participant, and that it offers the viewer the possibility of creating cinematic montage by having an active role in the creation and organization of images. Although Hatfield uses this purely in the sense of re-ordering images in order to define personal narratives or experiences within an artwork, connections between memory-making and montage also appear in the works on Public Intimacy by Giuliana Bruno and Suzanne Guerlac’s Thinking In Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. This notion of the montage as an artifact of interactivity is extremely exciting, since it suggests that in the process of dialogue with an image not only can we create literal affects on the artwork but the artwork has literal affects on us. Memory then acts as the third interface between the viewer and art object. Of particular interest is Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of perception as a feedback loop between reality and memory. Suzanne Guerlac’s analysis of Bergson’s Matter and Memory in her book Thinking In Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, explains that Bergson undermines the philosophical premises of universality by blurring the boundaries between the mind and body. Previous philosophical thinking had created a strict binary between the two, whereas Bergson determined that it was impossible to perceive either reality or consciousness separately in their idealized forms. Bergson theorized that at a level of ideal consciousness, there would be no duration—we would interact with an object and react to it simultaneously. However, since our human bodies take time to send signals from the site of perception to our brains, all of our interactions with the world are delayed. This delay offers us a chance to contemplate the input and formulate a reaction. The longer the duration between perception and action, the more our ability to make choices increases. Therefore, instantaneous, animal and instinctual reactions live closer to perception (fight or flight), whereas considered reactions live closer to our subjective memories or consciousness, but open up a variety of options for action. All of our perception is a feedback between the object and our memories of the object, which flesh out our perception with knowledge acquired from previous encounters with similar objects (106-123). Here, since it is impossible for it to be experienced in its purest form, perception becomes simply the act of instigating memory (119). In describing how memory plays a role in synthesizing our perception and reactions, Guerlac writes that “In concrete perception, memory functions in two important ways. First it interweaves… the past into present, such that memory is practically inseparable from perception. Second, it gathers together multiple moments of duration and contracts them into a single intuition." (122). From this intuition, we are able to react. With this in mind, we can consider all of our perception a construct which is tinted by our personal archive of past experiences. It forces us to reconsider the traditional prioritization of the mind over the body, and posits a cycle where both perception and memory act as equal nodes. Bergson also highlights the role of memory as an interface, arguing that it becomes “the point of contact between consciousness and matter.” (qtd in Guerlac 123). As the point of contact, it becomes a crucial interface in our the process of developing our understanding of the world around us and constructing a narrative about ourselves and our experiences. Giuliana Bruno takes up this notion of memory as a point of contact between multiple domains when she links the medium of cinema to memory and architecture. She notes the doubling of “film’s imaginative route”, the act of walking, the act of making memory and architectural archival in presentation spaces like the museum and pavilion (3-4). She notes the mnemonic impulse behind collecting and creating spaces to store memories, and that the virtual space of cinema and photography is intrinsically linked to the desire to preserve. In addition, the very structure of cinema (a series of frames projected over time) suggests a linear temporal presentation, however, simultaneously destroys temporality through montage and other non-linear processes (4). We are able to revisit a single moment in time over and over, however as Roland Barthes would say, it inherently references the death of a moment gone forever (Camera Lucida). The moment is preserved as a shadow of itself. However, Bruno also begins to link cinema to an active mapping of image (7). This mapping suggests that the creation of memory is tied to an attempt to structure experiences into some sort of diagram, and to build a narrative out of it. After all, what is a map, but a way of trying to describe and capture the scope of the world around us. Instead of creating linear connections, the montage generally acts as a way of drawing unexpected connections, usually through metaphor, suggestion, emotion or other irrational impulses. In addition to the irrationality of image combinations, montage can also combine non-diegetic sound with the images, uncoupling the connections with realism and working within unconscious or dream-like methods. This relation to dream and surrealism steps montage beyond traditional notions of narrative as linear, and begins to open up a space for the unexpected or unconsidered. A space for alternative possibilities to reality. This expanded scope of montage, in opening up possibilities for temporality, simultaneously alters our expectations of what space can be as well. Within the multiplicitous space of cinematic montage, our bodies as transported from real space to the space of imagination, where our disembodied selves can travel wherever we wish. Here, Bruno draws on Sergei Eisenstein’s “Montage and Architecture” in developing a theory of cinematic mobility which is influenced by the history of the architectural pavilion as a temporary place of exhibition (19-20). She writes that the act of wandering through art installation is layered with mnemonic echoes of the cinema palace, pavilion, museum and other architectural sites of archiving, saying: [t]he installation makes manifest the imaginative paths comprising the language of filmic montage and the course of the spectatorial journey. If, in the movie theatre, the filmic-architectural promenade is a kinesthetic process, in the art gallery one literally walks into the space of the art of memory and into its architecturally produced narrative… the installation space becomes a renewed theater of image (re)collection, which both takes the place of and interfaces with that performative space the movie theater has represented for the last century and continues to embody. An archive of moving images comes to be displaced in hybrid, residual interfacing (28). What is interesting here is that Bruno aligns the multidisciplinary acts of film, architecture, movement, memory and visual arts together in a single gesture. Like Bergson’s theory on memory, they intertwine in a palimpsest of perception, each affecting the way that we consider the other. Our cultural conception of what these acts might be is generally more rigid, considering them as isolated operations. Bruno weaves them together in a complex network, each node touches and rubs against the other, blurring their boundaries and creating affect. The interactivity between them also operates on an subconscious level—we fluidly incorporate them into our perception as a matter of habit (32). This habitual reaction echoes the habit of comparing memory to perception, which then drives us to action or builds our knowledge in the same way as Bergson’s concrete perception. A fluidity of understanding once again serves to blur the boundaries that would normally segregate us from external perspectives; it is something that can be argued as a natural way we develop experiences of the world, offering us the opportunity to highlight the palimpsest of memory on our environments. Layered memory and perspectives furthers our empathy for alternative ways of doing things, and proposes that incorporating external viewpoints does not mean an erasure of one, but rather a diaphanous co-existence. Within this co-existence, it also means that the boundaries between two viewpoints, objects, or perceptions are not stable. It infers a blurring or porousness, and a type of active sharing that could be considered as Interactivity, our fourth form of interface. Although there are many examples of obviously interactive artworks—those which require the spectator to push buttons, recombine images and create reactions within the art, here we are specifically interested in more subtle forms of interactivity. In his essay “Projecting Minds”, cultural theorist Ron Burnett supports the idea that interaction is aligned with projection and telepresence, or the ability to immerse yourself in a virtual experience. He writes that “[i]nteraction is about the interplay between fiction, the reality of the moment and projection” (313). This once again aligns it with the act of blurring boundaries between perception and consciousness, and offers a way for us to consider how any creative act of imagination might be an interaction with an art object. Rather than simply considering interactivity as a physical motion to stimulate action in an external object, we can imagine it as any instance where we engage ourselves in a dialogue with it, and can posit that it refers to the back and forth flow of information rather controlling and instigating an action. Burnett notes that projection, telepresence and immersion are all part of “conventional” artistic experiences like reading and game-playing, however with modern immersive technologies we are able to enhance the experience (310). Technology is able to extend our concrete perception into worlds that were previously only accessible through imagination. For example the microscope and telescope offers views of the universe that are far beyond human scale, and photography and cinema extend or compress duration, freezes time and produces encounters with personalities from around the world. It offers us the ability to travel to distant spaces without moving from our chairs, and this broadening of our scope allows us to imagine an entirely virtual world of communication. When Burnett writes that “[p]rojection is the way the human imagination works at externalizing what might otherwise be internal and hidden” (332), he means that it is how we are able make our consciousness concrete, how we can embody our thoughts and identify with something that exists beyond the borders of our own bodies. It is literally a form of empathy and communication. Visual artist Luc Courchesne describes this experience as a conversation. In illustrating his own interactive works in the essay “The Construction of Experience”, he details how he created a dialogue between spectators and an artificial character. In the work Portrait One (1990), Courchesne created an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that ran through a series of questions before dropping out of the conversation into internal contemplation. He notes that visitors deemed it a measure of success if they were able to maintain conversation at length before loosing the character’s interest, and writes that “[i]n fact, not unlike real life, showing sensitivity for the character usually creates more room for conversation…” (261). This anthropomorphization of the AI character requires a form of imagination and effort for immersion on behalf of the viewer. Courchesne observes that “[b]ecause the metaphor of conversation is so strong, once a visitor suspends disbelief, the work’s imperfect mechanics and crude interactive mode are forgotten and the experience remains consistent and coherent no matter what happens” (261). This ability to believe in something clearly unreal is an interesting example of our ability to project our imagination and immerse ourselves in pretence. This feedback loop of concrete perception activates memory (and imagination) as a reaction and construction simultaneously. As we react to the input, we also maintain the pretence and flesh out the experience by contributing our own fabrications. By imagining the dialogue as a conversation, we can also assume that both parties in the dialogue are of equal importance. The feedback would not work if one node was overpowering the other, and therefore it is important to emphasize evenly distributed power structures within the interaction. This equality is also important in the fifth type of interface: Erotics. Here the word erotics refers less to sexual acts, and more to a sensuous type of friction between two objects. It is incorporated into the work of both Sylvia Lavin and Laura Marks, who both describe the contact between media art projections and a surface as sensuality. Lavin remarks on the erotic sensations by assuming an analogy of “kissing” for her explanation of the relationship between architecture and projection, and Marks describes the erotic sensibilities in the oscillation between optical (traditional distance) and haptic (simulates a sense of touch) vision. In her text Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura Marks defines “erotics” as “[t]he ability to oscillate between near and far… to move between control and relinquishing, between giver and receiver. It’s the ability to have your sense of self, your self-control, taken away and restored—and to do the same for another person” (xvi). For Marks, it is the movement back and forth between distanciation and embodiment, critical thinking and sensuality. Lavin echoes this understanding saying that “[r]ather than being concerned only with meaning and images that demand close analytic attention, these surfaces work to provoke strong synaesthetic responses in the viewer and therefore to make architecture participate in a culture of interactive receptivity instead of imposed signification” 101. Here, both writers conceptualize erotics as something in opposition to critical distanciation. It is linked to the body and the the erotic fascination with losing perspective— drawing so near that you can’t see the whole picture anymore. It stimulates a shock or surprise at something that has become unrecognizable, which opens up the door to a new way of looking at the world. Another way of considering erotics is as a diffusion between public and private. It is linked to Marks' idea that you flow between your subjectivity and that of another, melding personal space that you would not normally share. Urban theorist Rob Shields also emphasizes the slippage between the two in his essay “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory”, raising questions about what is visible and what is hidden within urban representation. He draws attention to the historical lack of representation of the city as a domestic space, noting that depictions primarily view the city as public, excising domestic life from the picture. However, he also notes that in actuality, the public and private are deeply interconnected. The division between them is artificial, and contemporary society has seen technology erode the boundaries between public and private. He writes that the “…social space is extended virtually in the form of… television broadcasts… the clarity and the schema of the ‘public city’ begins to break down as television messages penetrate into the private…” (238). This constant diffusion of one into the other blurs the way we conceptualize the traditional structure of our space and communications, and more regularly we see people holding private conversations on the phone in public, working remotely from home, checking Facebook at work, and otherwise disrupting the linearity of public and private. There is a certain voyeurism in play, where we are able to share our intimacy with strangers, or bring strangers into the intimacy of our home through technology. It is, as Alan Blum conceives, a “scene”. Blum defines the scene as a bounded site for a distinct group to participate in voyeurism and exhibitionism, which survives because it strictly maintains its borders. The scene operates as a refuge from the routine, and Blum asserts that transgression from the everyday is a hallmark of the scene (174). Therefore scenes might, in theory, offer opportunities for alternative voices to find a platform. For instance, some hallmark scenes include the San Francisco queer community or the Berlin rave scenes which delineated spaces for youth. However, the scene cannot survive without drawing the attention of outsiders and eventually must allow permeation of outsiders. There is a certain theatricality in it, which requires both performers and spectators. The scenic Spectacle takes the place of the final interface. Commenting on the role of performance as exhibitionism within the spectacle of the scene, Blum declares that: [p]erformance is transgressive in its very potential to create exposure or humiliation even in its most mundane shape such as calling a spectator to perform (to sing, to recite poetry) in a way that dissolves the border between audience and performer… Performance brings into focus the passivity of the spectator by giving it body for all to see (174). The notion of bringing awareness to the body of the spectator links to a variety of spectator theories like Bertold Brecht’s distanciation, where the work of art makes the spectator aware of their position as viewer in a work of fiction. It also references Greenbergian distanced viewing in an art gallery, where the viewer is supposed to critically contemplate rather than become emotional. However the key with Blum’s notion of performativity—which distinguishes it from Brecht and Greenberg’s ambitions—lies in the duality of scenic performance as both exhibitionism and voyeurism… “to be seen seeing” (172). The scene begins a feedback loop of desire to participate, yet wanting to view and be viewed as well. It blurs the boundary between spectator and performer. The scene also concurrently offers the chance to be an individual and part of the community, a gesture of “impossible reconciliation” which places the emphasis on the draw of the scene as an oscillation between “fascination and seduction... promise and unfullfillment. We can say that the essence of the scene is longing, perhaps for the impossible, but a longing whose possibility is secured by memory of what is thought to be actual” (176). As such, the scene lives in a space of dream and the fluidity of the unconscious. Like Luc Courchesne’s conversations with artificial intelligence, we are able to project our imaginations and power the scene. It is our actions as hybrid performer/ spectators that creates the mystique of the event, and it is a within that hybrid-process of memory, interaction, erotics and spectacle that we are able to forge new ways of understanding and connecting with artworks as an alternative network of knowledge. These theories espouse a completely new approach to the world, epitomized by the technology which mediates our daily experiences. We have become cyborg creatures, with heterogeneity and plurality shaping our perception. As several of the authors mentioned in this work have noted, it is not exclusive side-effect to new technology, rather it is something which has shaped our lives since we began to create narratives, archive memories and represent dreams. Our new technologies have simply acted as prostheses which extend our awareness and our abilities in order to materialize our imagination. Although the notion of interface developed from research around media art practises and technologies, they are not exclusive to presentations involving those types of work. The goal of these ideas is to shift the concept of what artistic dialogue can be, in order to open up spaces for hybrid and technological works which may not have been able to find presentation spaces in a traditional setting. Ideally, this approach will allow new technologies and voices to coexist with older forms, and to create new and exciting dialogues out of their acts of collaboration and palimpsest. WORKS CITED Ascott, Roy. “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision”. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness by Roy Ascott. Ed. Edward A. Shanken. Berkeley: U. California P., 2007. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print. Bennett, Jill. “Aesthetics of Intermediality”. Art History, 30 (2007): 432–450. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Feb. 2013. Blum, Alan. “Scenes”. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal: McGill-Queen's U.P., 2003. Print. Brakhage, Stan. “About Time – Four Late Stan Brakhage Films”. Presentation House Gallery. Vancouver. 11 March - 9 April, 2006. Web. April 10, 2013. <www.presentationhousegallery.org/exhibition/stan-brakhage-about-time/>. Bruno, Giuliana. 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Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2002. Print. "Matrix". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, March 2013. N.p. Web. 12 April 2013. Mekas, Jonas. “Jonas Mekas”. Serpentine Gallery. London. 5 Dec. 2012 - 27 Jan. 2013. Web. April 10, 2013. <www.serpentinegallery.org/2012/12/jonas_mekas.html>. Neshat, Shirin, Dir., and Shoja Azari. Women Without Men. Indiepix, 2009. Film. Web. <http://womenwithoutmen.blog.indiepixfilms.com/>. Shields, Rob. “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory”. Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis. Ed. Anthony D. King. New York: New York U. P., 1990. Print. WILMINK 23