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Reflections about Interactivity
by Luis O. Arata
Department of Fine Arts, Languages & Philosophy
Quinnipiac College
luis.arata@quinnipiac.edu
3,877 words
posted: december 19, 1999
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[This is the text of a paper presented at the Media in Transition Conference at MIT on October 8, 1999.]
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Interactivity tends to evoke mostly images of the digital media. In
literature, digital interactivity is commonly associated with hypertext and
more recently with cybertext. George Landow traces the origins of this term to
Theodor Nelson who used it in the 1960s to refer to non-sequential writing on a
computer. Hypertext gives the reader choices to branch out among chunks of text
linked by multiple pathways.[1] Espen Aarseth
looks beyond hypertexts to cybertexts which he defines as involving
calculations in their production.[2] Such
explorations of other possible ways to generate literature open the question of
the very nature of literature as a collection of fixed texts. Literature is
moving from its origins in oral traditions to a future that we can hardly
envision from current experiments in the new media. As for the arts, the
objective nature of museums is turning fuzzy. The art work is becoming harder
to contain. Fixed objects are increasingly perceived as fossilized traces of
broader ensembles, organic, in process.[3]
More generally, Sherry Turkle observes that we are starting to move toward a
culture of simulation.[4] This is possible, she
points out, because people are increasingly comfortable with substituting
representations of reality for the real. How simulation is able to deal
flexibly and creatively with the always problematic notion of reality, is
perhaps one of the most important epistemological advances of our times.
Yet such developments overflowing traditional boundaries actually recall
creative features which have atrophied over time, or have been neglected and
now resurface in new guises. The sense of interactivity which dominates the
digital media stretches as far back as we care to look into the roots of human
creation. The most deliberately interactive books span the ages, from the I
Ching to Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch. In many ways these books
are beyond what computer driven texts achieve these days.[5] In an entirely different cultural world,
interactivity surfaces right from the start of the Popol Vuh, the
ancient Maya book of creation, when a narratorial voice speaks of the text as a
seeing instrument which can help the viewer understand clearly all there is.
The notion of interactivity appears in Aristotle's notion of tragic catharsis
and the pleasures of imitation described in the Poetics. I recounted in
The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal how theatre developed in ancient
Greece as a festive medium using mainly episodic forms. This was a highly
interactive mode of creation. It served as vehicle to interconnect performance,
audience, and a pre-existing festive background. But this began to change as
theatre detached itself from its active web of links. Aristotle rejected the
episodic form in favor of the more sophisticated plot-structures which had
started to emerge.[6] The constraints of plots
have in fact reduced the interactivity of theatre and literature. Such
well-made frames tend to tame the imagination and narrow the field of
expectations. However, they can enhance a game-like virtuosity through a
mastery of specific rules, so that both authors and audiences can rely on
artificial yet objectified expectations as marks of excellence.[7] Antonin Artaud used the medium of theatre in
an intransitive mode, as incantation, to make what he envisioned as its double
reveal itself. Political and philosophical literary texts use the medium in a
more transitive way to communicate messages which could effect change. In the
arts, André Malraux conceived museums without walls. He wished to see
art works move beyond the boundaries of museum walls, and have art history
establish dialogues across space and time. Malraux noted how Picasso was
interested in the process of creation rather than in the final products. He
quoted Picasso saying: "it's always painting that wins in the end."[8] Picasso was satisfied by the certainty that,
like, cave painters, he had captured something with his creations. Whatever it
was, he could not tell. The object captured is not important. Framing only
brings the work to an end. The process of interaction is essential for
artists. It is now beginning to count for the museum as well.
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The exploration of interactivity brings us back to the roots of literary and
dramatic creation. It takes us beyond more classic issues such as Eco's
question of whether texts are to be used or interpreted.[9] Interpretation becomes one of the many uses of
texts, rather than being an alternative. Richard Rorty has already noted that a
work of literature is neither a mirror of nature nor a fixed object, thus
recalling many other uses of literature including its potential for simulation
and modeling which are essentially interactive features. The issues which
return when exploring interactivity, not surprisingly, are concerned with the
play set in motion through the medium. As it turns out, these are pragmatic
issues.
What is an interactive work? Without shutting the door on an open concept, we
can say that interactivity points to active interrelations between players and
mediums. The interactions can be of many types. The forms of interactivity tend
to be as diverse as the artists who make them possible. What the rise of new
digital media has done is to widened the focus of interest beyond the object
created, to the participation in a process of playing out multitude of
interactions. Interactivity in its most general form is a mode of creation, a
way of being, a perspective. The basic characteristics of such a perspective
can be grouped tentatively into four areas. An interactive approach favors the
use of multiple points of view which can coexist even if they appear mutually
exclusive; it celebrates the creative value of play; it is a catalyst for
emergence; and it tends to be ultimately pragmatic.
Like a statue on a pedestal or a frozen oracle, the object of creation has
been defined classically as something to contemplate. From an interactive
perspective, this leaves most of the creation out of the picture. A first
quality of an interactive perspective is that is opens multiple points of view
through the blurring of boundaries of realities and objects once conveniently
fixed. This shifts the emphasis away from the object and tilts it more toward
the subject who perceives. Viewers interact with objects in a way that
celebrates subjectivity and diversity. Multiple views of a common phenomenon
can coexist even if they are mutually exclusive. Objects themselves can remain
fuzzy and metamorphic.
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The genial French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided a striking
illustration of both classical and interactive views in the sciences.
Poincaré used to say that when truth is reached, what remains to be done
is to sit back and contemplate it. Truth, when perceived in detached, static
terms, becomes a precious object which can only be admired from a distance. The
world turns into a museum. Look but don't touch.
Poincaré, however, had other more complex and contradictory views. The
man who would sit back to contemplate, also thought it was impossible to find
truth in things in themselves. Truth hovered only in relations among things. He
saw in the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries a clear indication of the
ephemeral and arbitrary nature of theories: what mattered was not an ontology
but convenience of use. He thought that failed theories left a valuable trace
even as they vanished, and that trace had the scent of truth.[10]
A second characteristic of an interactive perspective is that it favors open
approaches which stimulate play. Unfortunately, the creative function of play
at the adult level tends to be underestimated. In cultural studies, Johan
Huizinga's Homo ludens sparked an interest in play. It was published in
1938 when Herman Hesse was already at work in his novel The Glass Bead
Game. Both writers situated play as a free activity deliberately outside of
ordinary life. Huizinga saw play as an activity originating in the mind,
distinct from all other forms of thought as a "second, poetic world alongside
the world of nature." In this realm of illusion, the mind is able to break down
what Huizinga presupposed was "the absolute determinism of the cosmos."[11] In a similar fashion, Hesse separated
Castalia, the domain of the abstract, intellectual & artistic glass bead
game, from the domain of sensuous, down-to-earth wordly life. But such view
left out the interactive side of play. The ending of The Glass Bead Game
highlights such conflict. It is precisely the dilemma that Magister Ludi Joseph
Knecht faces toward the end of his career. He has reached the limits of the
game and begins to find it an empty exercise, all too perfect and formulaic.
The world, thought imperfect and chaotic from a Castalian point of view, begins
to appear vaster and richer, full of change, history, struggles, and new
beginnings. Knecht fears that the isolation of the Castalian game-culture
might be its own doom because it has lost the capacity for further growth and
change. Castalia has reduced interactivity to a minimum. The only variations
allowed are brilliant new moves within the strict rules of the world-like Glass
Bead Game. But these moves escape the ongoing changes which take place in the
outside world. Knecht foresees that unless Castalia interacts with the world,
it will come to an end. Such is the end of all systems that try to remain
close, and exhaust their possibilities.
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Huizinga's separation of play from "ordinary life" cuts along somewhat similar
lines as Hesse's but is more problematic. Whereas Hesse saw that life was the
realm of change, Huizinga considered life fixed in its basic order. Chemist and
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine bridged this gap and introduced the question of
play directly into what Huizinga had imagined was an absolutely deterministic
cosmos. Prigogine's work in the area of complex systems explores a world that
might function with both laws and play at the same time. In The End of
Certainty, Prigogine pointed out that scientific laws formulated in
traditional ways, describe an "idealized, stable world that is quite different
from the unstable, evolving world in which we live."[12] He envisioned science hovering between "the
two alienating images of a deterministic world and an arbitrary world of pure
chance."[13]
Perhaps Jean Piaget offered the most functional definition of play. He
presented play as a type of adaptive action understood in contrast to
imitation. Adaptation to situations involves a combination of imitation and
play. These two activities are the extremes in the spectrum of adaptive
behavior ranging from accommodation to assimilation, respectively. When
imitating, we accommodate to the outside model. But in play we undo the world,
so to speak, and assimilate it to our preferences. Adaptation is reached
through a balancing of these processes.[14] A
way to look at the spread of adaptive attitudes ranging from imitation to play
is to gauge them in terms of interactivity: imitation minimizes interactivity,
but interactivity increases the more play there is.
Marshall McLuhan used a temperature metaphor to distinguish between what we
consider are interactive features. He distinguished between hot and cold media.
He wrote that hot media leave little to be filled or completed by the audience.
Hot media are low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or
completion by the audience.[15] In this sense,
the new interactive media is mostly cool.
Sherry Turkle prefers the metaphor of solidity to that of temperature. Cool
media for her is soft.[16] It allows for
flexible, nonhierarchical interactivity. It embodies the notion of a decentered
self. It facilitates bricolage and simulation. Along similar lines, Ian Hacking
proposes that hard sciences tend to be indifferent because participation is
excluded. Natural laws are supposed to be what they are independently of the
observers. But social sciences, far softer, are interactive because there is
change introduced by the very process of structuring the sciences.[17] In other words, observations affect what is
observed.
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Many have already started to question the validity of the metaphorical
division of the sciences into a range from hard to soft, noting that there is
interaction and lack of objectivity even in physics, in the area of quantum
mechanics, for example. The possibility of interactive emergence extends then
to all areas of human research and creation. Much depends on how a medium is
used rather than on the properties of the medium or on the discipline. As works
like the I Ching or Hopscotch show, hot medium can be used in
cool ways. Or, to put it differently, a hard science like physics has plenty of
soft spots.
A third and perhaps the most unique feature of an interactive view is that it
allows us to consider emergent phenomena without downgrading them by
reductions. An emergent phenomenon cannot be predicted. Nor can it be entirely
explained away a posteriori. Emergent phenomena are above all those which
cannot be predicted by the behavior of its constituent parts. They happen as if
on their own. Here we see the crucial role of interactivity. Only through the
play or jiggling of interactivity is the stage set for emergent surprises.
Marvin Minsky ranks intelligence as one of such surprises. In The Society of
Mind he investigated how a mind could possibly emerge from an ensemble of
mindless little parts. In writing the book, Minsky tried to simulate the
process of emergence of possible solutions to the question of how a mind comes
into being, by writing collections of short pieces and letting the parts
conjure themselves into solutions.[18] Emergent
phenomena can be seen as successful yet unpredictable mutations. John Holland
has even suggested that life itself may well be an emergent phenomena.[19]
Concerning the digital media, Jim Gasperini has noted the emergence of an
interactive aesthetic in the structural ambiguity which permeates decentered
computer environments and the internet.[20] He
thinks this sense of interactivity is still in its infancy, especially in the
area of interactive games. But the development of more user-friendly interfaces
and the way the internet has broken down barriers so that every page is
literally next to every other one in the world, are interactive breakthroughs
which begin to show the extraordinary richness of the digital media. Eric
Drexler suggested that a breakthrough in the order of the Gutenberg revolution
has taken place with the advent of digital hypertext. The introduction of
movable print made producing texts much easier. Now hypertext and its spread to
the internet, make searching for information incredibly fast and effective.[21]
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The investigation of emergent phenomena is trully a new frontier of both the
sciences and the arts. The two domains of human creation seem to join hands in
this realm of exploration. Science has traditionally dealt with repetitive
phenomena, whereas the arts have favored special events charming by their
inspiring uniqueness. In the realm of emergence we begin to look into events
which are neither regular nor unique. They are suprises which can be managed to
happen but never coherced into predictable repetitions. What I suggest is that
an interactive perspective helps us map more effectively this new frontier
opening between chaos and total order.
A fourth broad characteristic of an interactive perspective is that it favors
pragmatic views. Richard Rorty captured the spirit of pragmatism stating that
it is the "refusal to believe in the existence of Truth, in the sense of
something not made by human hands, something which has authority over human
beings."[22] Pragmatism is a self-organizing,
bootstrap-like approach.
Rorty pointed out that "the end of human activity is not to rest, but rather
richer and better human activity."[23] He
envisions solidarity as an expression of this human interactivity directed
toward the goal of enhancing our lot in the world in an all inclusive rather
than exclusive way. The method of working in solidarity hinges on what Rorty
calls a "new fuzziness" in which "objectivity" gives way to "unforced
agreement."[24] The expression of this creative
solidarity is democracy: "a conception which has no room for obedience to a
nonhuman authority, and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus among
human beings has any authority at all."[25]
Following John Dewey, what Rorty stresses is the notion of interactive
participation, of being an agent rather than a spectator
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From a pragmatic point of view, objectivity is an illusion. What Rorty
proposes instead is to acquire habits of action to deal with the world.
Pragmatic interactions should not force preconceptions on others. Agreements
for action should come from reaching positions of solidarity and working toward
common purposes freely chosen. In this sense, pragmatism favors a local
flexibility. In the absence of absolutes, what works, works--within a context
which by necessity must be local.
Rorty suggests that the reward for pragmatists is Dewey's sense of democracy
with its utopian possibilities and sense of hope. He believes that we can
mitigate our finitude by self-creation rather than by invoking untenable and
ultimately confining truths. This creative imagination begins with
self-imagining: an inward interaction which gives rise to processes and models
to interact with the world. The pragmatic high value of feed-back, a deep
concern with reflexivity, is perhaps the most critical navigating tool of a
mature interactive perspective.
Finally, interactivity itself can be brought under focus. What does
interactivity have to offer in its approach that we did not already have? I
have suggested that it is best suited to deal with multiple perspectives, it
invites emergence, offers a broader sense of play, and has a pragmatic outlook.
In other words, an interactive view celebrates a constructive flexibility well
suited for navigating in open, changing, or unknown environments. But such
outlook also exposes us to the risks of the new, to sudden conflicts,
disintegration, fragmentation, and other unpleasant surprises. When science is
more open to the whims of the imagination it may be more vulnerable to
ridicule. Literature may lose the greatness of canonical values. The message in
the new media may turn out to be hollow, mindless. Creativity could be
compromised. Minsky already warned that total interactivity leads to chaos. He
argued in the appendix to The Society of Mind that insulators are needed
just as much as interactive links.
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On the other hand, change is all around us. Borders have shifted from
autocratic theories to democracies of models. Politics are evolving from
dogmatisms to networks of pragmatic solidarities. A drift in cultural plates is
changing the artistic landscape. And as new architectures metamorphose the
imagination, science also seems to overflow its banks an touch uncharted
domains. The internet is emerging as an example of total freedom to link,
without insulations or barriers to links, and yet we manage to use it
constructively. These reconfigurations are best explored from an interactive
perspective which moves us from teleology to play.
Nevertheless, an interactive perspective does not exclude other approaches.
Its tendency toward decentering and autonomy does not negate hierarchical
structures. This perspective is one more tool at our disposal, another creative
instrument to enhance our flexibility. And in order to learn how to manage the
initial anarchism of total interactivity, we must put to good use all the tools
we have at hand. The development of new links is not enough. We must also
develop new ways to manage those links. The open development of flexible
management tools is one of the critical and challenging aspects of our
interactivity.
Finally, couldn't we say that all creative works are always produced by
interactions? Yes, to varying degrees, unless, of course, we think they
originate from one-way divine inspiration, from the whispers of muses.
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Footnotes
[1] George P. Landow, Hypertext
2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 3.
[2] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 75.
[3] It is important to keep in mind Robert Markley's warning in
Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996) that the new media is not displacing the old ones.
Markley and the authors who contributed to the book he edited, suggest that we
must remain skeptical of the notion that a new form can place itself above what
has come before. This verges on a totalitarian perspective. The denial of other
forms of expression or the claim to transcend them, goes against the grain of
interactivity, as I argue in this essay. Virtual reality is essentially a new
modeling medium sprouting among the many others we already have. This, in
itself is plenty.
[4] Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 20.
[5] Cortázar favored active readers rather than armchair ones,
as he put it. Hopscotch celebrates his notion of interaction by inviting
the reader in its table of instructions to follow at least two paths through
the text. Works which focus on plot are the least interactive in this sense.
The interactive nature of Maya textuality is rather different. Readings are
based on spiritual links with the text. Readings vary depending on the quality
of such links, so to speak. The I Ching also contains this type of
interactive quality of reading, although here it is enhanced with the throwing
of sticks or coins to arrive at one of sixty-four hexagrams. Espen Aarseth
noted the hypertextual nature of the I Ching and argued that it is the
first expert system based on the principles of binary computing (Landow 1994:
64-65)
[6] Luis O. Arata, The Festive Play of Fernando
Arrabal (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1982), p. 1. The episodic form
reappeared during the revival of theatre in the Middle Ages, and has continued
to crop up since then in many playful guises.
[7] Such was the case with classical French tragedy made to follow
neo-Aristotelian rules of time, place, and action. Shakespeare, fortunately,
had enjoyed a much freer hand.
[8] André Malraux, Picasso's Mask (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1994), p. 98.
[9] Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation
(Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1992), p. 93.
[10] Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, (New York:
Dover, 1952), pp. xxvi, 50, and 143.
[11] Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), pp. 3-4.
[12] Ilyia Prigogine, The End of Certainty (New York: The Free
Press, 1997), p. 26.
[13] Ibid. p. 189.
[14] Jean Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (New York: Random
House, 1968), p. 8.
[15] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994), p. 23.
[16] This mirrors a solidity scale common in the sciences. Physics is
considered the hardest discipline.
[17] Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge:
Harvard, 1999).
[18] Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1986).
[19] John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading:
Addison Wesley, 1998).
[20] Jim Gasperini, "Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive
Aesthectic." In Robert Jacobson, ed. Information Design (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1999), pp. 301-316.
[21] Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (New York: Anchor
Books, 1986). Of course, Drexler wrote this book before the internet took off
as a hypermedium, but his observations carry over quite well.
[22] Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998), p. 27.
[23] Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Realism, and Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 39.
[24] Ibid. p. 38.
[25] Achieving Our Country, p. 18.
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