Networks and Artworks
the Failure of the User Friendly Interface
Copyright (C) Paul Brown 1996
All Rights Reserved
First published in Computers & Art, Intellect Books, January 1997
Abstract
Preamble
Background and history
What is multimedia?
Mail art
Telecommunications Art
Network Art
The World Wide Web
Conclusion - the User Friendly Dilemma
References
About Computers & Art
Abstract
This essay describes how communication systems have been used by a few artists and attempts to place their practice within the historical and critical context of post-modernist dialogue and, in particular, the evolution of a new communication paradigm. It also questions the value of "user-friendly" user interfaces. By adopting metaphors which reflect existing media usage these interface tools reinforce traditional points-of-view and make it difficult, if not impossible, to investigate and develop a new multi-media context and "language".Preamble
In 1990, I was driving north from Los Angeles to San Francisco on US Highway 5. The billboards flickered mindlessly past promoting the usual commodities: Camel cigarettes; United Airlines to Hawaii and the telco wars between MCI, Sprint and AT&T. Then a huge billboard advertising an obscure integrated circuit caught my eye! We were, of course, in San José, the capital of Silicon Valley and these unique billboards had been created to catch the attention of the few commuting engineers who design and build tomorrows personal computers.Just recently, some five years later, one of my graduate students who is attending a weekly seminar on computers and the arts brought along a receipt from her local supermarket. On the reverse side, along with the usual two-for-one video offers and dry cleaning ads was a promotion by a local Internet service provider. Unlike the niche focussed billboards of Silicon Valley this advertisement was pitched squarely at average consumers who shop at any suburban mall in middle class Australia.
In just two short years the Internet has blossomed into public attention. An anarchistic information bush track, created by hackers and academics, has caught the attention of a public who were, in any case, well primed by the rhetoric of the corporate "InfoBahn" and the emphasis on new technologies contained in media hype and national government initiatives like the Australian cultural policy statement "Creative Nation" (DOC94).
This general `net awareness also provides a perfect dessert for the moves to pluralism instigated by post-modern socialism that will, hopefully permanently, replace the legacy of right-wing nationalism that dominated the middle years of this century. The Sydney-based writer Ross Gibson recently defined the new "nationalism" as a boundary that contains difference rather than similarity (GIB95). And now the Internet promises to remove those geographic boundaries and create an egalitarian global information exchange.
Let's put to the back of our minds, for the time being (this essay has to be short), the fact that four fifths of the global population probably desire a reliable source of food rather than of information. And lets try to ignore the disturbing fact that many of those who are most eloquent in espousing this new electronic democracy are non other than the right-wing fundamentalists of the US Republican party.
Background and history
Today's Internet has it's origins in the so-called "Cold War" between the USA and USSR. The US Defence Department were concerned that a Soviet strike could seriously effect communications between the military command and control centres. The Rand Corporation's "Think Tank" suggested a new and unique method of connecting military units which would enable the communications infrastructure to survive such an attack. It was a linked network of individual nodes. A message could be successfully transmitted from one node to another so long as only one of the many possible routes connecting them still exists.Also a new and unique method of content communication was used. The original message was digitised then broken up into smaller "packets". Each packet would be transmitted and find the most direct route to the receiver node. Individual packets could take any of the different possible routes available by taking the least used exit from any given intermediate node. The receiving node would reconstruct the message by unpacking each component packet in it's original order. Missing packets, or those containing errors, could be re-requested by the receiver.
The system was implemented as the ARPANet (named for the Defence Department's Advanced Research and Procurement Agency which commissioned the project). It was followed by the US National Science Foundation's NSFNet. Other countries developed similar networks like JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network) and AARNet (Australian Academic Research Network). IBM built their own international network called BITNET. Other companies built both internal networks and access provision for other smaller companies and individuals. Each of these networks is "gated" to others to form an international network. The Internet proved remarkably sturdy and reliable and grew within academia as well as the military and information technology corporate sectors during the 1970's and 80's.
Since the mid 80's many novel, and easy to use, human interfaces have been developed for the Internet and the proliferation of independent internet providers has enabled rapid growth into the corporate and domestic sector. Soon it will be the dominant communications medium of the military/industrial complex.
Although packet switched networks were originally a text only medium recent advances in digital compression have enabled the successful transmission of both audio and video using these "packet switching" networks. Now international telecommunications agencies are developing packet switched high-bandwidth networks that have been collectively dubbed the "information superhighway" or "Infobahn". We can consider today's internet as a "bush track" that will evolve over the next five years into this international superhighway.
By the millennium many people in the developed world could be connected to such facilities and receive most, if not all, of their information needs via interactive multimedia networks. Already they offer content and resources for education; entertainment and work. Provider companies are competing ever more ruthlessly for market share of this information future. Significant legal, moral and ethical questions are raised by both the nature of the network itself as well as by the behaviour of governments, corporations and lobby groups who are working to either dominate or some way control this marketplace.
What is multimedia?
The phrase "computer graphics" is believed to have first appeared in an engineers report at the Boeing aerospace company in 1963. By 1968 the visionary Ted Nelson had coined the term "hypertext" and, by the turn of the 70's he and colleagues like Dick Schoup, Alan Kay and John Warnock, all working at Xerox PARC, were developing the tools of personal computing. However the technology that would eventually deliver integrated multimedia on a cost-effective personal computer platform didn't appear until the mid 80's and standards are still in development ten years later.If we pursue a historical metaphor and compare either photography or motion pictures we find a 40-50 year hiatus between the invention of a technology and its assimilation into the creative process and the evolution of a aesthetic language that is unique to that particular technology/medium. It's tempting to speculate about what multimedia may become as it matures as a means of expression and to predict just how grotesque today's CD-ROM and network offerings will appear once that mature perspective is in place.
Will the very large investment in multimedia that is currently underwritten by both the corporate and government sector enable this evolution to be accelerated -or- will it instead impede a "natural" development, slowing it down or, perhaps, even prevent it from maturing at all? In an age of economic rationalism most of this investment is into the creation of product. Product which is very quickly remaindered or, once purchased, becomes a "fifteen minute wonder" and afterwards put into the drawer and forgotten.
Artists have a reputation for experimentation with their medium. In the high modernism of the 1960's the medium actually became the message for many artists. Now, in the waning years of Post-modernism and the resurgence of what Peter French has described Neo-modernism many are promoting the role of the artist in developing a multimedia language.
Mail art
Artist have been actively working in communication media for many years. Mail art flourished in the transition years of the 60's. My first introduction was in a Liverpool bedsit in 1968. A postcard pinned to the wall invited the reader to ... "Pin this card to the opposite wall". The Japanese artist On Kawara was sending postcards consisting of a bold declaration of the precise time or date of posting or the simple message ... "I am On Kawara". One of my own first works was made in the early 70's. A large statement was cut up and posted to several recipients as single postcards each containing a small part of the text. Although a few of the recipients knew each other it was unlikely that the "message" would ever be reconstructed in full. I was excited by the potential of enigmatic deconstruction in contrast to the dominant logical reductionism of the day.The commercial artworld has shown itself to be extremely resilient to attempts to undermine its power. Many of the formats developed in the 60's and 70's were intended to create art that could not be venerated by the establishment or turned into investment fodder by the guru's of Green Street, Bond Street and the Latin Quarter. Stuart Brisley's 70's performances, where he immersed himself in a bath full of offal or vomited over himself, were specifically designed to be unmarketable. Now, as pension day becomes inevitable, Stuart sells limited edition prints of those performances via the same art market he so earnestly confronted thirty years ago.
Telecommunications Art
Mail art has, to some extent and perhaps thanks to it's lowly stature, survived the parasites of the commercial artworld. It remains an artform of enthusiasts. Then, during the 1980's, the growth in use of the Fax machine provided an excellent and ephemeral medium for communications art. "Fax Art" is a fairly meaningless phrase and serves to marginalise the practice and diminish it's value. The varieties of artworks that have been enabled by the fax medium defy such a simplistic title.Art Reseaux are an international telecommunications art group based in Paris. In their 1992 book (ORO92) Eduardo Kac comments:
- "The social impact of the telephone sparks the idea of art as a dialogue, going beyond the notion of art as object making. The understanding of art as intercommunication moves us away from the issue of what is it that art or the artist communicates? to question the very structure of the communication process itself".
- "Telematic art ... is inventing the multilogue of networking as a collaborative art form". (KAC92)
Their best known and most ambitious piece is Karen O'Rourke's "City Portraits" (ORO91). In his assessment of the project Frank Popper says:
- "Another aspect of this project concerns the fact that it is not the ideas or
the images that are important in it but their interaction, their articulation
in a context where the mind and the imagination are at play.
"It can be maintained that this connecting tissue is at the heart of all telematic networking and could even be considered as constituting part of the essential equipment of all Technoscience Art." (POP91)
- "What the new technology, the new consciousness, the new spirituality augur is worlds within which a multiplicity of realities can co-exist, interact, collide join, bifurcate in an endless dance of cultural transformations. As neural networks meet planetary networks and make the connection, so our brain will invade the city and the city will enter our brain". (ASC91b)
Stéphan Barron is a member of the international "Aesthetics of Communication Group". He originally studied engineering but, since 1983 has been creating international installations based on communication technology. His best know piece is "Lines" (1989) which connected eight locations in Europe who each received regular fax transmissions as Barron and his partner Sylvia Hansmann travelled along the Greenwich Meridian from the English Channel to the Mediterranean. The work is documented in an essay by Barron (BAR91) in the special telecommunications issue of the art and technology journal Leonardo (ASC91a).
Network Art
At the 1996 Adelaide Festival Barron will exhibit two works which weave together the technology of the internet with some of the aesthetic, social and political agendas that globalism implies.His piece OZONE is a timely comment on the residual colonial arrogance of the "First World" nations of the Northern hemisphere. Their high rates of overpopulation together with their commitment to the ethics of redundancy that are implicit in consumer oriented economic rationalism allow them to generate immense quantities of chemical pollutant gasses that are destroying the protective ozone layer of the earths atmosphere. As most Australians are aware this destruction is focussed in the Southern Hemisphere ozone hole and is manifested as higher than normal levels of ultra-violet radiation and the promise of high skin cancer incidence in years to come. During 1995 several of the culprit nations announced their intention of reneging on previous agreements to cut the output of these noxious chemicals using the excuse that doing so would undermine the competitiveness of their national industries and economies.
OZONE addresses this global nationalistic conflict of wills. The artist precedes his description of OZONE with a quote from the American composer John Cage:
- "The function of Art is not to communicate one's own personal ideas or feelings but rather to imitate nature in her manner of operation".
- "Two acoustic computerised pianos located, one in Europe, and the other in
Australia exchange sounds produced according to the ozone coming on one side
from the Parisian automobile pollution, and on the other side according to the
hole in the ozone stratospheric layer.
"This installation is a metaphor of an "Ozone Pump" between the ozone produced by pollution and the natural ozone.
"An "Ozone Pump" between Europe and Australia, between man and nature.
"This music is elaborated not by one person, but by human activity on a planetary scale (pollution of the ozone) and by interaction with the sun." (BAR95)
- "The project also expresses the immateriality and complexity of the phenomena with which contemporary man is confronted. The ozone and the UV rays are factors of complex phenomena where human physiology interacts with economic development". (BAR95)
- "The purpose of this project lies in the imaginary sky, an ubiquitous sky that
exists somewhere between north and south, somewhere in our imagination. A
never ending sky. The never ending phone network.
"These live and imaginary monochromes, cosmic and in harmony with the real skies distant by a thousand Kms, follow Yves Klein's project and his monochromes." (BAR94)
Cameras at each gallery continuously record and transmit the colour of the sky above them. The two images are averaged and displayed at each site. Apart from the conjunction of dusk and dawn the resulting images are a mixture of day and night.
It's a simple piece that nevertheless embeds a profound poetry. Barron discusses the concept of Planetary Interdependence:
- "It becomes more and more apparent that our destinies and gestures are linked
with those of all humans, even the most far removed.
"A solidarity, a planetary consciousness slowly elaborates itself.
"The beauty, the poetry of distance is essential. It allows us to redefine the dimensions of our consciousness." (BAR95)
- "The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
......
"These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery -
The gateway of the manifold secrets." (LAU63)
So it's not surprising that many of the artists working in communications and networked media trace their roots to the Art Language, Performance and Conceptual Art of the 1960's. It's here that we find the first concerted attempts by artists to undermine modernism by questioning both the value and significance of the visual arts after a century of experimentation that had been forced on them when photography usurped the tradition of representation in the mid 19th century. These artists confronted the gallery system, in a time of post-war plenty and long before recession set in, with work that resisted monitarisation and defied reveration.
What is particularly interesting about Barron's work is his historic evocation of modernist artefacts like land art and dadaism whilst his use of telecommunications undermines the need for the object and simultaneously adds layers of reference and implication. Whilst his work encourages us to expand our perception out of the world of art and into the realms of people, politics and economics it also evokes relationships that indicate its roots in, and consideration of, the traditions of art and art history.
As mentioned above Barron is one of the artists associated with the "Aesthetics of Communication Group" which also includes Derrick de Kerckhove and Fred Forest amongst others. De Kerckhove is director of the McLuhan Project in Toronto and the idea of telecommunications as a McLuhanistic extension and connector of human minds is a common theme in their work. Another group member, Mario Costa, is quoted from a 1983 statement by Frank Popper:
- "In this type of event, it is not the exchanged content that matters, but rather the network that is activated and the functional conditions of exchange. The aesthetic object is replaced by the immateriality of field tensions and by vital and organic energy (mental, muscular, affective) and artificial or mechanical energy (electricity, electronics) that transform our mundane object-centred sense of space and time. Equally the subject is transformed, being no longer defined by rigid opposition of self/not-self, but becoming part of this same flowing field of energy". (POP93)
In this way the artwork ceases to be an object that we appreciate for it's own sake and becomes instead a gateway, or a portal, to a virtual space that we experience in participation. A space that exists as much in the participants head as in the frenetic binary signalling of the computational metamedium. A space where serendipity replaces logic and where the singular words of Kurt Schwitters, the architect of Merz:
- "I am the meaning of the coincidence",
- "we are the coincidence of the meaning".
- "The question of what existed before language is impossible to answer, as our
consciousness resides entirely within a perception through language. ....
"We are in another period of transition from language to medi-age, it is impossible to speculate when and what will change, but when the question of what existed before `mediage' arises - if, indeed, there is such a question - the transformation will have happened". (SER94)
With the advent of personal-computer-based internet video clients like CU-SeeMe the technology became available to many other artists albeit at much lower spatial and temporal bandwidths. These "user friendly" internet tools have led to a rapid growth in artistic activity on the networks.
The World Wide Web
In 1990 Tim Berners Lee, at the European Particle Physics Laboratory - CERN in Geneva, developed a multiple media network protocol that he called the World Wide Web (Web or WWW). It was in response to the theoretical physicists who needed a rich-media publication medium in order to circulate their ideas in a more timely fashion than the printed journals allowed. An integrated authoring and browsing client was created using NextStep and a simple terminal-mode browser (called www) enabled text-only dial-up access.One of the institutions using the Web was the USA's National Centre for Supercomputer Applications where an undergraduate student intern called Marc Andreessen decided to create a user-friendly web browser he called Mosaic. Beta-test versions of Mosaic started to appear early in 1993 and the product was released on January 1st 1994. Two year later the 22 years old Andreessen is worth about US$50 million.
Mosaic had the same effect on the internet that the Desktop/Windows style of user interface had on personal computing. Many people, who would have previously felt too intimidated to use network facilities were given confidence by it's point and click simplicity. They quickly discovered that creating Web documents was also pretty easy. Many of them were artists who saw in the Web an ideal format for their entry into the virtual domain.
The result has been a meteoric growth in the number of art "sites" on the Web. In January 1994 there were a few tens at most. The Visualisation Lab. at the University of Illinios, Chicago and FineArt Forum Online were two. Now there are tens of thousands. Most of them have little if any relationship to the kind of developments described above. They consist of art placed on the network in the format of a virtual gallery and have little in common with post-modern ideology or communications-based art.
Most of these sites document object-centred artworks and use the web only to promote and/or market these traditional forms. There are exceptions but they're dogged by the poor response times of the web and it's lack of inbuilt dynamic interaction. This will change as new "plug-in" tools like Macromedia's "ShockWave" and Sun's "Java" get more widely integrated and the bandwidth of the networks improve.
But the real culprit is the traditional media dogma that we ourselves bring to the internet. We call web databases "pages" and the data servers "sites". The metaphors to traditional print media and architectural spaces abound. It's just like those early photographs that pretended to be academic paintings or the first dramatic movies that copied the theatre stage and mapped the film frame onto the proscenium arch.
Conclusion - the User Friendly Dilemma
It's our lack of ability to perceive the true nature of this new multiple medium that is the most significant limitation on its use. It's also my opinion that the more user-friendly tools haven't helped. On the contrary they have actually impeded the development of more intrinsic methodologies by reinforcing the old paradigm.There is, of course, some excellent documentation and information on the Web. It's a valuable library that is international in scope and comes straight into your home. But I'm still waiting to see artworks that have the impact of the earlier work described above.
User friendly tools work by adopting existing paradigmatic metaphors. In essence they tell the user .. "there is nothing new to learn, your existing knowledge and skill can be applied to these new systems". It's not surprising therefore that they cauterise creative development and could possibly delay (and may even prevent) the evolution of new methodologies and critical dialogues.
What confuses many is the social egalitarian value of user-friendly tools which have introduced many, who may not have otherwise got involved, to the computational metamedium. Whenever I speak about my concerns many get angry, believing that I am threatening their gateway to the new media or that I am arguing for a elitist position. On the contrary it's my belief that access by non-professionals is almost an essential prerequisite for a new language to evolve. Those who are already trained in the arts have too much to unlearn and to much to loose when the paradigm that nurtures them shifts into something new and unknown. In photography it was the amateurs, thanks to Eastman's "Box Brownie" cameras, who broke all the rules and established new foundations for the photographic language to evolve.
The problem is that a user-friendly computer system is not a simple Box Brownie camera. It's an extremely sophisticated system pretending to be something else. Pretending to be simple. Just like the aliens in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" who pretended to be the folks next door, dependable people who you had known all your life. So you trusted them. And that's what concerns me.
References
ASC91a Ascott, Roy and Carl Loeffler (eds.) Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications, a special issue of Leonardo - the journal of the International Society for Art, Science and Technology (ISAST), Vol. 24 No. 2, 1991.ASC91b Ascott, Roy, Mind City - City Cerveau, in ORO92 pp. 68-69.
BAR91 Barron, Stéphan, Lines: A Project by Stéphan Barron and Sylvia Hansmann, in ASC91a pp. 185-186.
BAR94 Barron, Stéphan, Project notes for "Le Bleu du Ciel", 1994.
BAR95 Barron, Stéphan, Project notes for the Sym Choon Gallery show, Telstra Adelaide Festival 1996, 1995.
BRO91 Brown, Paul, Communion and Cargo Cults, Proc. Second International Symposium on Electronic Arts (SISEA), Groningen, the Netherlands, 1991.
BRO92a Brown, Paul, The Convergence of Reality and Illusion, Proc HiVision 92, Tokyo, Japan 1992.
BRO92b Brown, Paul, Reality versus Imagination, ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Catalog, ACM NY 1992.
DOC94 Australian Federal Department of Communication and the Arts, Creative Nation - Commonwealth Cultural Policy, 1994.
GIB95 Gibson, Ross, Speaking at James Cook University, Queensland, September 1995.
KAC92 Kac, Eduardo, On the Notion of Art as a Visual Dialogue, in ORO92 pp21-22.
LAU63 Lau, D.C. (translator), Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching, Penguin Books, London 1963.
MIN87 Minsky, Marvin, The Society of Mind, Heinemann, 1987.
ORO91 O'Rourke, Karen, City Portraits: an Experience in the Interactive Transmission of Imagination, in ASC91a, pp 215-219.
ORO92 O'Rourke, Karen (coordinator), Art Reseaux - ouvrage collectif project art-reseaux, Editions du C.E.R.A.P., 1992.
POP91 Popper, Frank, Assessing City Portraits, in ORO92 pp.66-67.
POP93 Popper, Frank, Art of the Electronic Age, Thames and Hudson 1993.
SER94 Sermon, Paul, Telematic Vision, ISEA 94 Catalogue, Helsinki 1994, pp.43
Parts of this chapter first appeared as "Stéphan Barron at the Sym Choon Gallery", a catalogue essay written for the 1996 Telstra Adelaide Festival.
This essay first appeared in Intelligent Tutoring Media (now renamed Digital Creativity) Vol. 7, No. 3 October 1996 and as a chapter in Computers & Art edited by Stuart Mealing, both published by Intellect. For further information:
Computers & Art, ISBN 1-871516-60-9
Digital Creativity, ISSN 0957-9133
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