The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations

Phaedra Shanbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429885990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

1
The Aesthetic Interface

In this chapter, I propose a rethinking of the digital interface in interactive new media installations in aesthetic and processual terms. I outline what is at stake in my rethinking, suggesting that the digital interface can be understood as an open-ended series of relational, reciprocal, and co-constitutive processes that influence the movements and perceptions of the viewer/participant(s) interacting with it. With this theorization, I offer an alternative to previously posited notions of the interface outlined by scholars such as Paul Dourish (2001; Dourish and Bell, 2011), Mark B.N. Hansen (2004, 2006, 2013) and to a certain extent Anne Friedberg (2006), Alexander Galloway (2012) and Kate Mondloch (2010, 2018), among others. These texts are invaluable to this study as they begin to critically evaluate what it means to be a viewing subject in a modern technologically based society, as well as question the interface’s function as a device that facilitates yet also impedes interaction, mediates experience, and attempts to maintain a fantasy of control over unpredictable computerized systems. However, interfaces, in these texts, tend to be defined and consequently positioned in binary terms. Thus, the interface becomes either an active, yet empty technological object that frames experience, or something that acts as a boundary between the viewer/participant and the virtual world that the interface helps simulate. My approach to the digital interface differs from those offered by the previously mentioned authors, as it resists the structural terms of simplistic binaries listed above. These binary-based approaches are problematic because they do not provide an adequate critical language for describing contemporary digital technologies, like the interface in interactive new media installations. Therefore, my theorization of the digital interface is significant because it situates complex technological objects—which are deeply entangled with notions of relationality, hybridity, and subjectivity—within an aesthetic and cultural framework.

What exactly is at stake in proposing an alternative theory of the digital interface? How does this theory challenge previously posited notions of interactivity, media spec-tatorship, and aesthetics? How might these challenges change the way in which we engage with and theorize the relationship between humans and technology in interactive new media installations? These questions will be addressed through a focus on the importance of aesthetic inquiry, the link between theories of media spectatorship and interaction, and on how these theories can be applied to the digital interface in interactive new media installations. The aesthetics of the interface will be developed in relation to Sean Cubitt’s (2016) and Christiane Paul’s (2016) understandings of digital aesthetics. Questions of media spectatorship and interactivity will be discussed in reference to the interface’s visual presence in interactive new media installations and in relation to the viewer/participant’s embodied interactions with it. In the final section, I draw on new media artist Stelarc’s notion of obsolescence, arguing that previously posited theories of the interface are inadequate; thus, they need to be not so much revised as critically repositioned in relation to the role that the aesthetics of the interface plays in interactive new media installations.

Toward a Digital Aesthetic of the Interface

The word “aesthetics” is rooted in ancient Greek, originally referring to “sensation.” Its meaning has been broadened over time and has become attached to physical and phenomenological sensations, objects that encapsulate these sensations, and the emotional and intellectual reactions we have to them. In this way, aesthetics has become connected to the realm of art in that aesthetics describes, as Cubitt (2016) writes, “a moment when objects and senses come into contact—generating forms, sensations and psychic events.”¹

Drawing on the work of philosopher Alain Badiou (2007), Cubitt historicizes the notion of aesthetics, suggesting that it can be roughly divided between two moments: the Classical, which revolves around past notions of the transcendent, ideal beauty of singular objects; and the Romantic, which describes future realizations of this past beauty.² And yet, he argues, if we accept that aesthetics is the “moment when objects and senses come into contact—generating forms, sensations, and psychic events, then surely the aesthetic is par excellence the experience of the present?”³ But what is an aesthetics of the present? What does it entail? What form does it take? How do we know what an aesthetics of the present actually is? Is it because it has the qualities of being art or it was made in the present day? The circle, as Cubitt states, “is logically vicious.”⁴ As such, if we are to begin to describe an aesthetic of the present, we must do something more radical than simply list off the formal attributes of art that connect one movement to another. Cubitt does just this, suggesting that the thing that connects one digital artwork to another—the “digital aesthetic”—is the mediated experience of time.⁵ However, why should we be concerned with aesthetics when theorizing the digital interface in interactive new media installations? And what is actually at stake when the aesthetic aspects of this device are ignored?

For Christiane Paul (2016), the answer to these questions is as follows: we should be concerned with aesthetics because it offers different approaches to, and perspectives on, a number of key issues in the philosophy of art and technology.⁶ Speaking specifically to the aesthetics of new media art, Paul suggests that a critical investigation into aesthetics, alongside concepts like materiality and medium specificity, allows us to make distinctions between different artistic mediums and movements.⁷ For example, she argues, aesthetics helps us to distinguish between practices that use digital technologies as a tool to produce more traditional art objects (photographs, prints, sculptures) and what she refers to as digital-born art—that is, “computable art that is stored, and distributed via digital technologies and uses the features of these technologies as a medium.”⁸ Like Paul, I argue that a critical understanding of aesthetics is significant because it allows for a better theorization of the role that technologies play in defining an art form beyond their instrumental contributions. My motivation behind suggesting such an approach differs from hers. My aim in deploying aesthetics is to explore how the use of the interface can act as a mode of critique of our relationship with technology and to reflect on the effects that this critique has on how we represent ourselves, as subjects, with technology in interactive new media installations.

However, the idea that any kind of aesthetic theory, let alone digital aesthetics, asks us to “know in some sense what we mean by digital art as anything other than a social category or works that circulate in the institutions and discourses of art” opens up a number of problems because digital aesthetics, as Cubitt argues, “is not something that can be captured the same way information can.”⁹ The key qualities (non-identity, ephemerality, unknowability) that Cubitt sees the aesthetic experience of the digital as entailing are not things that are easily quantified and commodified, despite our attempts to place value on them.¹⁰ Rather, digital aesthetics, for Cubitt, is dependent on the mediation of the senses of vision and hearing—and these senses are always temporal. Thus, the identity of aesthetics, he argues, is always rooted in the present.¹¹ This point leads him to begin to theorize aesthetics in such a way that it allows for “the co-presence of not only artwork and audience but also the social that forms both of them.”¹² Here, Cubitt is arguing that aesthetic encounters occur in time and are durational, non-identical, non-repeatable, and subjective. They are not a “uniquely exclusive collision of perceiver and perceived” and therefore are not located outside of or beyond history.¹³ Thus, we must formulate this encounter, he writes, in such a way that it incorporates history, which is to say that “we must recognize the aesthetic, as both property of a work and as an experience of it, as something giving body to (‘corporating’) the historical present.”¹⁴

Like Cubitt, I suggest that the term “aesthetics” when applied to the use of the digital interface in interactive new media installations not only describes the characteristics of the artwork in which the interface is deployed, but also encapsulates the characteristics of the interface. In this way, aesthetics does not just shape our experience of digital artworks; it also shapes our interactions with and, by extension, our experience of the interface. Aesthetics, in the very narrow sense of the appreciation of art, as stated earlier, is dependent on “mediation by the senses of vision and hearing” and these senses, as Cubitt argues, are “intrinsically temporal.”¹⁵ Thus, aesthetics can be understood to serve as a descriptor of the mediated experience of time. Interactive new media installations, with their emphasis on viewer/participant action in virtual and physical space alongside their potential to highlight different, non-linear and non-visual modes of thinking and interacting, have the capacity to magnify the mediated experience of time Cubitt speaks of earlier. Here, I propose that new media artist Brian Knep’s interactive new media installation Deep Wounds (2006) provides a perfect example of art that magnifies the aspects of aesthetics discussed above.

In 2005–6, Knep was commissioned by the Office of the Arts at Harvard University to produce an installation (see Plates 1 and 2). He chose as a location Memorial Hall.¹⁶ This location was initially picked because of its surface-level aesthetic characteristics (stained glass windows, marble floors and walls). However, this attraction faded when Knep researched the building’s history. Built between 1874 and 1877, Memorial Hall honors Harvard graduates who died in defense of the Union during the American Civil War (1861–65).¹⁷ Names of 136 deceased alumni, along with other identifying information (year of graduation, place of birth, battle/place of death), are inscribed in red into the 28 marble panels that line the walls of the hall. Information about Harvard graduates who fought and died for the Confederacy is omitted from the building.¹⁸

Deep Wounds is installed in the transept of Memorial Hall—a dimly lit space designed for contemplation. The aesthetics of the installation reflects this atmosphere. There are no fast-paced moving images, blinking lights, or loud audio tracks. Rather, Deep Wounds consists of three large rectangular images, which are projected onto the marble floor of the building. These images, which were created specifically to resemble the stained glassed windows located above them, face the inscriptions on the wall. The images are milky in color, yet transparent enough so that, when visiting the installation, I could catch brief glimpses of what lies below. These hints are enticing, they made me want to explore the work, and so I do. I interact with the work by walking onto the floor. When I do this, the images covering the area of floor I was standing on began to blister and open up, revealing another layer of the artwork—snippets of blue-colored text.

I stand in silence for a few moments, examining the work, trying to make the connection between the imagery the piece has revealed to me and that of my surrounding environment. Making this connection is fairly straightforward: the text on the floor is written in the same font as the names of the deceased Union soldiers that line the walls opposite them, so I assume they are somehow related. I am correct: the text is an allusion to the dead Confederate soldiers, the implied other half of Memorial Hall. As Knep writes: “The content of ...