Conditions of use - participation in old and new media

There is an identifiable historical moment when any new technology
develops a sense of self-awareness. This is not artificial intelligence,
not an awareness on the part of the technology itself, but a moment when
the adoption of that technology reaches a saturation point that permits
a perspective on its own conditions and uses. This moment often
coincides with the broadening of access to this technology, with the
shift from lab to commodity, from research user to home user. The moment
when technologies find a place in everyday life, even if only in the
everyday life of a privileged few early adopters, is when they begin to
attain a cultural importance than can be interrogated of itself, without
reference to their primary function.

This is a kind of perversion of technology, or at least it appears to be
so from the viewpoint of the inventors and pioneers that first adopted
it. It is a form of emancipation from original purpose, a "coming out"
into the embrace of a larger audience with political, social, and
economic assumptions about what the future uses of the technology will
bring.

The primary media technologies of the twentieth century - Photography,
Film, Radio, Television, Video - have grown up in this way, moving from
exotic spectacle to diverse, ubiquitous presence, from the awe-inspiring
to the mundane. As technologies are commodified and marketed, their
increasingly streamlined mainstream products leave behind them a wake of
discreet practises - an aftershock of adaptive techniques that
consciously or unconsciously turn prescribed instructions into a new
vocabulary of habits and rituals.

As soon as the photograph moved from being a studio-bound appointment
into a stolen snapshot, it was freed to develop an infinite new variety
of uses, from historical record to forensic evidence to memento mori.
The history of photography could never be traced in straight lines from
the hybrid scientific/cultural activities of its pioneers. There could
never be an accurate audit of its impact, as every discarded photo-booth
snapshot is a fork in the path of its development as a cultural object
in a fragmented social arena.

"At the threshold points near the birth of new technology, all types of
distortions and misunderstandings are bound to appear -
misunderstandings not only of how the machines actually work but also of
more subtle matters - what realm of experience the new technologies
belong to, what values they perpetuate, where their more indirect
efforts will take place."–Steven Johnson

Like the photograph, whose history of "distortions and
misunderstandings" stretches from Man Ray to Cindy Sherman and beyond,
the development of computer interfaces has begun to fragment through the
speed of its technical development and mass utilisation. Its presumed
invisibility as a tool has begun to be challenged, in the way that the
photograph shifted from being a "pencil of nature" to a contingent and
fugitive document of the "real."

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The opaque languages of early computing, the punch cards and command
line interfaces that were impenetrable to anybody but their inventors,
gradually gave way to a succession of interfaces that attempted to
correspond more accurately to the experiences of a mass audience. From
Ivan Sutherland's Sketch pad to Doug Engelbart's ground-breaking
development of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), the computer interface
has sought to camouflage its infinitely intricate processes with a
visual language of icons, windows and menus. And like photography, this
language aspires to become a "second nature," a metaphor for lived
experience that develops its own currency and uses.

In the case of most contemporary operating systems, the metaphors of
desktop, folders and wastebasket operate as signposts to assist the
virtual navigation of stored data. But like photography, the assumed
neutrality of these representations disguise the conditions of their
creation and the tangled histories of trial and error that belie the
uniformity of their surfaces. Computers are not built as perfect
vessels, but are palimpsests, like cities. Hardware and software systems
cannibalise successful elements, perpetuating historical conditions as
if they were genetic traits. As the Y2K bug demonstrates, the complexity
of digital systems causes mutation as well as innovation, burying errors
within a history of use that renders them virtually invisible.

But there is an important distinction between the interface and previous
forms of media technology. The photographic message (according to
Barthes) is contingent on its means of production, dissemination and
consumption, but repeated exposures offer more or less the same set of
contingencies, affected only by historical processes. The photograph's
possible meaning is dependent on exterior associations - the context of
display (newspaper, magazine, poster) or annotation (caption), but these
rarely affect the surface of the photograph itself.

With the interface, the disruption of its surface is the only way that
meaning can be produced. Shifting icons, arranging files and
personalising the data space is not only allowed, but essential to using
the interface. To quote Andreas Broeckmann, "Participation becomes not
only an option, but a condition" (from "Presence and participation in
network art," essay posted to the nettime mailing list, June 1998). But
this participation has to operate within the boundaries defined by the
interface, by the protocols of data transmission that allow a series of
ones and zeros to be represented as an image file, a text document or a
web page. Any transgression of these protocols result in error messages
that only serve to make the user aware of the limits of knowledge. The
interface shifts intermittently between vehicle and obstacle, a
tentative series of steps mapped out by the user with every point and
click.

In this way the act of participation is never as final as it is with a
photographic click of a camera shutter, but actually "conditions" the
object into a format that is more amenable to the user. The click of the
mouse does not have the same gravity as Barthes' formula for the
photograph as an interface between Life/Death, but is a series of subtle
shifts - not necessarily a progression, but still a form of movement.
With the extent of this personalisation - from setting your own desktop
to hacking and "open source" software development - the interface
develops through a process of "auto-ergonomics," a process that embodies
post-structuralist assumptions about author-reader interaction in a way
that static media could only begin to describe.

I would now like to look at three examples of the interface as cultural
object, three projects that examine the status of the interface as a
fluid map, as a conditional yet mobile network of associative meanings.
All of these projects attempt to make visible the production of meaning
through the many participative moments of the user - the hundreds of
point-and-clicks that define the relationship between interface and
user. In this process, some parallels can be noted between the critical
enquiry of the singular click of the photograph and the many clicks of
the contemporary interactive experience.

I/O/D - The Web Stalker (http://www.backspace.org/iod)

"The Web Stalker establishes that there are other potential cultures of
use for the web. The aesthetic conventions of current Browsers are based
on the discipline of Human Computer Interface Design…Here, the normal
user is only ever the normalised user. Time to mutate."–from an
interview between I/O/D and Geert Lovink posted to the nettime mailing
list, April 1998.

Some of the most recent net.art attempts to foreground the means of
production in a medium that has, in a very short time, become more
opaque under increasingly commercial influences. What was once a
low-tech community medium using basic textual communication has become a
son et lumiere spectacle that is being hyped as the future of
entertainment, commerce and consumption. The Web Stalker opens up the
elemental nodes and network possibilities of the web that have become
hidden underneath the glossy surfaces of corporate web design.

Contemporary browsers such as Navigator and Explorer reassure the novice
user with references to older cultural forms, referring to web "pages"
that can be navigated "back and forwards" or "bookmarked." The Web
Stalker takes a singular node on the network (a URL provided by the
user) and presents the connections extending from this as an
ever-growing diagram of points and lines. By offering hard data,
visualised as a map rather than contained in metaphor, the Web Stalker
demonstrates the untidy connections, false links and anarchic
possibilities of a medium that ultimately thrives on connection rather
than closure. The Web Stalker demonstrates the infinite potential for
meaning within networks without attempting to second guess the user's
own choices. The much-hyped interactivity of digital technologies is not
"guided" by animated icon helpers, but presented as a stark skeleton - a
map without an index.

Mongrel - Natural Selection (http://www.mongrel.org.uk)

"The idea is to pull the rug from underneath racist material on the net,
and also to start eroding the perceived neutrality of information
science type systems. If people can start to imagining that a good
proportion of the net is faked then we might start getting
somewhere."–From an interview with I/O/D's Matthew Fuller, posted to
the nettime mailing list, February 1999.

If the Web Stalker reveals the Internet as an arbitrary, anarchic map of
connections, Natural Selection uses the (im)possibilities of accessing
these connections as a metaphor for the frustrations caused by
"institutionalised" racism in the UK. Natural Selection also perverts
the conventions of the Web browser, but in a subtler way, not stripping
the interactive experience of metaphor, but twisting the user's
expectations of the metaphor. Resembling the common search engine
"Yahoo," Natural selection deals with user's search requests in two
ways. Most searches are directed straight to a "normal" engine that
processes the results and returns lists of options. But if the search
contains one of a list of racially suspect words (eg. nigger, nazi,
paki), then Natural Selection refers the search to its own database of
sites, such as Mervin Jarman's BAA, a site that in turn perverts a
corporate site to give the user a feeling for the vagaries of the
British immigration system.

In BAA, users enter data to gauge whether they are allowed to gain
access to the UK (BAA standing for British Airport Authority, the body
in charge of UK airport security). The questions start to give a clue of
the interface's perversion, asking if the visitor is travelling on
business, pleasure, or to smuggle drugs. As the user works through the
long list of questions, the interrogation breaks down, lapsing into
patois and becoming more and more bizarre. Depending on the user's
"status," the site then sends you to reports documenting real-life
experiences of violence and mistreatment by BAA staff and police to
Afro-Caribbean travellers.

Mongrel's abuse of "official" interfaces peels back the veneer of
neutrality that interfaces are assumed to have in the way that artists
like Maud Sulter interrogated the photograph in the 1980's. By their
very nature, interfaces filter information and make assumptions about
the needs of the user, but the logic that informs these decisions can
carry with them "cultural" prejudices that can exclude options for the
user in the same way the immigration processes exclude visitors. The
increasingly commercial pressure on the Internet means that most users
appreciation of the Web's diversity is constricted by the databases and
classification of "portal" sites like Yahoo or Excite. Mongrel opens up
these processes of classification, using their own tactical
interventions to disrupt the smooth surfaces of corporate webspace.

Sawad Brooks - lapses and erasures
(http://bbs.thing.net/projects/index.html)

If the interface is, as Steven Johnson has suggested, the cultural form
of the very late 20th Century, then it is navigation, the participation
between author and audience, that legitimises the interface as a
cultural experience. The audience has gradually got closer and closer to
the screen throughout the century, from the darkened audience sitting
twenty feet away from the cinema screen, to the six feet between sofa
and television in the average domestic space. With interactive
experiences, the audience is typically less than a foot away from the
screen, and with immersive VR experiences this distance is almost
completely abolished. Marketing departments in multi-media corporations
use the terms "lean-forward" and "lean-back" to describe the difference
between passive viewing and interactive experience. One of the major
obstacles in the development of convergent media such as Web-TV is the
audiences unwillingness to shift between these modes of experience. In
fact, it is beginning to seem that mass consumer products using
interactive technologies may not only appear through the predicted route
of broadband TV/PC hybrids, but also through the personalised, intimate
and already interactive technologies used in mobile communications.
These products have a very different relationship to the body, slung in
holsters like guns or tools, and increasingly sported as wearable
fashion items.

In Sawad Brooks' work, the relationship between physical movement and
representation is explored through the less obviously physical
interfaces of the mouse and screen. But by incorporating unfamiliar
navigation techniques, the user is reminded that there is always a
physical connection between themselves and the interface. Without
attempting to replicate real-world activity, Brooks uses a vocabulary of
repetitive mouse movements that have little in common with usual
navigation. These movements are an exaggeration of the learning process
that user goes through with any new software, learning how to time the
clicks, drags and shifts to move their representations around the
screen. But in Brook's work mouse movements are forced to be erratic,
and are more tangentially connected with the legibility of the work
itself than the traditional point-and-click.

In Focus, one of the Java interfaces in Lapses and Erasures, the user
has to frantically drag the mouse backwards and forwards to enlarge a
window that reveals text underneath. No matter how hard or fast the
mouse moves, the window only opens up enough to reveal a section of the
text, often from different lines. This makes reading a physical act, an
act of navigation rather than narration. The eye cannot follow the
expected left-right path and so has to skip over the surface of the text
as if it were a physical object, a map revealed through hand-eye
co-ordination.

Successful interfaces by necessity have to become invisible, but this
does not occur without the user adopting new physical and mental
patterns. There is a network of technological, social and physical
relationships between the author and the user that an interface has to
negotiate in order for it to be adopted widely. The flat icons of the
computer desktop have proved to be much more effective than textual or
even three-dimensional alternatives. This proves that the representation
of data-space does not necessarily have to reflect real experiences.
Users adopt, adapt and incorporate interfaces until they become
subliminal, whether it is typing on a keyboard or driving a car.
Sustained participation is the process that makes the interface
invisible, but can also make "natural" a series of assumed preferences
that should be regularly interrogated. Adapting, perverting and
generally abusing the purpose of the interface opens up these choices
again, and re-introduces the character of the individual user -
highlighting the grain of the voice in what must always, by the
conditions of use, be a two-way conversation.