Interactives: changing authorship in the digital age?
In the midst of what seems a perpetual period of Kuhnian crisis science (during which more questions than answers accumulate) I would like to share a part of the process. In my previous post I ended with the question whether artists’ intent or the reception of an audience should be the perspective taken when documenting a production. The obvious answer is: both. However, that is not all there is to it. The role of both audience and ‘author’ is changing in the digital age. A viewer becomes a user and a necessary part to make the production work. An author then potentially becomes someone who invokes a certain response or initiates cultural processes. The productions that we here discuss are fundamentally relational objects; or as Piere Lévy puts it: “[a work of new media art] places us within a creative cycle, a living environment of which we are always already the coauthors. Work in progress? The accent has now shifted from work to progress” (1997:123). To understand this process we need a theoretical framework that allows us to describe the complex relations and the way in which they are formed as much as the work itself. In cybernetic terms we could call the constellation of artist, artwork and viewer a feedback system. Aarseth concludes: “[C]ybertext shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse between the various part(icipant)s in the textual machine.” (1997:22). This cybernetic approach is used to describe and analyse the interaction between human and machine, for example in gameplay (e.g. Lister et al, 2009) and in interactive documentaries (Gaudenzi, 2011).
What is interesting though is how some of the more appreciated interactive productions (note: by productions I refer to those works that circulate in the more mainstream media-context and are normally not considered ‘art’ in the strict sense) still have a very clear authorial voice and hardly illustrate the points made above. Try to navigate the interactive documentary Bear 71 (NFB, 2012), the animated sci-fi documentary Collapsus (Submarine, 2010) or the recent Alma: A Tale of Violence (Arte, 2012). They have a very strong narrative structure that cannot be altered. How do we interpret this phenomenon? Is it because we find ourselves in a transitory fase? Or is the desire for telling and hearing stories so strong as to defy the most radical application of digital technology?
Archiving Interactives 