Collaborative Art and Its Limitations

Singapore.
The day three morning session at ISEA 2008 continues with Kate Southworth, who begins by noting the material impact of the network and its logic on everyday life. Some artists are now devising relational frameworks within which participative activities take place - governed by protocol and rules of engagement. Protocol is synonymous with the network itself, and there is no escape from it. Protocol has no interest in the content of the network, on the rules of exchange.

The symbolic sphere shifts with technology, of course; Kittler suggests that media determine our situation - we think through their filter. Media technologies mediate encounters with the corporeal and subjective. A strategy against this is counter-protocol: pushing the network further than it is able to go. The logic here is that we must scale up, not unplug, exploiting the flaws in the network symbolic.

Kate now points to two of her own works, November and Love Potion, which aim to do so. They combine many discrete elements, dwelling in many placed and times simultaneously without forcing them together into one form. Some elements in the work are organised through the dematerialising frame of protocol - but what values, beliefs, systems, and aesthetics are embedded here? How fragile can a protocol become before it becomes dysfunctional? Can elements of the work evade incorporation into any form of protocol?

Love Potion moves through a number of phases - in the first, seeds are grown and harvested according to specific instructions; in the second, the harvested herbs are combined into a love potion according to a set recipe; in the third, performers and participants co-create and co-tend an intimate place filled with aural-visual trans-narratives. Love Potion thus is an open system transmitted through protocols beyond the installation space itself.

November is a networked performative encounter between four performers, recorded simultaneously in Cornwall and London on 31 October (as a four-way iChat video conference). The four exchanged data whilst eating prepared garlic, producing a rhythm and aesthetic which ebbs and flows to mark the change of the season. Again, the protocols for this performance are available, thus enabling others to re-enact the performance.

Next up is Isabel Valverde, presenting on her Touch Terrain project. The idea of the project is to develop experimental interfaces that reintroduce the corporeal dimension with the aim to have a more comprehensive approach to immersive interaction. This builds in part on motion-capture technology using multiple performers, enabling the performers to interact with one another, and with objects, in a virtual space. (Unfortunately, Isabel's video isn't working, so we don't get to see the work.)

Finally we're moving on to Chris Wigginton, whose interest is in collaborative writing in immersive mediaspaces. There are dangers inherent in both technophobia and technophilia - and a critical middle way is important, then. Chris compares this with modernist art - works which don't simply represent, but also reflect on modernity at the same time. Where one side sees the loss of humanity, the other sees technology as its reanimator; this contrasts organic and mechanic form.

Conventionally the artist is often compared to nature itself as a (romantic, genial, autonomous) creator (as in Coleridge); this allows for both technophobic and technophiliac approaches (technology as undermining such creation, or technology as harnessed during the process of creation. Against this is the view of artist as catalyst, with the meaning of a work of art no longer solely under the control of the artist as creator (as in Eliot or Barthes); this has been a well-explored view especially in the context of hypertext writing.

However, there remains what Eco calls the theological view of collaborative writing - at first glance, such texts promise an infinite universe based on a finite number of elements, but very significant limitations still remain, and standard cases of mimetic or dramatic narrativity are presented. A predetermined story arises as the user interacts with the virtual world. It is possible to proceed beyond such limited forms by embracing more fully collaborative environments, but the experiential possibilities of the form are not yet matched by the narrative innovations currently available.

The conservatism of digital narratives is well known - characters are often formulaic, narratives are based on mythological, historical narratives which remain strangely conventional. Chris points to Second Life as a prime example here: here's a virtual world which for the most part tries very hard to replicate 'real life' (why, for example, are there buildings with stairs in a world where everyone can fly, he asks?).

There could be a much more radical virtualisation that could withdraw real life from its 'sensible medium', as Zizek has suggested. Some such writing is beginning to emerge now, and offers a radical potential that will be very interesting to see if and when it is realised.

Technorati : ISEA 2008, Second Life, immersion, narrative, new media art, virtual worlds
Del.icio.us : ISEA 2008, Second Life, immersion, narrative, new media art, virtual worlds