THE PARTICIPATORY AGE
from a Talk/Show at Pratt, December 5, 1996by Christy Sheffield Sanford
Don Ritter asked me here to discuss my work. That was simple enough. Then I saw what your evaluation questions were and I thought, "Should I teach to the assignment." Economics: you mean you can make money at this. Well, of course, site design is the wave of the future. What else is there? Book design, games, corporate or commercial web sites and the impressive title of Webmaster. Collect your knowledge now, not to mention your soft and hardware, gather up your Power Mac, Scanner, Photoshop, Aldus, Quark, whatever it takes.
Physics is my weakest subject but I feel it's incumbent on me to address some important ideas that have come from that field and affect us today, and, I would suggest, have made it possible for the computer revolution to occur among the masses. Some of the ideas from quantum mechanics, for instance, have dramatically changed the way people interact with machine and society.
In 1926, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle; together with Planks's Principle it played a key role in developing the basic laws of quantum mechanics. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot accurately measure both the velocity and location of a particle. Indeed, the more accurate one factor is the more off the mark is the other. And the observer is the culprit who skews the outcome. This is called the observer effect. This idea, meant for the quantum world, has transferred to our daily world. How? By a fundamental human capacity, that is, metaphoric thinking. If the observer has a profound effect on something so basic, surely other types of observers might similarly have an effect.
Now you can imagine no longer the passive observer, but the active observer. No longer the passive audience member, but the actively involved audience member. No longer a passive recipient of services but an active agent. With choices. Many, many choices to make. This is sometimes mistakenly equated with power. To select among weak options is a poor example of empowerment. If you've navigated the Web, you know that clicking on options that lead nowhere or from one bad text to another can inspire annoyance or worse, a kind of hopelessness. Often interesting, powerful ideas are accompanied by a constellation of ideas that make their application possible. Such disparate entities as feminism, environmentalism, and chaos theory have contributed to the idea that all who inhabit the planet are influential, important and interdependent.
For example, with the formualtion of the Butterfly Effect coming from Chaos Theory, you learn that even the butterfly can have a reverberating effect on the universe-the wings heard round the world. I believe this is a profound and hopeful shift in thinking. No longer the patrone, the idea I am lord over my dominion but rather the idea that the "simplest" creature has some importance. A sophisticated type of animism. The end of colonial thinking. The total whammo. Many have realized this. George Landow, who has written a book about hypertext, teaches a course at Brown on post colonialism. I'm sure there are others as well.
I wanted to provide a brief set of examples of participation in the arts from around the middle of this century. I'll start with happenings:
In Claes Oldenburg's "Injun," a performance piece, the audience members were asked to hold onto a rope, while they were led from place to place by a masked man. As in many of the performance art pieces of that time, 60's-70's, the audience was often requested to do rather unpleasant tasks. Often one suspected writer-artist enjoyed a rather Machaevellian pleasure.
Miss Marguerita's Way was an off Broadway production, a one woman show with Estelle Parsons in the lead. In the play she encourages theater goers to respond to her role as a crazed, sensual, capricious teacher! She had to stop doing it in NY because the responses became more and more hostile. It seems the character had touched a nerve.
Most of you are probably familiar with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," the cult movie that evokes ritualized responses in which the audience does various things according to cues on the screen: everyone flicks their Bic lighters at a certain point or yells "No neck" at the appearance of one of the male actors. What made these things possible. They're not possible for a number of people. My eighty-six year old mother, for instance, is not a member of the Participatory Age. She has never pumped her own gas, used an ATM machine or happily joined the line at the salad bar.
These are, I would suggest, all examples of the idea of the Participatory Age. The idea in the arts was to my mind most exciting in performance. Chiefly in New York and Los Angeles. Largely the spirit did not transfer to Des Moines or even big cities like Atlanta. Interaction in theaters has settled into a token reminder as cast members invade the audience space, usually via an aisle.
But wait, it's hard to keep a good idea down. And that idea clung to life as collaboration, a shift from audience participation to artists collaborating. Artists from various fields, nationalities, or different age groups would join to work on a theme of mutual interest. Highly grant worthy. Rinde Eckert and Joe Harvey Allen, performers and writers, working with Paul Dresher, composer, and Terry Allen, set designer, collaborated to create Oh, Pioneers! a spirited and innovative performance piece about dominion and domination presented at Spoleto.
Perhaps you'd prefer to think of participation in a more political way: How about the participatory democracy. Or look at the large telethons for Farm aid, AIDS. or for other causes. In the arts, one might point to the AIDS quilt or the much earlier Judy Chicago's Dinner Party. Many of these types of projects have inspired intense committment and participation. I'm making the point that the idea has become part of most phases of our existence. Big ideas in any field will transfer to other fields. You can be aware of them and use them or let them roll over you. Inevitably they will influence you.
I want to return to the computer and the varieties of participatory experience. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Is scrolling an act of participation? I would never have counted this simple act of viewing the Web as an element of participation. But, recently I showed computer work at an art show in Miami, and suddenly I realized I move in rarified circles. I'm living in a fool's paradise. Many people, I would venture most people, know nothing about the medium and must be introduced to something as elementary as scrolling. They are frightened of the interface, frightened they'll do something gauche/screw things up. They are shy.
Those first encountering the computer often seem to treat it like television. The computer is, of course, not like TV. If you leave the computer screen alone, what will happen. In most cases, the screen saver will come on. They are both sedentary mediums, but the computer inspires much more interactivity. The computer is a much more readerly medium than cinema or TV. But it's also a very visual medium and text and image can work together strongly.
I wanted to show you a retrospective of some of my works. I came onto the Web a little over a year ago. I've had a more responsive audience in one year on the Web than in 14 years in print. And I've been published a lot and won grants and prizes. I feel that many of my works just prior to going on the Web, were conceptually hypertextual. I found ways to show text in print using overlays, typography, and various techniques involving Xerox, Aldus Freehand and Canvas. I'm satisfied that hypertextual thinking can be realized in print and not just on the Internet. It's more difficult but possible.
What do I mean by hypertextual thinking? I mean work that is layered/branching, has multiple themes/directions, relies on visual shorthand. In addition, html has many traditional language attributes. It has ways to emphasize, such as the convention of blinking or manipulating font size. It has means of sweeping you along as in a language flow. The client-pull technique allows a page to be automatically refreshed. In English one might hear, "and then;" in French, "donc;" in Italian, "alora". These phrases are not synonymous but function in the same manner in that they aid the flow of language.
Hypertext involves many conceptual, organizing devices such as forms, lists, tables and frames. It is these efforts to control information which naturally the artist must fight. The freezing of conceptual categories, the rigidifying of ideas must be subverted. The power of the conventions must be destroyed. Use the conventions to disorder, reorder, free up divergent thinking not to increase convergent thinking.
I've gone back and forth, putting up new work and earlier works that I felt would be better served on the Web. Georgette's Revenge is one example of conceptually hypertextual work. Cherise Fong, formerly of CICV, a French arts organization, who now lives in NY, saw the piece and immediately wanted to put it in frames. It has spatial tension and like much of hypertext can enjoy multiple readings. It also has drops, which slow the tempo. The border is philosophical or psychological and the inner section has a concrete reiterating narrative. The story inside the frame is about a woman from Senegal who comes to France to study at the Sorbonne. She marries a scoundrel who, after a quarrel, stages a boating mishap. Georgette, the heroine, thinks he killed himself because of her but years later finds he was merely escaping gangsters who were trying to collect a gambling debt. She, unlike her husband, has a knack for making money. She finally falls in love with a man with gorgeous thighs.
Great Lakes (Map-Induced Trance States) is another example of work involving hypertextual thinking. This is a fictional biography with trance-
like narratives inspired by maps of the Great Lakes Region. It's the story of a little girl who grows up in a happy menage à trois situation- her mother, father and godfather- and what happens when that charmed circle is broken. Words and map- reminiscent shapes with their web- like branches interrupt the story and obliquely point to evocative, ellipsed ideas, areas for the reader/viewer to construct his or her own story. A number of readings are possible. My first project was RED MONA, sponsored by Purplefrog, a software security firm. Sponsorship means the Web site, the space for the project, is free. Robert Forsman at Purplefrog scanned the cards for me. I now have a scanner; it has changed my life. I didn't want to learn hypertext. My engineering consultant insisted. I kept wanting to change things to look like I wanted them to look. I was afraid of html. It seemed like math, like programming. But hypertext is too easy not to learn. Easy on the surface. Just easy enough until you start fooling with tables and frames, then it becomes maddening but always tantalizing. If you don't yet know html, you must learn it. It's power. I send my work out in html. Choice is not as powerful as html, which is the language that offers a choice.
One good way to get started in Web page designing is to look at the document source for pages that you admire. I often start with a layout I've seen on the Web, and by the time I finish, it never looks like the inspiration. The document source is available in the browser menu and will automatically open with TeachTech. At least, this is the case with Macintosh. I assume it's similar across platforms. Red Mona stepped out of a De Maupassant short story. She was an unnamed femme fatale in "Petit Soldat," This story was translated into English as "Two Little Soldiers." About my story, I jokingly say she becomes the third little soldier, Simone de Milo. Her character is sort of a slut who does nature meditations and has incestuous longings for her dead father. Your typical girl next door. Part of the fun of the piece is that it plays with the convention of language learning. The piece is constructed on French Flash Cards, and they come up randomly on a CGI program and are accompanied by sound files. So it's language learning of French but also Web conventions. The Web has a strong educational history and I like to subvert that when possible.
Another idea that appeals to me is the illuminated manuscript: the electro-
illuminated manuscript with all it's theatrical possibilities. I've started the Madame de Lafayette Book of Hours Project, which involves a 24-hour clock with each hour to be contributed by a different artist/ writer/ scholar. It can also involve collaboration. In the Middle Ages there were many exciting illuminated manuscripts, such as, The Hours of Catherine of Clèves and Mira Calligraphae. This last work features several languages, concrete poetry, mirror writing, and surreal juxtapositions of plants and animals not to scale. For inspiration, I look to books like these. There are some fine sites on line that feature rare books, early manuscripts. It's important to think about the interface, the screen. How you see it will affect how and what you present on the Web. Do you see it as between TV show commercials, an interarts medium, a book or what.
Madame de Lafayette Book of Hours is inspired by the life, time and work of Madame de Lafayette, who in the 17th century wrote La Princesse de Clèves. This was a turning point for the novel. Before that novels were either episodic or seralized. She is sometimes credited with creating one of the first novels with characters of psychological depth. But I claim more for her, that is, that she shaped the conflict-
crisis- resolution model, which has proved satisfying for centuries and is still the preferred model today. At the site is a bibliography of Madame de Lafayette's work, my translation of the Comtesse de Tende and some of my first frames, which I thought were really hot! First, I want to show you one page of the Comtesse de Tende because it has more subtle animation than most you'll see on the Web. I wanted a page that would twinkle. It's still a bit showy. And here is Woman in the Fountain of Love, one of my contributions to the Book of Hours. The images of a Boucher nude were manipulated in Photoshop. In a second set of frames, Portraits, which begins with a Woman on a Blue Flaming Bed, the focus is on the idea of portraits, their frames and how they wield power in a romantic way but also in terms of their status as conventions.
The Web interface can be likened to a book, a book with theatrical possibilities. Brenda Laurel wrote a book about the theatrical potential, Computers as Theatre. Many people have noticed. This doesn't summarize the medium adequately for me, but it certainly points up one important direction for the computer art form on the Web.
"Bigamy in the Desert" and Safara in the Beginning are mixed genre pieces that have strong fictional narratives. They both have animation. And they have book-
like qualities of layout and design. They also have what I'd call interstices, spaces for meditation. "Bigamy in the Desert" is a contemporary story about a woman in the west who marries two men and successfully lives to tell the tale. It has animated word- poems that play with the illuminated manuscript idea. Safara in the Beginning," is about a young girl who is stolen from her home in Casamance in the 17th century and brought to Martinique to work on an indigo plantation. I call this a Moving Book. The images are not predominantly illustrative but rather open adjacent or new areas. Like an expansion joint in a table. More room for the reader to create the story.
"Ocean Crossing: Nancy Cunard" is an experimental biographical piece about Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress and poet-
publisher. She was disinherited because of her affair with Henry Crowder, a black musician, and because of an anthology she published called Negro, one of the first of its kind. She was often characterized by those who knew her as brave. She fought against bigotry and fascism. She reported on the Spanish Civil War. She had a fascination with African art and ornaments and had a large collection of ivory bracelets. She was often photographed with them. I used them to explore her life. It was an heuristic way of working; that is, I started with misconceptions I had about Nancy, and as I found out more about her added that to the piece. Often what I found was contradictory or ironic. Some said her eyes were blue, others said green. Some said wearing the bracelets was an act of love for another culture; others said she wore them like armor. In the piece, I played with perceptions and their vulnerability to human error. The H's the Spasms of a Requiem was a spoken opera performed at a museum. The documentary on the Web became another art form. Different from the performance piece and more than just a record. Except for the photos on the opening pages, I grabbed the images from videos of the performance.
I've done nature poems, some meditative and subtle, such as "Ocean Movement Study" and "I-75 Clouds." Light and Dust and Grist On-line are both interested in nature poems. I think people are trying to see nature with new eyes, the eyes of this century. They're trying to see systems operating, trying not to anthropomorphize but rather to regard the animals and plants and natural phenomena as having its own integrity as opposed to being an extension of humans. Again the end of colonialism.
I've also done some rants like "Medusa" and "Boucher en Vogue." These two works, as does the Cunard piece, have links to pages off my site. For instance, "Medusa" links to the Medusa gun site as well as the Gericault painting, "The Raft of the Medusa." "Boucher en Vogue" features snake sites such as one for people to come and rid your home of snakes, and there's an anti venom site at the end. I did "Plant at the Turn of the Century" starting with a Jean-
Paul Gaultier high- tech outfit that I cut up and animated to look diabolically flower-like. Photoshop and Gifbuilder are the programs I find myself using repeatedly. I often transform images from fashion. I'm very interested in power, which is a part of costume, especially for women.
Christy Sheffield Sanford, Copyright © 1996