Broadening audience and deepening interaction: lessons from Mcluhan and Rokeby

written for Teri Rueb's DmSeminarTutorial course, October 2004

Although Mcluhan (1964) and Rokeby (1996) examined different media in different generations, their analyses of interactivity and audience participation inform my own work today. Mcluhan speaks of media that are "cool" or participatory as having a far greater personal impact than media that are "hot" and non-affective

"The effect of hot media treatment cannot include much empathy or participation at any time. In this connection an insurance ad that featured Dad in an iron lung surrounded by a joyful family group did more to strike terror into the reader than all the warning wisdom in the world." (Mcluhan, 1964, p. 30)

Although Mcluhan's dichotomous approach is overly simplistic, his beacons of "hot" and "cool" are useful for defining two ends of a spectrum when considering the level of participation in an interactive work. In this vein, Rokeby extends Mcluhan's analysis of participatory media to elicit an actual role-reversal

"It is often said that interactive artworks blur the line between the artist and the audience. The audience becomes creator in a medium invented by the artist." (Rokeby, 1996)

I applied this idea quite literally in an interface for the Icon Icon Project, presenting the user with a blank screen and a paintbrush, which the user must apply to "paint" in their interface, unmasking the webpage hidden beneath.

Making this notion of interface as tool more explicit, the Iterative Art project presents the user with a blank screen and a set of faders that must be adjusted to create the user's own "original" art work. Although the site's developer creates the algorithms that define the art, the art itself is created by the user, making the role of artist in this interaction debatable.

Of course, Mcluhan speaks of participatory media in a much deeper vein than the surface-level actualization these two examples enable, forcing us to consider the impact on both sides of an interaction.

"One might take the extreme position that a significant interaction between an artwork and a spectator cannot be said to have taken place unless both the spectator and the artwork are in some way permanently changed or enriched by the exchange." (Rokeby, 1996)

By considering the transition from Mcluhan's "hot" to "cool" as an analog rather than digital development, I can examine ways of further "cooling" interactive media, making interactions more participatory and more affective. In my work, I approached this as a "slowing down" of interaction. Rather than focus on the immediate effects of the participant's actions on the interface, I sought to create a work in which interaction had a more penetrating impact on the interactive system itself.

In the Information Ecosystem participants create the information that keeps the system alive in order to maintain the balance of carbon dioxide in the ecosystem. Only by adding the right amount and right kind of information to the system will it continue to function. The system in turn reorganizes the information, changing its meaning through proximity and association with the other elements of the work.

This empowerment of the user as developer carried into my work in Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. Concerned by the neo-colonial effects of Western-developed educational media and metaphors, I began work on "cooling" down the already too "hot" interactive media used at the University. By defining the user as co-developer, our group approached interactive media as the development of an open toolset, a framework the user can actuate according to their own cultural norms and metaphors. Furthermore, as an outsider and, further, as the very actor whose influence I was trying to minimize, it was my responsibility to reduce my influence on the work as much as possible. My role had truly diminished to that of medium for the creations of the users.

Defining the user as developer transforms the audience into participant, turning a passive role into an essential, constructing role. Furthermore, "cooling" down the media encourages (and sometimes even requires) deeper reflection by the participant. In the strictest sense, an interactive work does not even exist until the user actuates its potential stored in code with the click of their mouse or wave of their hand.

But in requiring more from the user comes the necessity of making that work more approachable. A painting that confounds is still a painting. An interactive work that no one can figure out how to use ceases to exist in any practical sense. The irony of this situation is that in order to force participants to get more deeply involved in my work, I must not demand too much from participants by creating hurdles with the interface, presentation or context of the work.

In Rokeby's terms, the balance hinges on maintaining a sense of interaction by preserving the audience's reflection in the interactive system's responses. "There is a threshold of distortion and complexity beyond which an interactor loses sight of him or herself." (Rokeby, 1996) In other words, I can extend the interaction to "cool" it down and increase its depth of penetration, but not to such a degree that the audience is no longer aware that an interaction is taking place.

Of course, this balance depends on the audience itself. Some interactors tolerate a higher level of ambiguity than others, so increasing the depth of penetration will decrease my potential audience. While I do not share Mcluhan's enthusiasm for the potential of electronic media to banish "the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner," (Mcluhan, 1964, p. 4) and find his ethnocentric conception of "backward" cultures offensive, I have seen firsthand the connections electronic media engender between disparate populations in developing countries. As a result, I have realized that the interface and content of the media play as large a role as the technical hurdles involved in accessing media (Robbins, 2004), and I have learned that in a dichotomous world I would rather sacrifice depth for access and clarity. In other words, I would rather create something that a non-technical non-American can identify with than create more complexities for the erudite, more media for the media-stricken.

Fortunately, I do not live in Mcluhan's dichotomous world, so a compromise is possible. The goal, then, is to cajole the audience through layers of undemanding simplicity towards "cooler" depths hidden below. Rokeby presents a very tangible and personal example of how I might achieve this through another role reversal of interactive media when he cites Norman White's Helpless Robot: I see the work behaving as the classic "hustler". For instance, it might initially enlist human cooperation with a polite "Excuse me... have you got a moment?", or any one of such unimposing phrases. It might then ask to be rotated: "Could you please turn me just a bit to the right... No! not that way... the other way!" In such a way, as it senses cooperation, it tends to become ever more demanding, becoming in the end, if its human collaborators let it, dictatorial. (White, 1990, in Rokeby, 1996)

While I have previously considered interactive media as social transactions at a meta-level, (Robbins, 2001a, 2001b) Rokeby's approach focuses on this personification at a micro-level, showing that the specific nuances and techniques of interpersonal manipulation can be used as an interface between audience and media. This humanization (as opposed to sociafication) is doubly exciting to me, as it provides a rich and intuitive lexicon with which to approach a broader audience without sacrificing depth. By building on the non-technical knowledge of the audience, I can assume a deeper level of sophistication.

In summary, the empowerment of the audience in their relation to "cool" or participatory media can be achieved through a slowing of the interaction from immediate reaction to a true interaction that affects both parties. By opening the interface to humanized gesture and inference, I can increase the depth of this interactive language without sacrificing my intended less technologically and Western-acculturated audience.

Epilogue

Jiri Cernicky, Panasonic Emotions

Rebecca Horn, The Unconsciousness of Feelings

References

Mcluhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~gisle/overload/mcluhan/um.html#ch01

Robbins, Christopher (2001a). The upended perspective bench. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://www.grographics.com/writings/upended_004.html

Robbins, Christopher (2001b). Multi-bloody-media. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://www.grographics.com/writings/3minutemadness.html

Robbins, Christopher (2002). Christopher Robbins' Blog: Derivatives of Mcluhan. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://www.grographics.com/webactivism/2002/04/derivatives-of-Mcluhan.html

Robbins, Christopher (2004). Educational multimedia for the South Pacific. Fiji : ICT Capacity Building at USP Project, The University of the South Pacific. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://www.grographics.com/fiji/AccessUsability-ICTResearch/research-report/Education-Multimedia-for-the-South-Pacific_Robbins.pdf

Rokeby, David (1996). Transforming Mirrors : Interaction in the context of Art. Retrieved October 10, 2005 from http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/mirrorsart.html ---

Related guff

be sure to read this post of de-poncing this essay

Teri's notes

• "My role had truly diminished to that of medium for the creations of the users." TR: which is still potent of course as the medium carries implicit cultural biases
• "I must not demand too much from participants." TR:elaborate: demand too much of what?
• "While I have previously considered interactive media as social transactions at a meta-level, (Robbins, 2001a, 2001b) Rokeby's approach focuses on this personification at a micro-level, showing that the specific nuances and techniques of interpersonal manipulation can be used as an interface between audience and media. This humanization (as opposed to sociafication) is doubly exciting to me, as it provides a rich and intuitive lexicon with which to approach a broader audience without sacrificing depth. By building on the non-technical knowledge of the audience, I can assume a deeper level of sophistication." TR:really interesting distinction, save for thesis!
• "intuitive" TR:watch that word, tricky as it carries many assumptions
• "true interaction" TR:circled-I assume she found these undefined and subjective
• TR: just curious - did you share your interactive artworks with your co-developers in Fiji?

Access

• Layers of simplicity: Camille Utterback's Untitled 5 Starts with immediate feedback, then adds layers of interaction, meaning
• Making algorithyms accessible through visualization: "The interconnectedness of written code and the actions it produces also begs the question how transparent the relationship between these two forms can or should be, and whether this might be a criterion for evaluating the art. Meaning, is software art more successful if one can 'see' the algorithms at work in the unfolding of visuals / sound and can establish direct connections between the front end and the code driving it? Art that allows this connection to be made will certainly be accessible to a wider audience but it remains questionable whether the transparency of cause-and-effect relationships is a criterion for the quality of art. " -Christiane Paul on Software Art (DmSoftwareArt)

Learning from Nature, what we know

• Camille Utterback's Potent objects Captures the human gesture, use what is already obvious (weights on balance, snowglobe)
• Ben Fry imitates the behaviour and systems of simple lifeforms as a method to dynamically display data, following general rules (valence) as well as imitating specific biological growth structures (anemone). (DmBenFry)