The up-ended perspective bench

How taking an octopus to Tokyo can help us find new ways to approach Interactive Media

by , December, 2001

AMIDST ALL THE CORPORATE COMISSIONED FLOTSAM that clogs the paved shores of the Thames, there is a rather plain looking slab of concrete, angled gently towards the sky, that stands out from all of this.

I call it the “Up-ended perspective bench.”

The point is not to look at the thing, but to lean back into its gently bowed belly and look. Look at the world from this new view.

Granted, the view is usually a wide grey ski and the corner of big square building with security camera, but even the view is not the point. The point is that it’s a tool for altering perspective that doesn’t involve funky sunglasses or little pieces of paper with woodstock the bird printed on them.

The last time I leaned into this sculpture was on my way to the FACTS OF LIFE exhibit at the Hayward Gallery. And the common theme that bound me to the exhibit, through all the cuteness and voyeurism, was that same trick of altering perspective without pomp (and without pills).

When I first entered the exhibit, I came upon a pair of tubes with a chair at their vertex. Sitting into the chair, I found that the tubes were at ear height, and could be adjusted to cover my ears completely. Suddenly, the sounds of the gallery, of people murmuring and doing that painfully slow museum shuffle were reverberated through the tubes into some sort of Hendrix-guitar filter. Every shoe-sole tapping the concrete floor echoed in my ears. And when I rose from the tubes, I realized that my own museum-shuffle played the drumbeat for someone else’s Hendrix experience. When I’d had my fill I relinquished my seat to the next person in the queue, and stood in line to try out the next gadget. As my place in the line got closer and closer to the front, I saw that it was an eyepiece of some sort. And looking through the eyepiece, I found that I was staring into the face of the person currently listening through the ear tubes I had just left, watching her react to my footsteps.

I had just been the exhibit. I had paid to be a patron. I was both.

It’s all a matter of changing perspective.

A man takes an Octopus on a trip to Tokyo, excitedly pointing out Mt. Fuji, the view from Tokyo tower and the fish market. Describing Tokyo to an Octopus, he experiences Tokyo somewhat differently than before. He meets different people, goes different places, has to try to see this familiar place through the eyes of an octopus so he can describe it all to the poor little guy.

In an oft-used comparison, the original movies were really nothing more than recorded theatre. The camera was static. Actors entered, performed within, and then exited the static frame of the camera. The first televised new shows were little more than talking heads: radio with faces. It took decades before anyone realized that we could move the camera¹. It wasn’t a new development in camera-technology that made this possible; it was a new development in the way we approached the medium of film that made this possible.

Going back further, rocks were scraping rocks for centuries before humans figured out that we could purposefully scratch symbols into rocks with other rocks. Writing was born! Truly the greatest steps in the evolution of any media have not come about directly after a change in the available tools, but after a change in how we approach those tools.

A rock is just a rock until you knock someone over the head with it.

Post-Modernists, Situationists and hackers call this change of perspective subversion. Says the hacker: “If I can make a toaster play a DVD, I have that right.” We can subvert our tools to purposes for which they weren’t initially designed.

Says the Post-Modernist: “If I can treat history ‘as an endless reserve of equal events’ with my video archives and library, then I can mix Greek Columns with aluminum siding.” Or more to the point, if mass media and society together can create their own hyper-real “news” out of current events, I can subvert society with media in my own way. I can create my own reality.

In The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord points out that our entire notion of reality is based on some fiction we have created. We define everything in the world and in ourselves against some spectacle our species has created. The perfect (unhealthy) body. Terrorists and freedom fighters.

The world we live in is already a self-imposed change of perspective. What’s to stop us from changing that perspective in different ways?

Another artist in the FACTS OF LIFE exhibit at the Hayward Gallery is Genpei AKASEGAWA. He describes the detritus of ordinary urban life as purposeful (or purposeless) inventions. His Plant Wiper, the spherical erosion of a concrete wall by wind-blown branches, is described as if it were some sort of natural machine built for that very purpose. And in a way, it is.

A knot of ivy found tied to a string on a canal must be a pet, because why else would someone tether it to a leash like that?

His innocently twisted logic was endearing and inspiring to me, and not just because it makes for cute mind-games. In essence, he was subverting reality.

So, what are these Japanese artists telling us? What is Guy Debord telling us? What are the cavemen telling us?

First, they’re reminding us that things aren’t only what they initially seem to be. Some call it subversion, but I prefer to think of it as discovering new potential. When D.W. Griffith first moved the camera¹, he changed the identity of that tool in the minds of millions, and forever changed the way film worked. He did this by looking at his tool from a different perspective. Pans, tilts and fades have become such common vernacular of the film industry that it is hard to believe these techniques could ever be less than blatantly obvious. In 50 years, the common vernacular of Interactive media will include terms for techniques we have not yet discovered, and it will be hard for a 2051 Interactive artist to imagine how these techniques could ever have been anything less than blatantly obvious.

Every journey begins with a first step, and most begin with a destination in mind. I happily admit that I haven’t the foggiest idea how to move our camera, so to speak, nor the foggiest notion of what our camera is. But I have taken some painfully small steps towards looking at our tools and our mediafrom a new perspective, and I do have a vague destination in mind.

Ask any Interactive Artist what his or her tools are, and the usual knee jerk response is to list off several software applications and hardware specifications, peppered with some inspiration sources. The first question that should pop into our heads after reading this is “Wait, let’s look at this from another perspective. What tools are you using of which you are not aware?”

I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s examine how we can look at the tools we have already identified from a new perspective, and how we can subvert those tools. Be warned: this journey is just beginning. These are tiny first steps, and for me they are mostly conceptual ones. To change our perspective we first have to get rid of our old point of view.

So this means starting at the basics.

I remember when Dad traded in our Apple II+ towards that first beige boxy Macintosh. It came with MacPaint. Forget what I could do with the program, I was just amazed by the tools themselves. I must have spent hours “drawing” different square selections with the marquis tool and watching it shimmer.

It was like an animation program for me. “Dad, look what I made, it blinks and moves!”

And then once I started actually drawing things with the pencil tool, I could select them and make them drive all over the screen. I could force errors to coincide with my drawings smacking the edge of the screen. The screen flashes! The Mac Beeps! Sound effects. Motion graphics! Multimedia! All reacting instantaneously to my every spontaneous move!

Now that was interactive.

It didn’t occur to me to save some of the work for quite a few days, I was just having so much time making stuff that went wherever I pushed it.

More recently, choosing color in Photoshop at 2 in the morning on a Tuesday, my haggard mind slipped into that 2 oclock state, and I came to to find myself mesmerized by the changing patterns of colors as I swept my HSV and RGB sliders back and forth. This was fantastic interaction. This was amazing in its own right. The tool itself was better than anything I had created with the tool.

Can’t say that for a hammer, now, can you? Think of what hammers have built! And think of what we’ll create when our creations outshine our tools!

And I remember when OS 8.6 came out. That was an incredibly buggy operating system. But I held onto that system for quite some time, with all the crashes and anguish, because I had discovered a filter that only OS 8.6 could perform.

This filter is probably best described as the ram-abuse color shift filter. You take your computer, whittle the alotted memory on pshop down to its minimum, open up lots of other programs and big, big files, and just set up a circumstance so that your computer is just on the brink of an error type 1.

(this works best on OS 8.6)

Then, you open up the file you want to apply the filter to and start screwing with the color settings on your mac, dragging windows all over the place, and keeping an eye on your image.

If you’re lucky, and the situation is just right, you get some wild color-shifts.

Chunks go missing, you get trails, and just keep snapshotting (command-shift-3) these images. It’s hard to get this groove going, so whenever you’ve got it, be sure to do it to as many files as you can, for later use.

I also call this the "Sonic Youth" filter, cuz they do things like drop a roll of quarters in the piano, string a couple rubber bands ’round the frets of their guitars, and get grooving. The sound is never repeatable, and often serendipitous.

The O.S. itself becomes part of the tool. The forced interaction of different programs to each other becomes a technique. By sabotaging our tools we alter our perception of those tools. By breaking the paradigm of menus within software as our only methods for controlling our software, we can start to push our understanding of what we can do with these tools further and further. We can build buildings with our hammers instead of pale facsimiles of hammers.

This applies to the Internet as a tool as well.

So I created LA LINKIS!, a simple application that converts sentences into hypertext, via a simple script that pillages Google’s I’m feeling lucky feature.. And I was amazed by what I found. Now, I’ve used google hundreds of times. I’ve looked for “Guy Debord” and “Ginger Spice naked” and “current political climate in Fiji”. And I’ve found lots of useful things. But when I started just writing prose and using LA LINKIS! To turn it into hypertext, a found a whole new world wide web. Designer Snowflakes. Custom replica moose turds! Fantastic Ferrets!

I was the same person using the same search engine as always, but my experience was entirely different. This was because I had changed the way I approached google. I approached it in a different frame of mind, and so came out with entirely different results. I could have done this without LA LINKIS! But LA LINKIS! Helped put me in a freer frame of mind, and that allowed me to use the tool in a new way.

As I said, it is a tiny story, with admittedly underwhelming results. But if we can approach all of our tools with a different frame of mind, truly we can pull new things out of the same tools. Things we never would have discovered otherwise.

So, I’ve talked about a few tiny first steps towards changing my perspective to and subverting our tools. I’ve talked a little about how we can open ourselves to expanding our perception of what our tools are. These are tiny, initial, mostly conceptual steps. So, what is this destination I seem to see hovering vaguely on the horizon?

To my mind, the first media we were ever conscious of creating was thought. When we first wrote that down with pictures and words, we added materiality to the medium of thought. Gave it tangible existence outside of our mind. Did a similar thing in a very different way with speech.

Image added materiality to thought. Film added motion, and then sound, to static image and text. Interactive media adds interactivity to film, text and image. There is a clear progression here, but what exactly does it mean to add Interactivity? I’ll put forth that no matter how cool your rollover is, that that is not interaction, it is reaction. Even destroying and reassembling an interface, on the fly, in reaction to the users every mouse movement, is still just reaction. Interaction is a two way street.

Both parties are affected by true interaction.

As Josh Ulm put it, interaction is a conversation. And if you have a really powerful conversation, both of you are going to come out of that conversation changed. And if you enter a similar conversation with another, or even with each other, that conversation will be different because of how you were changed by that interaction. True interaction takes much longer than reaction. It is an evolutionary process. It is a social process.

And what the Surrealist and the Situationists and the Post-modernists and the Marketers have been showing us is that Society itself is a medium. It transfers information, emotion and trends. It is manipulatible.

We’ve borrowed metaphors from many other media for our Interactive work. Tabs from files. Pages turning. Panning cameras through the digital vista. We have a lot to learn from the media that are generally considered as precursors in the development of interactive media. And society itself is a medium from which we can learn. And I feel that is the media most appropriate to get Interactive cues from.

The veins of the Internet may be wires and electrons, but the blood that flows through its veins is human thought, human emotion. The Internet as a whole behaves very much like a network of living organisms. It learns, it adapts, it grows and mutates as we build, learn from, and then edit it.

Just like society.

That’s what I see as a way of working towards a new language of interactive media, of creating the tilts and pans of this new medium. We start by examining our tools and media from new perspectives. Just as a rock becomes something else when we scratch symbols with it, we can forge new creations from our tools by forging new identities for these tools. And the medium that teaches us most about how to approach true Interactivity is society itself.

It’s all a matter of changing perspective. And it’s as simple as taking an Octopus to visit Tokyo.