Mediamatic Salon
Lecture transcript
Mediamatic offices, Amsterdam, 18th March 1998
Firstly, I'm afraid that I'll have to begin with a sincere apology, and that's for the absolutely awful level of my spoken Dutch, which more or less forces me to perform this presentation in my native English. This aside, tonight I intend to present a number of interactive productions completed over the last year, and hope to expand upon a number of issues contained within each work, as well as attempting to draw as it were, a chronological, almost thematic time line throughout the presentation, which will chart the common elements present in all the projects. I say this, as it is my nagging suspicion that, having only recently assimilated these projects together, that essentially I have actually been producing variations and extrapolations of what ultimately might appear to be the same idea. So here goes.
The idea, or notion, of producing interactive work, in whatever form it might take, be it a CD-ROM, a game, a website or even works outside of the computer, I feel is essentially about the importance of the interface - finding out how the thing works. Here you might think of such simplistic examples as learning to drive, or figuring out how your microwave or cooker works, and it is really with this starting point, using the idea of the interface, with which a vast majority of my projects tend to begin with. For example, this menu interface, I know how it works, because I made it, but my concern is that it is far more interesting for an interface to reveal it's usefulness through someone actually using it, rather than the traditional notion of spelling everything out very clearly straight away.
My solution in one form to this problem, was essentially a very simple one, that of using rollovers, which reveal and hide suitably relevant information in accordance with the movement of the mouse. Decision making, as it were, is ultimately undertaken by clicking, so let's actually begin here with a CD-ROM production entitled Justitia Scientia.
This work really began with the notion of historiography, in the sense of somehow creating a navigable series of histories of histories. I'd been collecting various sets of information from the Internet, and this idea of building collections of things (whatever that might mean), quite strongly underpins the work, yet I really had little idea in what form to present them. But to produce a system whereby you might actually be able to travel through the information, as with the World Wide Web, except now in a more blinkered, and less free falling way, seemed to be perhaps one avenue of production which might lead to an interesting solution. However of course, as soon as you start doing this, by putting all these 'sets' or 'blocks' of information together, you inadvertently create links between the information, purely as a natural consequence of doing it, yet happily this correlates very strongly back to the idea of using the Internet again.
So this is ultimately the kernel of the Justitia Scientia project - the creation of a navigable system whereby histories of events, lives, companies and so forth, are presented upon an equal level, therefore reflecting back upon each other, creating histories of histories - historiography. This, of course, only happens when traveling through the information, you're not really going to get it from the start up sequence, and the main menu, as we see here, this just poses the question - what have all these things got to do with each other? For example, what has a neurological project investigating flies brains in Los Angeles and Hamburg, got to do with Edward Kennedy, or indeed, the Unabomber? This is really the question posed by the project, that of synchronizing various elements from past and present histories (if indeed, you can ever have a 'present history'), and combining them into a context where they do actually bear strong relation to each other. This allows for the fictitious presentation of information as well of course, but more importantly, in a plausible way - there is no real need to doubt the information being presented - whether or not this is because of the style of presentation, the medium itself, or some unknown psychological trigger I'm not sure, but when the project explains how the Unabomber wrote letters to Edward Kennedy, whether or not its real or not becomes slightly blurred - but within the context of the work - it did happen of course.
So what ultimately is created, and this of course is hinted at by the number of geographically oriented interfaces in the project, is virtual space. So when I talk about 'travelling' or 'navigating' information, the form it takes is really a three dimensional, even four dimensional one, or
at least the blinkered illusion of this anyway. So the further you travel through the material, the more links and strange coincidences you find, and really, the CD-ROM is specifically structured in order for this to happen, although whilst not making absolutely direct connections between events. So to give an example, you might be within the Unabomber section, which provides an archive of information about a (now captured) American terrorist, whose cause was that of the railing against technology. Strange and ironic then, that the absolutely definitive place from which to obtain material on his movements should be the Internet. Stranger still perhaps, to turn that material into a CD-ROM...
Anyway, within the Unabomber section is a subsequent subsection on the activities of the 'Unapack' group, a team of political activists who seriously proposed the Unabomber (or Theodore Kaczynski to use his real name) for presidential election during the 1996/1997 campaign season. The information presented consists of posters, stickers, shots of rallies, and even a fictional stadium, where, within the context of the project, one of the more prominent Unapack rallies was held. This uses quicktime virtual reality to give a 'virtual tour' of the ground from most areas of the building. Then cut to the Edward Kennedy section for example, where you can find an almost identical subsection of material outlining his failed attempts at the presidency. The idea triggered off here is that you are returning to an almost identical set of information which you feel as if you've seen somewhere before but can't really place exactly where, almost like a virtual deja-vu. Much like returning to the same point in the labyrinth and realising that now you're really lost. The CD-ROM creates an almost unnegotiable set of levels of information, entirely dependent upon the choices of the viewer, or 'player'.
So the entire project fits together by presenting an often fictional collection of histories, which, when woven together through this subtle cross-referencing of imagery and text, attempt to delve into the notion of alternative histories, possible and probable histories, or even what it might mean to construct a history, through the perpetual stream of data arriving at your computer via the Internet. In this sense, it also touches upon the availability and accessibility of information via this medium. The fact that just about everything is available but a choice has to be made about what you want available is also paralleled by the project in two very distinct ways.
Firstly, through the way in which the interfaces work (to return to my earlier point) in that the buttons or clickable areas really have to be found in order to be accessed, there is no obvious method in which to start here (perhaps this becomes like a blinkered form of the Internet Search Engines), and secondly, the notion of wading through all this material inevitably (due to the screen or flatness of a projection) invokes a laziness in which the participant doesn't want to read the text but somehow becomes induced into some kind of mouse click festival, as if looking for the next big hit. The body of the text becomes strangely redundant in the ultimate experience of the project and is often just reduced to pure cosmetic effect. This is precisely one of the problems with text on screen, particularly on the Internet, as there are so many factors working against it. For example, it's just easier, quicker, and plain cheaper to download the file and read it offline, or failing that, print it out. This way you have it forever and you lose that temporariness of the screen.
My subsequent step sideways from the rather page-like production of CD-ROMs was to move towards a more fluid visualisation of that spatial navigation of a collection of gathered material. Perhaps a somewhat simultaneous notion of the idea of a virtual space, or what that virtual space might be. So the labyrinths of the CD-ROM became more concretely visualised into the mazes and environments of level editing for first person perspective games, of which DOOM is probably the most famous, or indeed, infamous.
This particular brand of interface and programming structure really allows for the construction of virtual spaces into which objects might be placed, monsters could live, and perhaps therefore our traditional conception of a computer game compounded. However, my experience of using such a tool (and they are, after all, tools), was to create a collection of purely network levels, where the possibility to play other people on other computers becomes possible, and in terms of the Internet itself, this is one of the fastest growing and most technologically advanced fields so far, with people scaring themselves stupid playing network deathmatches with others all over the world, and inflicting virtual carnage upon each other.
The network game returns the notion of an uneasy remoteness to the computer gaming idea. With the network possibility, a number of different computers can be 'gathered' together, either through an internal network such as Ethernet or Local Talk, or, as I mentioned before, over a modem and through the telephone lines, enabling the computer game to now become a global event.
This, of course, proliferates and even returns the idea of the faceless, remote opponent to the computer game. It's almost like a kind of bizarre solution, whereby you invest in a game for your computer, spend weeks, even months conquering and mastering it, until you can smash the computer's efforts into the ground, whereupon the natural progression is to look for fresh meat. The network games provide this, in terms of presenting a simulated version of playing against the computer, yet with all the imperfections and unpredictability of a human player now thrown in. You might not even know the other player, so their presence within the game bears close similarity to what the computer would generate anyway. The idea is though, and this parallels the problems encountered with the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue from IBM, is that the human opposition would move around in an entirely would never be instructed to achieve, and the learning of movement patterns and behaviours becomes completely obsolete. This technique provides and ensures that no two games are ever the same, let alone similar, and almost removes the notion of strategic play (except perhaps for varying degrees of hiding of course).
To further complicate the process, computer terminals providing information about the environment, and clues to where things may have been hidden within the game were scripted in, and depict digital, but often photo graphic representations of information which might help the player in some way.
But what about the environments? Would they be the typical gladiator's arena so often found on the game disks, or would they incorporate much bigger projects, involving strategy perhaps. Of course, one of the obvious problems involved here is in the danger of making the level too big, as if this happens, the players will just never find each other, and the experience becomes ultimately frustrating. Yet in saying this, I decided to propose an eight player network game which would be played within the environment of a virtual Jan van Eyck Akademie. I'm currently working in the real one in Maastricht. Here I decided to join all of the computers together within the real academy, over the internal network. So, from the library, the computer room, video suites etc.) but through the means of a virtual representation of that same space. A way of joining a real architectural environment together through the medium of its virtual parallel. So the whole thing again doubles back on itself by almost tripling the sense of a representational space, or playing with the idea of what it might mean to make a virtual space based on something which already exists.
The furthest point on the arc comes with the construction of a museum space, complete with Andy Warhol retrospective installed, in which, as a single player game primarily, but with network possibilities, the problem solving within the game becomes more important. For example, keys have to be found, secret doors unlocked, storerooms explored or switches punched, purely to remove further the idea of shooting people in rooms, so symptomatic of many commercial releases.
A further application of this idea of environment creation comes with a trailer which was made for the forthcoming event at the Lost and Found evenings at De Waag. Here, there was a pseudo-virtual Waag programmed in, complete with Rembrandt paintings on the wall from his Anatomy Lesson, which allegedly was or wasn't painted there. Anyway, into this environment were placed typographical sprites, spelling out the three words, lost and found. There was then a three player network game, and a film made documenting the 'action'. The work really acts as a primitive typewriter in many ways, in which a specific combination of words in produced in accordance with whatever you press on the keyboard. The sprites react to your pressing the keyboard (or in other words, moving around) and exist independently of each other - meaning that they attack each other as well as the players. The ‘losts' for example will attack the 'founds' and vice versa. This more typographical application of the gaming idea I feel is perhaps one interesting avenue through which to explore more practical uses of game design, perhaps within a more authored, educational context.
In terms of another step sideways, but essentially again working on the same concerns, I produced a much smaller project entitled Random. Wad. This was essentially identical to the previous environments which had preceded it, but with one major difference. There was now a reversal of the visual code of the game, in which a simulation of playing the same game environment (the walls, floors, ceilings, sides and so on) is made visual, and the graphic representations which that code produces, what you would normally see, made invisible. Therefore, when you move the mouse around, as you might to move around in the gaming environment, you see a change in the code generated for what you would see. Ultimately it's a number cruncher, and designed as a piece of pseudo-software.
In most games, there are a number of standard, 'set' interfaces, but to deviate from this is really the key to creating something new. For example, there's the Doom-esque, hand at the bottom of the screen version, the Tomb Raider over the shoulder interface, the in the cockpit view, the God view of Sim City, the list goes on, so the Random. Wad project really attempts to extrapolate this idea a stage further, or a stage sideways I should perhaps say.
So to return to the final section of our main menu here, I will attempt to discuss my current project, a much larger project this time, involving such diverse elements as Internet chatrooms, mailing lists, virtual communities, pop videos, even junk e-mail (or Spam, as it is affectionately known). The project is essentially sited on an idea of combining two very separate elements together using a variety of hyperlink means. This synchronicity idea basically comes from two main sources, which I feel I should briefly touch upon here. Firstly, in response to Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass project, which some of you may know, in which he organised for a brass band to play a selection of Acid House anthems. And secondly, from the synchronicity archive on the Internet, which investigates the idea that you can match up some records with the most unlikely of movies. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is apparently an absolutely perfect soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz for example, Nevermind by Nirvana, matches up with The Muppet Movie, and it's really this obscure collaboration of material, be it coincidental or otherwise, which really forms the kernel of the new work. In this sense, it has very strong parallels with the Justitia Scientia project, although this time working on a more specific relationship between two items. Based on an interpretation that pop group Radiohead's Paranoid Android is a story of the demise of the Spice Girls, the project works in two very distinct ways. It's important to say here, that these two items reflect back upon each other so closely, that it is often quite difficult to separate one from the other. So the first theme of the project really charts the expansion of the idea, from small conversations to more complex discussions on a broader scale and bringing in much more complicated concerns, whereas the second theme, which only really exists as a consequence of the first, charts the establishing, maintaining and sustaining of a relationship with a virtual community through an Internet chatroom.
So ultimately, the work becomes more of a documentary of events which have already taken place, producing an archive of on-line conversations, received e-mail (including pictures). Essentially the link between the two themes, which run closely parallel to each other, is that, whilst looking for the material to use in corrollating Paranoid Android with the Spice Girls, I came across Polyethylene, a chat room designed for Radiohead fans, whereby I began my relationship with them by posing the Paranoid / Spice match up to them, to see what they would think. As soon as this was done, a much wider discussion was opened up, and the project became far more about everyone's on-line personalities as it were, than about my original idea, although of course, within the context of the work, they sit side by side. The latest installment to the work comes from establishing and documenting my on-line relationship with a young British guy called Alex Seeley, a Radiohead fan very much interested in my question, but who went to school with Emma Bunton, better known as Baby Spice. It's really the unpredictability of contacting such people (he now visits my own chatroom, for more intimate, less crowded conversations) which the CD-ROM is charting, and eventually I hope to again assimilate most of the information into one, large, navigatable format, although this is really what's happening in terms of how the project is made, like a constantly, daily updated website. In a sense, the work is just added to every day, and then I go to the chatroom in the evening and the whole process starts again, so what you're really seeing here is just the shell, the skeleton of the work, hence my feelings of it being work in progress.
So to return to my initial point by way of conclusion, the work I've presented here tonight is really an extrapolation, extension, and exploration of the idea of a digital history, or at least how a history might exist within a digital format. Either through a navigatable page-like CD-ROM, an eight player network game, or transcripts of online chatrooms, I feel that this idea of a digital history is of course something which is very much in its infancy, and its future something of great fragility, but also of great interest. On these points, I will conclude my discussion, and offer the subject up for us all to discuss. Thank you very much for listening.
