Michael Hammel
University of Aarhus, Denmark

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome! Or, Will There Be Art in the Global Village?

Keywords: digital art, computer games, global culture

The Global Village, coined by Marshall McLuhan, describes a vision of the impact of modern media, such as TV on society. The vision was that in the Global Village we would all 'live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums'.¹ The global audience would gather round the television and be united through the media. We would know everything about everybody everywhere.

The Network Society, or the Information Age, is in many ways the successor to the Global Village. The difference, though, is that we can now choose the tribal drum we want to hear, and ignore the others. We choose our tribal interdependence, or interconnectedness to certain communities and are no longer confined to a single space. On the contrary, our 'village' is a virtual or imaginary community that has no borders. It is a community based not on geography, race, ethnicity or familiarity, but on our own choice to belong to the group.

A consequence of this individualisation of culture is a greater diversity, and diversification. There is no longer such a thing as a single notion of culture. So, where McLuhan envisioned a whole society with one general culture, we now have the opposite, a fragmented mass of isolated communities.

Following the rise of the Network Society, where all knowledge is at one's fingertips and no longer in one's mind, a further consequence of this is that the bourgeois culture, which until now has been the predominant one, is disappearing. Thus with the bourgeois culture disappear the concepts of education and art, because these concepts are basic elements within the bourgeois society. Without a predominant culture it is no longer possible to distinguish between high culture (which is appreciated) and low culture (which is enjoyed).

In the Network Society there are no criteria that can be used to differentiate good from bad taste, nor can we say anything about what could or could not be called art. It is all about context. Information - as a difference that makes a difference - is only useful if you have something, a vantage point from which to differentiate. You need context - a cultural identity - that embeds one in society. As critics, we cannot be sure that we even share points of the culture in which the object was created, so how can we pass judgement?

Entertainment

This vacuum of indifference paves the way for entertainment, which needs no prerequisites for giving one a good time - a good laugh, though, is harder. Feeling entertained rests solely on one's personal aesthetic judgement, and is not influenced by any of the bourgeois ethics that constitute the concept of art.² Entertainment does not require knowledge of culture of any kind to know what and how to appreciate, but is sensory information that can be enjoyed or rejected immediately. Entertainment, therefore, is bound to be the aesthetic of the Network Society. This is already so today. If you look at contemporary art you find many works that try to entertain you. Trying to shock you, delight you, or the deeper points are vanishing in the mist of sheer fun.

Bourgeois Art as Culture

The concept of art is based on the belief in a unifying bourgeois culture, an elitist ideology that has been the dominant culture in the West for more than three centuries. But, as it becomes increasingly clear when entering the Network Society, the idea of art is different in the world's various groups and classes, and only 25per cent of the world's population live in the 'western' world. Art, therefore, must be understood as a local (western) cultural concept. Much in the same way as we look today at different cultures' artefacts, as decorative handicrafts. Balinese woodcarvers do not consider themselves artists, because they always do their best and nothing less. The same thing can be said to apply to computer artists. They often think of themselves rather in terms of explorers than as artists. They explore different ways of using the computer to engage people and do whatever is in their power to do with the computer. They explore the computer as a medium and as a machine. Nevertheless, most of them call themselves artists in order to explain the kind of exploration they do, and also because the art institutions offer some kind of funding for this kind of non-commercial research that rarely seems useful at first glance.

The problem, though, is that without a general culture we cannot identify art. In order to judge something as art we need to agree on what constitutes the dominant values of our society, and then look for art that discusses these values. With the individualisation of culture, the thought that there is a general cultural canon to follow becomes impossible, or at least, based on ill-founded assumptions. Every genre of art has its own culture and therefore its own rules, which you see most clearly in computer art.

Fig. 1. E-poltergeist by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, 2001

E-poltergeist (2001)³ (Fig. 1) by the British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, is an example of this. When started, E-poltergeist litters your screen with windows taken from Yahoo.com, accompanied by a carol orchestrated in midi. Unless you know the culture of the net, artworks like this are not obvious as art. One student on a computer art course thought it was broken and did not work, so she simply ignored it and went on to other works which were more straightforward.

Art historians have played an integral part in the painting and sculpture culture for centuries, but the media-art culture has escaped the confines of the bourgeois tradition, so the art historian is bound to explore a specific culture in which these artworks are created and to try to understand it. This can be achieved by becoming a part of the culture, for example as an anthropologist on fieldwork exploring the native tribe's customs. The difference is that the art historian does it in reverse, understanding the culture in order to understand the artefacts, and not understanding the culture through the artefacts. In this sense every artwork is from a 'foreign' culture. The art historian working with computer-based art must know the culture from which the art work emerges in order to be able to judge the artwork. So, when everybody else can let any kind of cultural knowledge go, the art historian must research and learn about the culture from which the objects have originated.

Interface

Every man-made object becomes an interface if you are looking at it through the eyes of an interface researcher. As a viewer or user, one is required to do something with the object, and the object somehow communicates what you are expected to do. Traditional artworks are interfaces for viewing, contemplation and interpretation. The interactive interfaces of computer-based artworks are interfaces for continuous tactile exploration and interpretation, but not for silent contemplation. Interactive artworks require the viewer to change position and to become a user and get involved in the actual development of the artwork, and there is simply no time to contemplate when one is in constant action.

Lately the term 'cultural interfaces' has surfaced in the discussion of artists' works in computer media. It is meant to describe the artistic approach to creating user interfaces in 'cultural objects distributed via the computer'⁴. To Lev Manovich 'cultural interfaces' denote the graphical style of how the user interface has been designed, and how these interfaces are different from the conventions made by the computer industry's human computer interface.

I will point out, however, that using the term 'cultural interfaces' in relation to computer-based artworks can be problematicif not pleonastic. On the other hand, it is a precise description of computer-based and distributed art, where we need to distinguish between the conventional work-oriented interface and the entertainment-oriented interface of the emerging mass of entertainment software.

Culture is interface – interface is culture

Culture as a common understanding is something that emerges among people when they meet. To identify one's culture, the single person or group requires an Other or Outsider – a difference to constitute the difference that makes them different from us, and at the same time, this difference constitutes what we have in common; being different from them the same way. We meet across our differences, even if we disagree. We do literally inter face!

From the computer industry standpoint, the interface towards the human, the user, is usually conceptualised in terms of Human-Computer Interface, HCI⁵, and its present shape is the WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer) interface, also known as the Graphical User Interface, or GUI.

The design of the GUI is the result of the traditions and conventions of computer science combined with intense research on human capabilities in order to optimise the design of the interface and make it usable, i.e. to minimise the possibility of human errors.

Looking at interface design from a cultural perspective it becomes clear that the Human-Computer Interface is always cultural! On the one hand one has the programmers, who know how to use the computer and have learnt to program, and thereby learnt to think in a certain computer-ready way. On the other hand, one has the user who, generally, is not trained in programming and has better things to do than toy around with a machine all day.

The conception of a general, value-free and intuitively understandable user-interface to the computer is grounded in the false belief that there is one general culture, where everybody is like everybody else. The truth though, is that we are all individuals and have different backgrounds (e.g. cultures), and as such we are all different. This is especially true for users. The only thing we do know about users is that they want to have things done.

The result is that the human-computer interface is the field for a clash between the culture of programming and the culture of using. This clash is found in most software, and reveals itself when certain procedures appear to be difficult to find and perform.

Art as interface

One feature these 'objects' have in common is that they do not follow the conventions for designing graphical interfaces. They are not always 'counter-intuitive' as some interactive artworks are, and challenge the conventions of interface design by short-circuiting the logic of conventional usability. In this sense these objects can be seen as experiments in how to design interfaces that work, but have a different design from the average conventional interface.

These artworks are programmed to clash with the expectations one has of an interface, artistic or not, in order to challenge the computer industry's monopoly on how one should interact with the computer. The situation with E-poltergeist is an example of this. The belief in the apparent generality and value-free nature of the interface is exposed as sheer ideology: somebody has already made a choice for us in advance. In the context of everyday use it is simply annoying, but in the context of the artwork this is an area for interpretation.

Other artworks apply a more traditional approach and limit the user's interaction to very few actions, as for example choosing a starting point. Having made the choice, the user is reduced to a viewer and can only watch as the artwork unfolds itself on the computer screen. Sometimes it feels like the artwork runs amok on the computer, and one is watching helplessly as it does so. The only thing one can hope for is that it does not harm the computer. The much proclaimed empowement of the user through interaction is turned on its head and shows how fragile this power is.

Playing games

Playing games is one way to learn the rules and values of society, and so, they are a key to our culture. This has been argued by many researchers in cultural studies and anthropology.⁶ And today if one looks at interactive artworks, this view seems more relevant than ever. But since there are no rules to learn, the play becomes empty toying around, or as with interactive artworks, revolves around the concept of interaction itself, questioning how to make interaction possible and fun. This path to interaction in art is presented in Soda Constructor (2001) (Fig. 2) by the group Soda and Apartment (2002) (Fig. 3) by Markus Wattenberg and Marek Walczak.

Fig. 2. Soda Constructor by the group Soda, 2001

Fig. 3. Apartment by Markus Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, 2002.

As a user one explores different ways to interact with the artwork. In Apartment one creates an apartment through writing about one's ideal home. The computer then sorts out the words and designs the apartment accordingly. The Soda Constructor is a playground for experimenting with the creation of string constructions. One can design one's own playground or choose a prefabricated one and then test it in the playground environment, where one can expose it to different actions, such as gravity and elasticity.

Fig. 4. Banja by the Team Chman, 1999–2001.

If one leaves the context of art one finds much more innovative and more pleasing games. The online community game Banja (1999–2001) (Fig. 4) by the French designers Team Chman is a good example. In 2001 they won a first price at Ars Electronica for this game and its innovative way to bond users in communities. It is a commercial game. As one walks the Rasta character Banja round the game world one collects points, and if one teams with other players in solving the tasks one collects even more points. The points can then be used for buying merchandise, especially music, which plays an integral role in the game. Every week features new music by DJs on different independent labels. One turns the music on as one walks around the characters' virtual home.

Conclusion

I have argued that there is no general culture in the Network Society and therefore no rules learnt through play, and (bad news for us art historians) no rules for art to play up against However, there are, as demonstrated, artworks that are some kind of game, or are at least playful. These artworks are artworks of the Network Society and through the games the user explores what it means to interact with a computer program in an entertaining way. Most people dismiss these works as toys and it is in some sense obvious that artworks that present the highest level of possibilities for a user's interaction present the lowest level of what we might call content or meaning. It is obvious, because the more freedom the user has the less can be defined by the creator. This is because the program needs to be undefined and open in order to let the user work freely. Of course, this means that meaning has to be put where the action is, and therefore, it is through one's own interactions within the artwork that the artwork's meaning arises.

The dominating problem is that we are still learning to interact and make proper use of the computer. Artworks such as Soda Constructor and Apartment show a different route to creating content by creating playful interfaces for an entertaining diversion, by letting the user interact and explore the program as a game or a play. This is a route that might possibly lead to new art in the Global Village. The face of art is inevitably changing towards more entertaining art.

November 2002

Notes

1. McLuhan, M. and Q. Fiore (2001). War and Peace in the Global Village, Corte Madero, CA: Gingko Press.

2. In a sense this constitutes a perverse version of Kant's aesthetics, in which the value free judgement is also free from the all-important sensus communis.

3. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/original/ (12th November 2002)

4. Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, p.68.

5. Recently, there has been a shift towards human-computer interaction. Here the approach is based on human activity research.

6. Huizinga, J. [1938] (1944), Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Translated by R.F.C. Hull, Routledge & Keagan Paul Ltd.; Turner, V. (1982), From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York, NY: PAJ Publications.