IIIe ETATS GENERAUX DE L'ECRITURE INTERACTIVE : Tactile and
Precise
Paris, 1999: The government has decided to heavily invest all spheres
of French society with "New Technologies". In concert with the
Troisièmes états généraux de l'écriture Interactive, an
exhibition of interactive art was held at the Forum des Images,
previously the Vidéothèque de Paris, located in the Halles, at the heart
of the City of Light.
Dates: a symposium on the 16th and 17th of November, accompanied by
16 interactive installations running until the end of the month. The
works presented consisted mainly of CD-ROMs, a few digital tableaus
incorporating images, sound and movement, and interactive environments
that examined questions of identity in the viewer's relationship with
the virtual work; they also explore the extent of an object's resonance
beyond its presence and materiality in the spatial setting.
Organizers: Art 3000, an association with a shoestring budget which
has spent the greater part of the last decade reflecting on multimedia
tools and on the impact of all things digital in research and structures
of new forms of expression. Two brothers head this collective: Florent
Aziosmanoff, creator-philosopher, and Nils Aziosmanoff, political
musician. Art 3000 is the official organizer of ISEA 2000, a prestigious
world event that will be held in France in December 2000. It is
therefore with a mind oriented toward semantic precepts and with a
desire to assert new ways of "thinking creation" with the new media that
speakers shared the results of their inquiries concerning the structural
axes of digital writing.
Major concepts were broached, illustrated by large screen displays of
some CD-ROMs, commented by Florent Aziosmanoff in the presence of the
various authors, who were very relevantly questioned by Karine
Douplitzky, another lead thinker of Art 3000. The symposium began with
the presentation of interactive games, to clearly state the new domains
of meaning, such as taken up and consumed by the greater number, and to
show spaces of semantic infusion, taken for what they are rather than
for what we would like them to be, stigmatized in their possible
cultural dissemination.
The online game Mankind, supplied with an
installation disk, was a breathtaking example of what virtuosity in
network techniques and logic can do for recreative diversion and for the
pleasures of communication collectively shared around discussions
concerning war strategies. The objective of the game, once the
participant is arbitrarily chosen as a member of either of the two camps
- the inside and the outside empires - is to initiate encounters and
partnerships between player-vassals of the same camp, who, between
warlike engagements, invent new forms of exchange.In discussion groups created separately from the computer game,
participants have real world discussions about the development of their
virtual identities. The game is a great success and will soon me
marketed in the United States. It also generates a good deal of
employment, as it demands the presence of monitors, full-fledged group
leaders who must evaluate whether players are respecting the rules or
not. For instance, cliques using the space for promoting pedophilia
and/or Nazi ideologies are excluded.
Questions were not long in coming
and a profound difference between Europe and North America in all things
PC became evident: why should carnal and pornographic exchanges be
excluded? Would the survival of the species not depend more on the
reinvention of pornography than on the obsession with war promoted so
intensely by the video-gaming industry? Why would an arms dealer be more
highly regarded than a panderer? By presenting this game at the outset
of the symposium, what organizers wanted to emphasize, beyond the
message, was an awareness of the generational fact underlying the
Play-Station as access tool for the interactive reading of virtual
spaces. What this implied was the exclusion of a whole segment of the
population from these new technologies. The observation of interactive
writing is necessarily filtered through the psycho-sensory experience of
"clicking". And one should surely not disregard the tactile experience
of the Play Station, which brings both hands into play in the field of
dialogue. To all those over 25 this year: get cracking!
Isabelle, a CD-Rom created Thomas Cheysson, highlights an
author from the world of cinema who takes on the development of a
multimedia product as he would a film production. This game, which also
requires familiarity with the Play Station, portrays the world of
village mine. The hero, blinded in a previous altercation, is looking
for his brother who is investigating a sect-inspired plot. In order to
recall hidden evidence, the player must move (and think) in
counterpoint, from different points of view and in different spaces
within the same situation. The key to the mystery is only revealed at
the end of a succession of tests.
Other CD-Roms were discovered as one pointed and clicked, each of
which defined its style by the nature of the rapport established with
the viewer, and by devices generating any number of systems of
perception to meet the prodding action, the viewer's "clicking". Armand
Béhard's installation, P-M-E (père-mère-enfant), showcases a
marvellous aspect of interactive writing: offscreen presence in the
grain of the work. The author's offscreen presence represents a form of
authorial humility, a catharsis transmuted into resonant meaning; the
muted demiurge projects the pathos of his discourse into the exteriority
and empathy of others. The author pings the reader, who must find a
response in the immersion following the interaction.
The second day was devoted to sound and music and to issues related
to their generation via new technologies. Of prime importance are
image-sound correspondences, with which raves have familiarized us, the
VJ's visual effects syncopating with the DJ's mix. While music
traditionally finds its interactivity in an abstract hearing that
unfolds in a real space-time, the creators are here preoccupied with its
generation through the new tools of the art... How can artificial
intelligence generate musical phrases based on auditory contact, whether
artificial or natural? Beyond all possible ramifications and
interpretations of a music written in advance, the computer-artist
participates in the causality of sound on the instrument, in harmony
with the manifest presence of the hearing.
The conclusion of the IIIe États généraux de
l'écriture interactive -- which had accepted to welcome dissenters
from the interactivity bandwagon, like philosopher Bernard Stiegler,
among others -- is that digital tools indubitably allow us to produce
systems capable of taking initiatives related to the viewer's
interactive presence -- another string to the bow for hypertext authors
used to synchronizing 3D images, sound and meaning.
Pascale Malaterre
Translation: Ron Ross
