Ups and Downs of Interpassivity: Email Dialogue between Geert Lovink and Gijs van Oenen

In early 2004 I started to work at the Polytech in Amsterdam (HvA), where I became a researcher at the School of Interactive Media. The brand new degree was initiated by Emilie Randoe, whom I knew from my studies in political science and the cultural debating centre de Balie, then Waag Society. The program was barely 18 months old when I joined. I thought it would be a good idea to kick off my job appointment with an internal discussion on how everyone defined interactivity. I had no emotional investment in this term and wondered how the others were thinking about it. Was it merely chosen for tactical reasons, or did the staff really believe in user-centred experiences? I thought the term was too cold, with too many references to IT, computer science and engineering. It seemed like some notion from the roaring 90s, a period that had just come to a crashing halt. In the course outlines the artistic, critical, and cultural dimension of interactive media by and large failed. To me interactive sounded quasi-corporate, much like multi-media: a special effect without an agenda. It smelled too much like modernist machine aesthetics that were ultimately self-referential. The School for Interactive Media was also light years away from V2, ZKM and Ars Electronica, though maybe this wasn’t too bad for the job prospect of the students after all. It was time to confront mass markets and large user bases—but why utilize such an uncritical term?

In essence Interactive Media was a vocational BA web design degree with a firm Web 2.0 agenda. The emphasis was on usability. During the difficult aftermath of dotcommania the central role of the user-as-producer could no longer be overlooked. Enough with the e-commerce and virtual reality hype. No more utopian promises or dystopian warnings. Interactivity had to deliver real experiences to users. The question in the early days of user-generated content was: are systems going to be designed in the name of real participation, or will we continue with cool but non-functional demo-design? We discussed Margret Morse’s poignant text Poetics of Interactivity, published online as an excerpt in the online journal Switch.¹ This still remains one of the best texts available on the topic. Since then the intellectual investment in ‘interactivitiy’ has remained weak. Interactivity continues to be unreflective design practice, defined by engineers. Most of the so-called ‘interactive’ art works seek to expand the techno-aesthetic experience and rarely question the very terms of new media communications, and if they do so, their fame remains reduced to the gallery and festival contexts, only known to experts.

So, will the faith of its mirror concept, interpassivity, be similar? Wikipedia is rather short about interpassivity and defines it as “the act of projecting one’s own self onto remote objects, that is, onto people or things, in so doing delegating the sensation to that person or object.”² The few examples the article provides are from television—perhaps a sign of its retro nature? There is always a future in which to stop thinking for a while, take a step back and relax. Even though the desire to do nothing pops up every now and then—I am not a promoter of so-called ‘active’ holidays—I would rather not like to delegate my holidays to someone else. As an activist I might look with mixed feelings at calls for a collective break. The desire to stop working could also be the starting point of a general strike or a fantastic party. We’re not in a situation of political decline and depression comparable to the mid 80s. We haven’t come to an end of an exhausting cycle of social movements, all bound to disintegrate. As a media theorist and internet critic, it is impossible to judge the slow discourse around ‘interpassivity’ on its own merits. At times I think of it as a ‘Kampfbegriff’, a polemic term that was merely invented to provoke its opposite, aimed to dissolve its counter part...