Indexing the Interface

Establishing a concept of "art at the interface," Kris Paulsen theorizes the impossible place of being in-between, or being a border. She does this through an exploration of screen-based artworks and the theory that emerges from them, spatializing our mind, ethics, and understanding of the world through the concept of the interface, the "slash," and the deictic shifting stimulated by the mediatic contemporary experience. Here/There moves from early 1970s video art experiments to drone warfare to show the ways in which the proliferation of screens has affected the historical trajectory of the way we conceive of telepresence or, as the word's etymology suggests, presence at a distance. Paulsen's book theorizes art-based technologies with dexterity, moving from the 1970s to the present by way of conceptual development rather than temporal necessity. In this development, the book builds on its own ideas: art-historical context informs screen-based experimental works, the tactile elements of television teach us to read more contemporary screens, and the index transitions from a sign lost due to overdetermination in cinema studies to a method of understanding the contextual ground of deictic signs.

Paulsen's foundational first chapter does an exemplary job of recapturing the concept of the index from a rhetoric that skewed the original sign into an analog dead space. Throughout photographic theory, the index, Paulsen argues, has been conflated with truth due to the ability of light to form a photographic emulsion through "touch" (22). Despite the argument that digital technologies are in fact not immaterial, Paulsen insists that "the 'materialist' argument for the nonindexical status of the digital breaks down because … materiality is not a necessary feature of the index" (23). Turning to Roland Barthes's description of the way a photograph engages with "touch," Paulsen explains that the photograph is not indexical because it is made through the touch of light; rather, "it is instead a thing that touches, whose effect is largely separate from the depictive qualities of the photograph" (27). The photographic index is based on the context, or the way that the sign "touches" its interpreter. The deictic shifters that encapsulate the index—"this," "here," "you," or "I"—reaffirm this position. This reading of the index, correcting the way it has become interpreted through photographic "mummification," becomes a key point for the book. The index returns in each chapter, driving the ways in which Paulsen moves between performance art, satellite television, and drone-simulated warfare.

Paulsen importantly links the index to the digital. She argues that the sign, rather than being a material substance that links meaning, is instead akin to properties that correspond to the virtual, a term that signals the idea of both "not really existing" and "almost the same" (33). Paulsen reinstates the index in the realm of the digital. "Rather than being 'dead' in the digital age … the index reemerges as a particularly helpful category for understanding mediated information, 'digital doubt,' and experiences through virtual interfaces. … [T]he index is an inherently ephemeral, doubtful, and distant sign that hinges on a split temporality," she writes (19). And so we get the idea behind the title of this book: as much as the early video of Vito Acconci's pointing finger in Centers (1971) or the famous Uncle Sam army recruitment posters (ca. 1917), the index signals something that is both "there" and "here," both distant (tele) and touching (presence).

Artistic enactment, satellite television, Internet communities, and drone warfare all contribute to the book's continued narrative on the interface. Paulsen uses performance art, such as Chris Burden's Doomed (1975), to move from the presence of performance to the way screens or an "interface" in fact change the way we look at art, technology, and humans. In this piece, Burden lay behind a sheet of tilted plexiglass for forty-five hours. Paulsen analyzes the way in which that one sheet of plexiglass served as a remediation of the museum stunt; the interface "mediates" a situation, making [End Page 341...