Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

5 | Events & Interactive Aesthetics

97 five eVents & InteractIVe aesthetIcs The image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable. Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media In the PreVIous chaPter, using Claerbout, Viola, and Graham, I cited various examples of the way in which both “old” and “new” media have been used to experiment with time. By using these artists as a lead in to the exploration of interactivity set out over the coming chapters, I do not, however, mean to imply that they have in some way influenced these works. In actual fact, many of the following examples pre-date Claerbout ’s and Viola’s work. This book after all is not an investigation that deals with media history in a linear sense. What I am asserting, though, is that these works all have something important in common: in their mediation of the world—re-presenting and re-ordering experience through the experimental use of technology—they are all implicitly concerned with the temporal, and further, the events that they initiate open new modes of temporal experience. The concept of the event is central to questions of digital aesthetics and interactivity. Interactive artworks are always in some sense theatrical , with their emphasis on the inclusion of a user and his or her physical actions. This moves interactive aesthetics beyond ideas of an aesthetic experience constituted merely by looking, where a “disinterested” subject apprehends a static object. The aesthetics of digital media are instead manifest in process; a process in which a computer, its processes, and a user all work together.1 Of course, this does not just involve a user encountering and intellectually responding to the computer’s data. I am trying here to work beyond the process by which data or images at the 98 Time and the Digital level of the screen are thought to “represent” their meaning, affect, or utility (data is of course not information, and information is of course not knowledge, aesthetic or otherwise). Rather, in terms of interactive aesthetics , the meaningfulness of our encounters flows interactively through process, as data is generated, recalled and reassembled by users in interactive settings.2 It is neither the computer nor the data nor the human alone that constitutes aesthetic meaning; it is rather the interpenetration of these bodies in the event of interaction that matters. The aesthetics of digital interactivity involve a process in which the user and the digital extend over each other, setting limits upon what the other can achieve, and in a sense “co-authoring” events. Instead of a user, as an outside entity, that merely accesses data from inside the computer, interaction through Whitehead can be thought of as a concrescence, in which the boundaries between living and inorganic are collapsed and the living human is always potentially contaminated by the inorganic technology.3 In the event of digital interaction, the human comes into contact with the aesthetics of the artwork that are registered through their senses and also the digital processes that provide the conditions for the digitally generated forms to emerge, and that may cause the “user” to behave in certain ways.4 These are quite often not registered consciously, but rather appear vicariously. For instance, in Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, mentioned in Chapter 1, the user’s experience is based not only on the appearance of the computer screen but on the experience of connecting and synchronizing real and digital spaces. The emphasis that I put on the digital overlay of physical movement, where the boundaries between living and inorganic are collapsed, is similar to the examples of the steam engine and communications technology provided in the Introduction. As Danius and McLuhan point out, developments in technology that marked the period we think of as being under the banner of modernism , such as industrial, travel, and communications technology, fundamentally altered the relationship between individuals and their environment .5 In both the examples of experimental digital art and the examples of modern technology, we see something similar. In both illustrations the user’s connection to technology, whether it be a steam engine, a printing press, or a digital network, causes them to move in, perceive, and experience the world in new ways. This type of interactive relationship between humans and technology will be fleshed out over the coming chapters, Events...