Edited by Kornelia ImeschHebei Fine Arts Publishing House

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Delegating the Act, Translating the ObjectHanna Hölling

In his lecture titled The Creative Act, given in April 1957 at the convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, Marcel Duchamp declares that no work of art can disclose precisely what its creator had in mind. He points to what he calls “the personal ‘art coefficient,’” which “is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” Describing the act of creation as a “chain of subjective relations” and the artist’s struggle toward the realization as “a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions refusals, decisions” Duchamp not only points toward the gap between the artistic intention and its realization, demystifying the unequivocality of artistic creation, but also assigns great importance to the spectator’s ability to determine the work on the aes-thetic scale. He posits that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spec-tator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Duchamp maintains that “this becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists,” endowing the act of performance with a potential for historic validation (Duchamp 1957). The necessity for a work of art to be read, interpreted and completed by the viewer is radicalized even further in one of Duchamp’s earlier letters, in which he states that “a work is made entirely by those who look at it and read it and who make it survive by their accolades or even their condemnation” (Duchamp 1956).

In this short essay I strive to recover some of the multiple contexts of interactivity that originate from the history of our engagement with the interpretation of written, painted and performed media. I also discuss the ways in which interactivity is involved in the relationship between the human and the machine. Finally, I attempt to identify how the concepts of interactivity might be applied to the interpretation of the oeuvre of the Swiss photographer and artist Hannes Schmid, with a special emphasis on his interactive multimedia project MOMENTOUS, shown at the Beijing Today Art Museum in the summer of 2014.

Duchamp’s aforementioned Creative Act appeals from at least two perspectives. First, Duchamp asserts a “mediumistic being” of an artist, putting him in the position of a “medium” (Duchamp 1957). This could be interpreted both in the light of the surrealists’ experiments with the telepathic abilities of a person involved in paranormal activities, but it could also be seen from the point of view of an artist’s role as a transmitter of a message, a role roughly reassembling that of technology-based media. Without risking pure specu-lation, it presently suffices to mention that the parameter of interactivity is one of the aspects widely discussed in the realm of new and technology-based media. I shall return to this issue at a later point. Second, Duchamp’s statement is not entirely new—the poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé already noted the openness of a work of literature in the act of reading, asserting the notion of process-based art that would encompass aleatoric and

From Social to Technological Interactivity:

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permutable aspects (Arns 2004). The idea was to depart from the “static object to dynamic process, from contemplative reception to active participation” (ibid).

Media theorist and art historian Dieter Daniels locates the origins of modernism’s theoretical engagement with the concept of interactivity as early as the writings of Charles Baudelaire, which assume the translator’s role of the spectator of an already translated text, broadly understood (The Painter of Modern Life, 1859). Interestingly, Baudelaire also correlates music with the written word and painting by asserting that through a creative use of imagination, the listener plays a significant role in completing the work. This musical correlation encour-ages association with another relevant theory originating from music—Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (Open Work, first draft 1958, publication 1962, English translation 1989).

Corresponding chronologically with the Fluxus movement, which propagated an open status of artworks along the same lines, Opera Aperta is an examination of the role of subjective interpretation, arguing that a work of art is brought to completion by interpreters. The idea of an open work serves to explain and justify the apparently divergent characteristics of modern and traditional art (Robey 1989). In the aleatory music performances of the 1950s, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, Eco observes that the performer is given increasing autonomy with regards to the manner he or she chooses to play a work—thus the interpretation of a work is left to improvised creation at the performer’s own discretion (Eco 1989). As opposed to classical music, composers of new music “reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their ele-ments” (Eco 1989). These works appeal to the initiative of a performer and hence are incomplete and infinite, prescribing specific repetition along defined coordinates. They are open for completion by a performer who concludes the work, who experiences it on an aesthetic level (Eco 1989). The author of such an “unfinished” work passes it on to the performer in the form of a “construction kit”; the openness of the artwork in Eco’s sense manifests at the social level of execution and collaboration, yet is not exhausted by it (Eco 1989, Hölling 2013).

Opera Aperta also addresses another form of openness of an artwork—the openness to the receiver. It acknowledges the personal perspective of an addressee of a work of art, whose response to the stimuli is shaped by his or her own cultural background, set of tastes, inclinations and prejudices. However, Eco fails to specify the degree and nature of the spectator’s creative involvement (Almenberg 2010). The work of art, according to him, may only be aesthetically validated from the perspective of the subjective views of its address-ees. Here, again, to reiterate Duchamp, “it is the viewers who make the pictures” and, in line with this, yet more radically, the literary theorist, critic and philosopher Roland Barthes proclaimed—arguing against traditional literary criticism—the birth of the reader at the cost of the death of the Author (Death of the Author 1967).

This is taken on in another postmodern expression of the author theory: Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an author” (1969), which postulates the reduction of the mark of the author

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to the “singularity of his absence.” Whereas Foucault assumes the role of the author as a function of a written work, a part of its structure but not necessarily part of the interpretive process, Barthes holds that one, in order to draw meanings from the author’s work, should not rely on the aspects of an author’s identity related to his or her political or religious views, historical and cultural context or personal attributes. In an often quoted passage, Barthes compares a text to a tissue or fabric of quotations and postulates that the essential meaning of the artwork is fully dependent on the reader, who situates the text in a tissue of dis-courses and in relation to other texts, shifting the conventional importance of its origins to the importance of its destination in the person of the audience (Barthes 1967). Similarly, the philosopher Denis Dutton suggests that careful attention must be paid to the audience’s contribution to the context of the performance as a living critical tradition (Dutton 2003). Through the example of audiences attending opera performances in Milan’s La Scala, he posits that the particular character of the receivership (and its connoisseurship) renders the spectacle complete. He heightens the importance of this statement by thinking about an audience entirely made up of tourists that hypothetically replaces the indigenous, natural audience knowledgeable of forms of spectatorial behaviors.

Apart from Duchamp and the theoreticians discussed, there are others who have had a pioneering role in the development of interactivity. Worth mentioning is the avant-garde composer, theorist and artist John Cage, who implements concepts of chance operations and contingency and, equally, the advancement of the use of electronic media in arts that somewhat preceded both Duchamp’s and Eco’s influential propositions. In his compositions for radio dating back to the early 1950s, such as Imaginary Landscape (1951, twelve radios, twenty-four performers), Cage already seemed to be making use of the idea of an open work prior to its theoretical formulation (Daniels 2008). Inheriting and further developing ideas from Cage’s work (but also from Futurism and Dada), emerging art forms of the 1960s, for example happening, performance and installation art, have become explicitly interactive, presupposing the active participation of the viewer.

But what does it mean to say that something is interactive? As a primary definition, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that interaction pertains to the state of being reciprocally active, acting upon or influencing each other. The meaning of the word “interactive” may furthermore concern a computer or other electronic device that allows a two-way flow of information between itself and a user, the former responding immediately to the input of the latter. This association draws attention to the concept of interactivity that has become explicated with the rise of new media and the marriage of art and technology. Thus the term not only encompasses the theoretically scrutinized social interaction, but also the techno-logically oriented human-machine relation named eponymously (interactivity).

How have (new) media become “interactive,” then? And is it correct to understand compu-tational media as inherently interactive? There is much interest in interactivity in media theoretical discourses—sometimes justifiably so, sometimes as a consequence of mis-guided assumptions. Media theorist Lev Manovich, for instance, presumes that the concept

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of interactivity in new media has been misinterpreted and explains it by placing “interac-tivity” within six categories exemplifying “what new media is not” (2002: 66). Manovich claims that the concept of interactivity applied to computer-based media in a literal way is based on a tautology, as these media have to be activated by a human to perform functions in the first place, rendering the “interactive” label for computer media meaningless. Instead, Manovich proposes to differentiate between various types of interactivity, specified in rela-tion to their ‘open’ or ‘closed’ set-up. In comparison to traditional media, however, comput-er-based media pushes the interactive structures further, putting, as he asserts, “new cognitive and physical demands on the viewer” (Manovich 2002:71). It is perhaps the vis-ibility of interactivity in media, coinciding with fashionable concepts such as “interactive media” and “games” that contribute to the ease with which its aesthetic-theoretical roots, its connections with Dadaists, constructivists, and later the 1960’s Fluxus movement, hap-pening and performance art are overlooked. Furthermore, misinterpretations might result from the very different contexts within which interactive media are displayed and/or medi-ated. Media theorist Erkki Huhtamo suggests that interactive arts were first welcomed and commissioned by science centers rather than art institutions (Huhtamo 1995), causing them to be more often featured in the context of art and technology rather than of art and culture, each of which has a distinctive culture of display. Seen more positively, we might read this split within the frame of a paradigm shift proposed by Daniels: the 1960s propagated media as one means of achieving the socio-cultural utopia of a transformed society (involving ‘intermedia,’ early telecommunication experiments of the 1970s and 1980s), whereas the 1990s saw media as a leitmotif for cultural, social and economic transformations (Daniels 2008). Yet the primarily technological interactivity of the 1990s that suppressed social inter-action has been restored with the rise of Internet and its accompanying notions of interaction and interactivity linked with media assisted human interchange (Arns 2004).

Further thinking about the implementation of the term ‘interactivity,’ the question arises whether, and to what degree, the ability of an artwork to perform its “work” on the viewer and vice versa can indeed be classified as “interactive.” Perhaps this is the level of aware-ness necessary for identifying the degree of interactivity when interpreting the work of a contemporary artist. Interactivity, as the art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has noted, is scarcely a new notion (1998). The novelty, he proposes, lies in the intersubjectivity and interaction which are neither

fashionable theoretical gadgets nor adjuncts to (alibis for) a traditional artistic practice. They are at once a starting point and a point of arrival, or in short the main themes that inform their work. The space in which their works are deployed is devoted entirely to interaction. It is a space for the openness … that inaugurates all dialogue. (Bourriaud 1998)

It is—I suggest—within such a space of openness that the work of Hannes Schmid resides. There are multiple levels of interactivity embraced in Schmid’s work. Against Baudelaire’s rejection of photography, understood as a purely mechanical reproduction of reality (which,

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to be sure, fails to acknowledge the noise and chance that might endow the image with “art coefficient”), already Schmid’s lens operates on numerous levels of interactivity. In an end-less potential of discovery and unconcealed fascination, his camera involves a profound engagement in the world at which it is directed. From behind the lens, in a pulsating, unstop-pable tempo of racing cars and glossy heroes, the depictions of a highly aestheticized world (studies rather than snapshots) force the beholder to react to what he or she contemplates. It is a psychological interaction by nature. For those familiar with Schmid’s other photo-graphic series, the act of viewing demands balancing the line between the voyeuristic, almost uncanny gaze and the quasi-innocent curiosity that his works convey. One may face various individuals—Western idols, stars, outcasts—and cannot withdraw from them. Instead, the viewer is automatically involved in this spectacle—a journalistic fragment, eternalizing, perhaps, a happening, a gesture, a grimace. Given the promises of the Today Art Museum in Beijing, however, this kind of engagement centered around Formula 1 drivers and focused on technical perfection seem to be countered by the stillness of the almost empty landscape sculptured by large fields of suspiciously well thought-through compositions. On the Bonne-ville Salt Flats of Utah, U.S., Schmid thematizes the (failed) plan of setting a speed record with a Formula 1 car, which subsequently becomes, in this exhibition, his antithesis.

From there, the exhibition curated by the art historian Kornelia Imesch offers, in a powerful gesture, an interesting twist from a passive to active—or even proactive—spectatorial engagement. This is also precisely where the primary level of interaction resides. The viewer encounters some large-scale mobiles—circular segments that rotate and are illuminated by images projected from digital projectors. With great intensity, this immersive audiovisual experience enables the spectator to watch electronic images projected onto the circulating structure. Not only do the images offer fragments reminiscent of Schmid’s other video and photographic works, but the visitor to the exhibition is encouraged to upload images using an app on his or her tablet or smartphone and thus becomes, in a direct sense, co-author of the installation. In this space titled “Synthesis,” the interaction is conceived to be resulting from the dialectic of the exhibition spaces (“Thesis” and “Antithesis”) visited by the viewer prior to entering this room.

Inevitably, also in view of the discussion of various levels of interactivity, the concept of “tool being” by the philosopher Martin Heidegger comes to mind and might be helpful in under-standing the ontological underpinnings of artworks involving aspects of interactivity. Roughly speaking, according to Heidegger, the act of using a tool diminishes our awareness of the fact that what we are applying is, indeed, a tool. Consequently, some of the tool’s qualities and characteristics become blurred. The Being of things recedes as it becomes suppressed by the ontic realm of human beings (Heidegger 1962, Bold 2011).

Heidegger further distinguishes between a tool that is present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and a tool that is ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Once one becomes familiarized with the tool and forgets to think about it beyond its use value, the tool withdraws itself from being present-at-hand—transparent and inconspicuous. Thus only when the tool falls into the state of

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unreadiness-to-hand (when it fails or brakes) its reception alters radically—its user may once again become aware of it. Malfunction, as the philosopher Bruno Latour puts it, can trigger another perspective on things (1999). So perhaps in this sense, exemplified by a proactive involvement of the viewer in Schmid’s installation (proactive as opposed to active, in which the viewer would be involved in the installation interactively yet in a more passive way, for instance, by being filmed rather than contributing to the work by actually doing something—taking and uploading images), there is some kind of a readiness-to-hand that we expect of the tool that is different from its sheer presence-at-hand. Thus the condition for the possibility of something becoming interactive would lie in its categorical readi-ness-to-hand, as opposed to “unreadiness-to-hand,” which would not only disable the interactive implementation of the tool but also any kind of its implementation.

There are two salient aspects to this: First, as discussed before, it is only when the tool becomes unready-to-hand that it becomes an obstacle to achieving goals (here, the failure in the interactive transmission of the images to the rotating structures) and, second, inter-activity renders it impossible to take the tool in question for granted. Because its function cannot simply become transparent, interactivity withdraws the tool from being simply present-at-hand because it is always being noticed.

To sum up, it can be said that Schmid’s mobile structures allow for the final synthesis between the viewer and the exhibition space by way of interactive and proactive confronta-tion. This is also precisely where the tool’s presence-at-hand overcomes its readiness-to-hand. Being engaged in the spectacle through pure interaction, the images are not only simply there (which is true of those created by the artist), but are also made by us and, possibly, also of us. This is exactly the case in this installation due to the inclusion of the tool that becomes even more present because it is vital to the work’s completion on the aesthetic level. Moreover, what should not remain unmentioned is the convergence of two cultures, sets of views and arguments—Eastern and Western—that this space enables, shifting the significance of interactivity to the performative realm of socio-cultural encounter.

To conclude, I propose that Schmid’s immersive environment combines the two historical modalities of interactivity. On the one hand, it activates the avant-garde wish to extend the notions of authorship to the viewer, because the work’s completion depends on his or her very presence, participation and interpretation (in that sense it might be seen as a continuation of the legacy of the artists such as Cage, Kaprow and Nam June Paik, but also Dan Graham, Peter Campus and Peter Weibel who mastered the concept of closed circuit installations in the early days). On the other hand, the possibility of taking an image and transferring it to the installa-tion’s operating system in order for it to be displayed as an aesthetic part of this Gesamt-kunstwerk incorporating the viewers’ presence evokes the link with (and is enabled by) technological interactivity and the human-machine exchange. Whereas, on the level of content, the suggested synthesis is manifest in the quotations of various visual inputs by images which echo moments of the exhibition, the viewer, on the conceptual level, merges with and immerses into the installed environment through the manipulation of the technological apparatus.

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