Gathering Ecologies Thinking Beyond Interactivity Andrew Goodman Gathering Ecologies Thinking Beyond Interactivity Immediations Series Editor: SenseLab “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains” – A.N. Whitehead The aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires. It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational fabric. Co-composition. “The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile” – A. N. Whitehead Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be answered by the Series authors. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory, movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture, philosophy ... the range is free. We invite you to roam it. Gathering Ecologies Thinking Beyond Interactivity Andrew Goodman London 2018 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2018 Copyright © 2018 Andrew Goodman Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration © 2018 Leslie Plumb Cover Design by Leslie Plumb Typeset in Open Sans, an open font. Print ISBN 978-1-78542-052-8 PDF ISBN 1-78542-053-5 Freely available online at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/gathering-ecologies Contents Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Thinking beyond interactivity 11 1. Interactivity and relation: The myth(s) of interactivity 30 2. Thinking action and event 54 3. Once more with feeling: Whitehead’s concept of feeling and a trans-human ethics 74 4. Thinking parasitic action 98 5. Walking with the world: towards a minor approach to performative art practice 110 6. Entertaining the environment 134 7. The noise in the noise: micro-perception as affective disruption to listening and the body 154 8. A thousand tiny interfacings: fertile acts of resistance 176 9. Sacrificial RAM: locating feeling and the virtual in software 198 Conclusion 232 Notes 240 Bibliography 300 Index 330 For three teachers who encouraged me to write: Max Balchin Karen Ward Edward Colless Acknowledgements Thanks must go to the many people who have contributed their knowledge, support and enthusiasm to the making of this book. First and foremost my thanks go to all the members of the Senselab with whom I have had the pleasure of collaborating and learning from, and without whom I could not have thought through these ideas. Amongst many, many Senselab members who deserve thanks, this includes Erin Manning, for her unending enthusiasm and warmth and for sharing art making and writing with me, Nathaniel Stern for various collaborations and his unbounded energy, Alanna Thain for her writing on my work and key conversations, Sam Spurr for artistic collaborations, Anna Munster for her valuable feedback, support and many helpful suggestions, and Andrew Murphie and Lone Bertelsen for their support, suggestions and feedback, and for sympathetic reading of papers in progress. Thanks also to a several people who contributed to the editing of earlier versions of various chapters: Din Heagney for his sterling efforts editing chapters and controlling footnotes, and Trinh Vu and Leonie Cooper for their many constructive suggestions. Thanks to a number of people who have contributed to my own artistic processes during this time through support, collaboration and feedback, including Oliver Cloke, Tony Falla, Samantha Bews, Luhsun Tan, Andrea Ekersley, Kent Wilson, Jude Anderson and Caroline Kennedy-McCracken. Thanks must also go to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their careful reading and efforts to improve the writing style and content of the book. 10 Acknowledgements Finally, thanks and love to my daughter Lucy for her humour and patience throughout the long process. Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in print before. Sections of Chapter One and Chapter Two appeared as “Rethinking Interactivity.” ACMC Interactive Conference Proceedings , Victoria, 2012. Edited by Matthew Hitchcock, Australasian Computer Music Association. A version of Chapter Five appears as: “Walking with the World: Towards an Ecological Approach to Performative Art Practice”. Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Pedestrian Mobility in Literature and the Arts, edited by François Specq and Klaus Benesch. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2016. An earlier version of Chapter Six appears as: “Entertaining the Environment: Towards an Ethics of Art Events.” AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, vol. 3, 2013/2014. A conference paper version of Chapter Eight appeared as “A Thousand Tiny Interfac(ing)s.” Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA2013, Sydney Edited by K Cleland, L Fisher and R Harley, 2013. Introduction: Thinking beyond interactivity Imagine you are out walking in the street. To go for a walk is to create, through the endless flow of interaction, bodily and spatially. With each step – and within each step – perceptual, sensorial and social possibilities are opened up, assemblages of forces gathered, altered and reconnected, complexities multiplied, memories activated. The moment is saturated with affectual relations and intensities (Lorrainne 2005, 73–4). With the fall of the same step, previous possibilities perish, simultaneously propelling the endless opening of fresh possibilities of connection (Manning 2009, 38–9). Try to map all the relations that go to make up one instant, one occasion: within your body, between body and world, mind and body, object and object – all the various ‘machinic’ combinations producing experience. You will have to consider subatomic, atomic and molecular forces with their general disregard for what we view as discreet bodies. You will want to account for the way the texture and gradient of the terrain shapes movement, rhythm and posture; how sensory perception, vision, hearing and touch and so on begin to ready the body for the next step; how the force of physical habits and body memory shape patterns of movement in the moment. Also present will be all the events of relation that have gone into making each tree, stone, person and sound you are interacting with, affecting your body more or less forcefully. Then there are the mental forces – ‘inextricably intertwined’ with the physical (Whitehead 1978, 325) – memories, 12 Introduction anticipations, evaluations, random associations made and forgotten, affects that will subtly or bluntly alter you, the myriad mental processes that sit behind conscious perception, yet nevertheless shape and reshape your body. Beyond that instant, in the next occasion, the concrescence of all these forces creates anew this simple act of walking the street. It is a constant, complexly enmeshed act of creativity: when we look honestly, all things, as Whitehead says, are vectors of relations (1978, 309). Such an everyday act is saturated with complexity and invention, and is rich with potential. But now imagine you are in a gallery, in some interactive installation. Things happen as you move around – sounds, lights or video. Perhaps triggered by your presence, the work pretty much does its own thing and its actions seem somewhat random, or perhaps it continues to develop as you engage, with a concentration on a demonstration of how your actions affect its workings. Either way, this type of work often lacks the complex, intertwined-ness of body and work, the perceptual nuance, the fluidity, the surprising originality of connection and thickness of experience of a simple walk outside. In general in this book my intention is to focus on a productive move towards exploring positive developments in the field, and so the critique of the poor state of interactive art is painted with broad strokes. I will, however, begin with a brief description of a here-unnamed work I encountered early in the process of writing that contrasts with this imagined walk and illustrates some of the problematic areas that concern me. This particular work formed part of a large exhibition of a broad range of interactive works. Inside the gallery were various pieces that responded to touch, movement or other interactions with the audience, with shifts in sound or video projections and so on. These included a couch that purred as you stroked it, a series of pot plants that made sounds as the audience moved amongst them, and a digital ‘mirror’ that reflected a greatly aged version of the participant’s face. All were at least mildly amusing works, if a Introduction 13 little one dimensional in their aesthetics and outcomes, with very direct and limited links between the actions of the viewer and the changes in the works these gestures triggered. The particular work that affected me most negatively was situated in a bare shipping container outside the main gallery. It was set up as a very small rave club that would respond to audience members’ dance moves to produce sound. It was silent and empty, other than a large speaker system, when I entered the space as the exhibition opened on a chilly 10-degree morning. The young invigilator then approached and enthusiastically encouraged me to begin dancing in order to trigger sounds. As I hesitated she became more forceful in her pleas for participation. I hovered near the door, unwilling to make a fool of myself in the service of as yet unheard music. Eventually the invigilator gave up in disgust and began to throw herself around the room as the very loud beats began, still pleading with me to join in. Needless to say I beat a hasty retreat, having not only not participated but having been made to feel guilty for my lack of enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice dignity for the sake of this artist’s work. The sense of obligation and potential humiliation of the experience was certainly powerful compared to the mild amusement of the works inside the gallery, however it was mostly a feeling of distaste for the genre that was evoked for me. It was closer to the uncomfortable duty of a work presentation than the more open-ended exploration and play that one might wish from an art-experience, whether as a solitary pleasure to be enjoyed in one’s own time, or as a collective investigation with a feeling of relational connection and trust. My concern with this work is not only that the interactive component (movement triggering sound, with the sound’s volume and speed relating in some way to the size and speed of the gestures) was somewhat limited in its aesthetic imagination, with little variation in reaction from participant to participant or over time within one interaction (although 14 Introduction I think this is a valid criticism of the work). The distributed agency frequently attributed to interactivity is often lacking in these linear, prescribed constructions of relation. At best, as Brian Massumi argues, the interactive experience might seek to expand awareness of the processes of perception and relation (2011, 45), yet too often remains programmatic and replays the same standardised reactions, lacking in subtle and surprising combinations of associations, sensations, affects and prehensions. This is not to suggest that the role of interactive art is to mimic life, but rather that many such works display a paucity of life’s rich, heightened experience of connection and potential. My larger critique, however, is an ethical one, deeply concerned with the politics of an enforcement of power relations that instrumentalise bodies and seek control rather than explore the possible expansion of expressive capacities. While there was certainly a series of relations established between the viewer or participant and the artwork in this example, these were highly problematic. The piece demanded ‘work’ from the participant, prescribing the types of relations and interactions that would be recognised by the technology and requiring a high level of energy from this viewer in order to produce itself (replicating the neoliberal dynamics of society that require the constant donation of immaterial labour). The participant was clearly in the service of the artist, not collaborating in any meaningful way. ‘Choice’ here became limited to opting in or out, with little possibility of nuanced and singular participation. Like many interactive art experiences, this event did not work to enhance my ‘life-world’ through any exploration of further potential combinations of bodies and artwork components, but instead replicated the dominant power relationships of society through obligation, control of gestures and the limitation of expression. The limitations of this work made me wonder: what would happen if we were to radically shift our notions of what interactivity is or might be? What would happen to ‘interactivity’ Introduction 15 if we expanded the concept of it greatly and explored its essentially environmental or ecological potential? What would happen if we stopped limiting interactive potentials to human subjects, or to these subjects in conversation with an artwork across the abstracted and artificial divide of the ‘interface’? What if we shifted scales – and worked across scales – and thought also the potential for interactive or relational development between, for example, an algorithm and a sensor, a sound vibration and a foot, an affect and a perception and so on? In highlighting this example I don’t mean to suggest that interactive art should be ‘nice’, or that it should promote a bland positivity. Certainly there must be a place to explore tricky, slippery or challenging relations and propositions in art. However, there is a difference between the relational entanglement created by a work such as this example that offers only a heightened precarity to the individual ego in the face of obligation, and one based on a collective ‘positive’ extension of potential. The relationality that the neoliberal world already offers us is one of shared ecological, social, economic and psychic precarity that certainly creates a connectivity between people, but this is chiefly one of a shared vulnerability not an enjoyment of collective potential. Nor would it be enough for such a work to merely deterritorialise and delocalise or create and capitalise on speculative movement or reconfigurations of these already toxic connections (Guattari 2008, 33). Capitalism already operates successfully in this field of speculative and preemptive control, and, as I argue in Chapter One, the politics of relation in interactive work too often homogenise and constrict experience and orient the participant towards these dominant power structures. Nor can we truly imagine a work that would help us to ‘escape’ from such networks. Rather, to remain ethical, relational works need to pay attention to and care for what else might be going on: for the differential seeds or ‘isolated and repressed singularities’ (Guattari 2008, 34) that might suggest transversal movements and other, hidden potentials. 16 Introduction Such potentials, rather than re-individualising and controlling yet another aspect of living, might, as I advocate throughout this book, instead be situated in an emphasis on Whiteheadian ‘novelty’ that is enjoyed at an ecological level and not on a level of individualised or subjective human enjoyment. Terms such as positivity, collective enjoyment, novelty and connection may well raise alarm bells. They will remind some readers of exactly the empty promises of consumerist entertainment already on offer, and the bland, identity-based and resolutely neoliberal iterations of relational aesthetics available for consumption at any major gallery. Here perhaps the concept of affirmation better describes the particular direction I am seeking to head towards in this discussion. Affirmation is speculative , seeking not to confirm the already-prescribed and thought relational possibilities, but to experiment freely and immanently (Manning 2016b, 201). Affirmation seeks to potentialise, thus it moves towards an increase in intensity or differentiation in the event (novelty) rather than homogenisation. To be clear, affirmation is of the event, not pitched at the level of an individual, subjective positive or negative emotional response. The event enjoys its expressions of novelty, which involve both the explorations of new conjunctions and disjunctions. An affirmative interactive practice might seek to expand and explore how components of an event can interact. This does not necessarily imply a concern for any individual component; rather it might seek to affirm ongoing ecological differentiation. Affirmation pitches discussions at a very different level to that of criticism. In the context of this book, it will become apparent to the reader that the works are not ‘critiqued’ in the negative sense of this term. That is, they are not there to be evaluated against some predetermined criteria of the new face of interactivity that the book might, from the outside, be mistakenly seen to be proposing. Their role is not to have the opinions or judgments of the author bestowed upon them, but, as Brian Massumi has Introduction 17 written of this affirmative and ‘immanent’ style of critique, to perform a ‘dynamic evaluation that is lived out in situation’ (2010, 338). 1 This is ‘eventful’ and seeks to engage with and acknowledge the singularities of a particular situation rather than resort to generalisations. Rather than leading to a shoring up of established positions, immanent critique might instead ‘foster unforeseeable differentiations’ (Massumi 2010, 338). In the context of the various discussions of artworks within this book, their inclusion implies neither any attempt to ‘assess’ or qualify the art, nor a ringing endorsement for all aspects of each work. Nor does it imply any assumption that these works form a ‘canon’ of important, new or ideal interactive models. Rather, they are there because there are some aspects of them that might productively help both the author and reader to think through the various concepts in their particular intersection with a singular art event, and potentially to lead such thinking into both unexpected and ever more diverse readings of the conceptual material at hand. Such thinking happens in the middle of the majoritarian events and theories, as minor undercurrents or dérives. It suggests a particular attention to what else might be happening: to transversal events that begin to split, fracture or unsettle expected outcomes or thoughts. In line with this, the aspects of the artworks that are examined are often incidental to their main focus. For example, in Chapter Five I discuss aspects of Nathaniel Stern’s Compressionism , focusing on the particular and awkward assemblages and rhythms of bodies, spaces and technical objects, rather than on the undoubtedly beautiful photographic outcomes of these performances. Similarly, in discussing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Re:Positioning Fear: Relational Architecture 3 in Chapter Eight I focus on an accidental incidence of disruption to the original work that overlaid the existing event with new tonalities and intentions. Affirmation is performative or processual, and thus in this book the interrogation of the concept of relation is performed through the lens of what is broadly termed ‘process’ philosophy. 18 Introduction Process is a creative event of formation of an entity through the ‘transformation of the potential into the actual’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2005, 311). Whitehead terms the placement of process as primary within thinking a shift from the ‘material’ to the ‘organic’. 2 Process philosophy’s focus is ontogenetic, concentrating on how events (which here includes objects, relations and forces) come into being, rather than with the states they pass through (Massumi et al 2009, 37). Philosophically, this entails a shift from a hylomorphic view of the world as composed of discrete objects and subjects enduring in relative stability over time and which then interact with each other, to a view of the world as an ongoing, continually unfolding series of events of relation. This is an expanded notion of relation as emerging within an art event, concerned not with its demonstration or metaphoric representations, but with the power of conjunctive and disjunctive relational forces to creatively differentiate. That is, with the capacities of entities to affect and be affected in order to advance events. Thus it replaces ideas of transcendence – where development is focused on the achievement of an ideal, pre-described form – and focuses instead on the drive towards novelty and further differentiation. 3 As Whitehead puts it, this is a novelty conditioned by its relationship to past events – ‘an urge towards the future based on an appetite in the present’ (1978, 21). 4 In this approach, all relations need to be considered for their role in forming events, and thus William James’ ‘radical empiricism’ forms an important base here, in asserting that only that which is experienced and all that is experienced must be admitted into its construction of the world (2010, 18). In this expanded model, thoughts and concepts are events in and of themselves, rather than projections or representations, and are as much a part of this enaction as objects. As such a process philosophy approach not only eradicates ideas of preformed or ideal subjects, it also, as Whitehead notes, ‘abolishes the detached mind’ (1978, 56). Relations that connect experiences, as James states, ‘must