And what is an artifact? Artificial intelligence research suggests ... An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point-an ôinterfaceö in todayÆs terms between an ôinnerö environment and an outer environment, the surrounding in which- it operates. If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose. (1) -Pamela McCorduck

The current fascination with interactivity by avant-garde video is a beneficiary of 150 year old avant-garde ideas about form and content and the relatively recent computer revolution. A little over a hundred years ago artists produced painting and sculpture and the most common form of symbolic interactivity was letter writing. Then, the phrase ôreach out and touch someoneö with its shrill note of aggressive intimacy would probably have suggested to anyone hearing it that they should go and actually visit someone, perhaps bringing food and good cheer to a shut-in. Today, the phrase is part of the telephone companyÆs advertising campaign and everyone understands that the slogan means you should pick up a telephone and call someone. Increasingly, we live in a world where people are connected by an electronic interface. The current call for interactivity on the part of video artists is part of a larger societal development of machine-augmented simulacra of intimacy. Technology has shortened distances and accelerated communication so that widely separated individuals are no longer isolated and are now united in a global information net. Computer scientists and philosophers once dreamed of a world where people would be able to communicate with each other more effectively through machines than face to face. That dream is now a reality.

Whereas technology has created a new electronic community, it has also been part of the process that has witnessed the destruction of physical, social communities. Cars, airplanes, telephones, television, and computers have facilitated the decentralization of society. One kind of meeting has been substituted for another. In the late nineteenth century almost everyone played a musical instrument or sang, and people entertained themselves by playing music together. The phonograph and the radio brought a wide range of quality music and entertainment to a large audience but, in the process, has made public music making a rare experience primarily limited to professionals. Instead of the coffee Hatch, where neighborhood women would regularly meet around pine or Formica tables in each otherÆs kitchens, women now share their hopes and problems by talking to each other one to one on the telephone. The communality of an outing to a baseball game with its noises and smells and mass joy and sorrow has now been replaced by each personÆs watching the game alone on television.

The telephone was introduced in 1876 and for the first time allowed people to be two places at once. Until fairly recently long-distance telephone calls were an exotic phenomenon and were only used in extreme circumstances such as a death in the family. I remember a time when it was a daring, almost erotic experience to call a boyfriend long-distance instead of writing a letter simply because the kind of intimacy the telephone makes possible was not yet the everyday experience it has become and long-distance telephone calls were regarded as expensive, extravagant luxuries on a par with a dozen long-stemmed roses. Today, we have to use the telephone ôto reach out and touch someoneö because families are fractured into ever smaller units separated by vast geographical distances. Atlas Van Lines estimates typical corporate managers move fourteen times during their lifetimes. (2) Transience and isolation have became characteristics of suburban family life, and only 5 percent of American children see their grandparents on a regular basis. (3) Physical intimacy is being eclipsed by an ongoing dialogue between computers and humans that has already lead to a symbiotic, co-evolution that is central to artistsÆ dreams of interactivity.

Art

A work of art is an externalization of the artistÆs consciousness; as if we could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw. Whatever else art does it has to feed into an ongoing discourse on the nature of art, or we will judge it trivial. (4) -Arthur C. Danto

Video art is the heir of the new set of assumptions in art, science, psychology, and literature about what constitutes reality that developed in the nineteenth century. This was a time marked by a revolution in consciousness as notions of hierarchical order as expressed in Renaissance perspective and the proscenium stage were replaced by a multiplicity of spatial and temporal points of view. The causal or parallel developments in mathematics (especially non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension), physics (EinsteinÆs theory of relativity), and philosophy, and the invention of new forms of transportation and communication altered the previous linear and static perception of time and space to a simultaneous, fragmented, and conditional one. Based on developments in psychology from William JamesÆs concept of ôstream of consciousnessö and FreudÆs and other psychologistsÆ work on dreams and the unconscious, artists, in their works from the novels of Proust to Juan DowneyÆs Thinking Eye series of videotapes and Graham WeinbrunÆs interactive videodisk project The Erl King, have structured their images into chains of interleaved fragments corresponding to these psychological models of reality and their own experience of the world. (5)

Many artists from Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Arp on wanted to reduce the total arbitrariness of their increasingly subjective visions and to renotince specific goals in favor of a ôpervasive openness to new impressionsö by giving over control of part of their compositions to ôexternal arbitrary formsö (6) through the use of chance or aleatory composition. Chance allowed them to create open-ended structures that produced ôa kind of chaos characteristic of nature.ö It was also a device for bridging the gap between art and life because many like John Cage believed ôart should not be different from life but an act within life. Like all of life, with its accidents and variety and disorder and only momentary beauty.ö (7)

Recent computer studies have shown that use of chance in art only symbolically reduced the artistÆs control by substituting one kind of order for another more limited one. McCorduck has noted that by ôdeliberately using chance, tossing a coin, we derive not uncertainty but a very large measure of certainty that can not be achieved otherwise. Chance produces not only certainty but simplification.ö (8) ArtistsÆ reasons for using chance anticipate the new reality models (the mainstay of postmodern science), which are concerned with such things as ôundecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, æfracta,Æ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes.ö(9) While denying us any sense of free will by showing us subject to unseen whirlpools of fate, mathematical theorems and computer modeling have shown that the nonlinear twists and wild disorder of chaos have their own structural logic, albeit one composed of infinitely spiraling subatomic coastlines of fractals.

Artists were prophetic in their understanding and acceptance of new mental and reality models. From cubism, surrealism, and the elaborate four-dimensional web of James JoyceÆs Ulysses to the films of Stan Brakkage, Yvonne Rainer, and Anita Thacher, artists have created artifacts that humanized the new reality postulated by science and technology. Until recently, their work was limited to static and/or linear media such as painting, sculpture, literature, and even film, and they could only create simulations of their vision of a mutable, fragmentary world. It was not until the development of computersÆ capacity for random access memory and the most complex interactive videodisks that they could fully realize their vision of a complex simultaneous web of images and ideas.

One of the consequences of these intellectual and technological developments was the shift from an external, Euclidean, and generally knowable reality to a more private subjective one. The avant-garde and the bourgeoisie took up opposing positions on consciousness. The creators of such bourgeois art forms as realistic painting and sculpture or Hollywood films asserted that their works represented imitatio naturae and were the true mimetic art forms. Building on new notions of science, psychology, literature, and art, the avant-garde argued that their private visions of and manipulations of form, color, and space constituted the true mimesis.

Avant-garde art has had a strange, aloof, and often hostile relationship with its audience. While avant-garde artists have sought to render a more authentic and universal depiction of reality through their use of abstraction and disjunction, their abandonment of a shared visual language based on the illusion of a harmonious reality offered by enclosed forms and logical narrative of Hollywood film, television, and realist painting for a personal vision has isolated them in an ivory-tower solipsism outside the praxis of society. Alienated from common discourse, they are left to communicate with a small group of like-minded people. Not even in the last quarter of the twentieth century when we live in a world of ever greater speed and the pulsating beat of MTV, a world in which people nightly create their own kaleidoscopic collages by flipping channels and playing the channel buttons on their cable boxes like a rocket jockey on -a race to the moon, is the artistÆs subjective mosaic available to a general audience. One hundred years of experimental art has taught us it is one thing to experience the world as parallel and simultaneous fragments and it is another thing to be able to decipher another personÆs nonlinear, kinetic tapestry. Placed in the position of being accidentally or deliberately an ôoutsider,ö artists have sought to break down the separation between art and audience and art and life. They have adopted various strategies to make the audience part of the creative process. This is most striking in artistsÆ theater and performance throughout the twentieth century and the hybridization of art forms that occurred in the 1960s

At the end of the ninteenth century the illusionistic fourth wall of the theater was toppled and works by Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and others eliminated traditional distinctions between stage and audience with new and more environmental theater configurations. By the middle of the twentieth century happenings used all the available three-dimensional space, including that occupied by the spectator. In destroying theatrical conventions they anticipated the synesthesia of discotheques and the experience of participating in the mass spectacles from peace marches and rallies to rock concerts like Woodstock that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Marginalized by the hermeticism of their art and exempted from the needs of Hollywood films, Broadway musicals, and broadcast television to please an audience, some avant-garde artists decided that the opposite of pleasure was cruelty and assaulted their audiences. The futurists shouted at their audiences, bombarding them with noise and insults, and their audiences responded by petting them with eggs and tomatoes. Susan Sontag has pointed out that one of the key elements in Happenings was their assault on the audience:

Perhaps the most striking feature of happenings is its treatment (this is the only word for it) of the audience. The performers may sprinkle water on the audience, or fling pennies or sneeze-producing detergent powder at it. Someone may be making near-deafening noises on an oil drum, or waving an acetylene torch in the direction of the spectators...There is no attempt to cater to the audienceÆs desire to see everything...in fact it is often deliberately frustrated...ö (10)

Sontag saw the avant-gardeÆs deliberate withholding of information as another form of attack on the audience:

The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation; this is the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Dreams have no sense of time...Lacking a plot and continuous rational discourse, they have no past. And this with-holding of a sense of structure is, if sublimated, as much an attack on the audience as the physical menace of the lawnmower. (11)

Nam June PaikÆs early music performances featured screaming, throwing beans at the audience, smashing glass, and other violent and aggressive acts to disturb the passivity of the audience. During PaikÆs 1959 Etude for Pianoforte, he jumped off the stage and cut off John CageÆs tie. Cage said of PaikÆs concerts, ôYou get the feeling anything can happen even dangerous things.ö (12) Paik, Chris Burden, and other artists incorporated danger into their art to add a ôclimaxö to indeterminate, nonhierarchical work that lacked an internal conclusion by putting both themselves and their audiences at risk.

Audience participation was an integral part of the art/theater/music works of the 1960s. This incorporation of the audience into the work of art and letting them shape it is an important precedent for the role of the viewer/participant in current interactive video disk projects. Cage rejected the notion that music was entertainment that was passively received by the audience. He wanted the audience to be participants (active listeners) who must ôrealize that they themselves are doing it, and not that something is done to them.ö (13) Along with other Fluxus composers, La Monte Young was fascinated by the audience as a social situation. Three of his 1960 compositions were ostensibly ôaudience pieces.ö In Composition 1960 No. 3 listeners are told for a specific period of time or other they may do anything they wish. No. 6 reverses the performer/audience relationship-performers watch the audience in the same way as the audience usually watches the performers. Nonperformers are given the choice of watching or being the audience. (14)

The centrality of audience participation in Alan KaprowÆs happenings and other work was extremely influential on later concepts of interactivity. Michael Kirby has defined three kinds of audience participation in Alan KaprowÆs work: (15)

1. Pseudo participation, in which plants in the audience come on stage and take part in the work. 2. ôTokenö or ôselected involvement, ô for example in Courtyard the audience is offered brooms and invited to sweep on stage. Only a few members of the audience took advantage of the offer, but the few People who did take part symbolically represented the audienceÆs participation. 3. Pieces in which there were only participants-performers and accidental spectators.

To these three modes of audience participation, which are all found in current video disk projects, I would add a fourth, a variant of there being only participants, artworks in which the spectator is a necessary component of the work and completes it. In Michael FriedÆs 1967 essay, ôArt and Objecthood,ö he observed that all work that does not have the ôpresentness and instantaneousnessö of modern painting and sculpture tends toward theater, especially works like earthworks, and process art that extend into real time. (16) With some dismay he noted that instead of withdrawing into an aesthetic space, separate from that of the spectator, these works were clearly dependent on a situation in which the beholder of the works of art was actually their audience.

Many video sculptures and installations grew out of FriedÆs ôtheatricality.ö PaikÆs early video sculptures such as his 1965 Magnet TV and his later Participation TVÆs required audience participation to change them from static forms to dynamic variable ones. Early closed-circuit video installations by Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, and others used the instantaneous feedback of these systems to make the viewer an integral part of their work. In the late 1970s Buky Schwartz switched from abstract sculpture to closed-circuit video installations involving disparities between the appearance of three-dimensional objects in a room and how they appeared as two-dimensional shapes on the television screen as a way of deepening the viewerÆs involvement in the work and compressing the distance between the sculpture and the viewer. As Rosalind Krauss pointed out, these projects with their use of lived time put ôpressure on the viewerÆs notion of himself as æaxiomatically coordinatedÆ-as stable and unchanging in and for himself.ö (17) In speaking of audience participation it is important to distinguish between film and theaterÆs collective audience where a group of people have a shared experience in a common public space and the idea of theatricality in sculpture in which the audience at any moment is essentially one person at a time. This sequential audience is identical to time-sharing in computer terms and the one-at-a-time interactivity of computers or video disks.

Video Art

ôInterfaceö originally came from the physical sciences, where it applied to events and properties peculiar to the boundaries between materials. The surface of the ocean, for instance, is an interface between air and water; and reactions occur there that do not occur in kind or quantity anywhere else in the air-water system. An interface is an area where substance or energy is exchanged. The term was adopted by the computer industry as being excellently descriptive of the juncture at which information is exchanged between two processes. An interface is whatever happens to be the medium of that exchange; a piece of equipment or a program that transfers information from one process to another. (18) -Phil Bertoni

The genesis of video art in the late ig6os was directly attributable to the introduction of low-cost, portable, 1/2-inch consumer-grade video equipment to the United States by Sony in 1968. The early black-and-white portapacks were a far cry from todayÆs home equipment. A portable recorder, black-and-white camera and monitor cost between $1,500 and $2,000 dollars, about the same price as the comparable low-end equipment today, but the dollar was worth more then and the tape had to be threaded on an open reel. Also, the unit produced an unstable signal that was adequate in closed-circuit situations but was close to ôjunkö compared with broadcast television. In spite of these disadvantages, this ugly duckling immediately appealed to several constituencies that were virtually identical at the time: artists interested in new art materials, especially sculpture in an expanded field; technological or kinetic art; conceptual art; avant-garde film; and political activists. These groups eventually separated into several different camps-documentary, video installations, and video art. However, elements of the issues and ideas present at the initial nexus remained.

Video art was born at a time when the monolithic power of broadcast television as a mass communication and entertainment medium was being examined critically. As David Ross pointed out, ôTelevision was no longer viewed as the activity of the culture, it was the culture.ö(19) Video artists came to their new medium with ôseven channel childhoods.ö (20) Video art is more closely associated with broadcast television than a house painter is to Rembrandt. Not only do they share common tools and similar imagery and imaging systems, video art constantly compared itself to broadcast television and defined itself as being different from its jumbo elder relative while secretly yearning for a share of its power. Many video pioneers saw independent video as a revolutionary and utopian tool for giving power to the people and changing the world. ôVideo offered a means to decentralize television so that a Whitmanesque democracy of ideas, opinions and cultural expressions made both by and for the peopteö could correct the bias of broadcast television and enfranchise the disenfranchised. (21)

Almost a decade before Sony successfully introduced Betamax and Matsushita UVC and Panasonic) introduced VHS (Video Home System), the videocassettes and recorders that turned television audiences into active participants, artists were farseeing in their immediate understanding of implications of the half-inch revolution. As Erik Barnouw has pointed out, videotape has become ôlow cost . . . reuseable and could be expended . . . as freely as a novelist uses paper. Suddenly all sorts of people-alone or in schools, churches, groups and businesses-were in video production.ö (22) The compact, paperback-book-sized 1/2-inch cassette offered many new possibilities of distribution. Artists were among the first to realize the liberating aspects of the new format and sense its value as both a political tool and a new art form.

The late 1960s witnessed a massive redefinition of what constituted ôart.ö Many would have agreed with Paik, ôThere is no difference between ritual, classical, high art and low mass entertainment, and art. I live-whatever I like, I take.ö (23) Artworks often consisted of activities and situations and incorporated time and space. Drawing on the tenets of conceptual and performance art, which emphasized using the materials of mass communication to disseminate art to a wider audience and the concept of art as information, artists wanted to compete with television on its own turf to challenge and ultimately usurp some of televisionÆs ability to directly enter peopleÆs lives. Television and radio were perceived as one-way sending mediums that were passively received by machines in individualsÆ homes. Using symbolic actions, some video artists wanted to shake up the passivity of television audiences and make them aware of televisionÆs limitations and possibilities.

In 1974, Douglas Davis broadcast three works on Austrian television. In all of these he addressed the audience directly saying, for example, ôPlease come to the set and place your lips against it. Think about our lips meeting now.ö Davis described his goals at this time:

I donÆt hold with the performance aesthetic-that the art is only what happens to me. What happens to me is only a means of making contact with the viewer,, and with the world...{M}y first thought about the television set was to activate, as a link in a live sending as well as receiving link. We are almost blind to the two-way nature of television. Bertolt Brecht...correctly pointed out that the decision to manufacture radio sets as receivers only was a political decision, not an economic one. The same is true of television, it is a conscious (an unconscious) decision that renders it one way. My attempt was to inject two-way metaphors--via live telecasts-into our thinking process. (24)

Although calling for intimacy and interactivity, DavisÆs projects underline the isolation and limitation of intimacy the electronic interface imposes.

Video artists were not content with showing their work in lofts, art galleries, and museums. They wanted to be ôon the air.ö The Television Labs at WGBH, WNET, and KQED provided early and substantial support both for the production and exhibition of artistsÆ television on their channels. The development of cable and low-power television in the mid sixties seemed to offer a chance for even greater access. In 1968 the Supreme Court gave the FCC the right to regulate the cable industry. In 1972 the FCCÆs Cable Television Report ordered cable systems to have four different kinds of public access. To give this legislated ôaccessö any real meaning, the cable facilities were required to provide low cost production facilities. This opened the door for artists. Soon video artists were asking, ôHow soon will artists have their own channels?ö (25) There were many successful projects on cable television. These included the early TVTV (Top Value Television) and also Jaime DavidovichÆs Cable Soho, which began in New York City in 1976 and the next year became the ArtistÆs Television Network. Another project also starting in 1976 was the Video Art show on Los Angeles, Theta Cable and Long Beach Cablevision. More recently, Paper Tiger Television in New York City has had a series on public-access cable television in New York City for seven years, examining the communications industry through a critical analysis of print media in a hard-hitting style that resembles aspects of performance art. None of these projects could be called truly interactive. In all of them the artists functioned primarily as senders on the same level of the many kinds of special-interest and personal programming that became a feature of cable television. ArtistsÆ programming generally lacks both the genuine interactivity of call-in radio shows and the lesswell-understood interactivity of broadcast televisionÆs audience. Broadcast television can be regarded as advertising interrupted by programs, and one way the broadcast audience interacts with television and determines what they watch is by buying or not buying the products that are advertised on the air. ArtistsÆ Television does not rely on the financial support of the audience to sta on the air, so interactivity with the audience is immaterial. The act of simply being on the air is enough to satisfy the concept of increased communication.

Some of the more radical developments in interactivity made possible by cable television were found in social services and grass roots democracy. In 1971, the Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine under the direction of Dr. Harold Wooster built the New Hampshire-Vermont Interactive Network complete with a television studio at each site to allow doctors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire to participate in medical meetings long distance. The doctors could hear the papers but also participate in the question and answer period as if they were present in the room where the paper was given. Here, the necessity for knowledge causes the development of real interactivity whereas artistic projects, with a few exceptions, merely play lipservice to it. The system is still is use today.

Soon after the communications satellites became available for private use, artists began to design projects that employed them. Douglas DavisÆs 1976 Seven Thoughts broadcast from the empty Houston Astrodome ôto the global mindö is credited with being ôthe first attempt by an individual to use the global satellite in a personal way.ö (26) Most satellite projects-such as the ambitious interactive satellite teleconference The Artist and Television (1982), which interleaved performances and commentary in New York, Los Angeles, and Iowa City via the communications satellites West Star 3 and 4 and Sat Com3R-have focused on the artistÆs ability to be in several places at one time, the reconciliation of lost or ôghostö selves, and symbolic expressions of an expanded sense of ôcommunity.ö Only Kit Galloway and Sherrie RabinowitzÆs Hole in Space (1980) extended their projects to a more liberal form of interactivity. Galloway and Rabinowitz set up a live satellite link between New York City and Los Angeles and, by placing large video screens in the street, provided a free videophone between the two cities. Many ordinary people spontaneously took advantage of the occasion to visit with friends and relatives on the other side of the continent. (27)

With the exception of Nam June PaikÆs Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), artistsÆ satellite projects lack the polish of broadcast television. Their shoestring budgets impart a homemade, hand-touch quality that not only distinguishes art from industry but also reveals the fragile and artificial nature of the electronic mosaic of time and space made possible by the latest technology business. In all particulars they are virtually identical to teleconferencing or TV coverage of a global news event. The significance of the satellite projects lies less in their quality as good ôartö and more in the fact artists managed to access commercial technology for the relay of personal and aesthetic information, thereby demystifying the hegemony of corporate technology, saying, If I can do it, you can do it.

A branch of twentieth-century art has always been interested in machines and a machine aesthetic that was an artistic response to new technologies and new ideas of perception. On a practical and theoretical level, groups such as the Raindance Foundation and publications such as Radical Software and The Spaghetti City Video Manual sought to demystify the technology of television so that it was easily accessible. Many video artists were dedicated to achieving sufficient machine literacy to be able to use their tools effectively and imaginatively. A small group concentrated on videoÆs soul and hardware, inventing new machines that, freed from televisionÆs constraint to generate recognizable universal product, produced new and often abstract images. Woody Vasulka has stated, ôThere is a certain property of the electronic image that is unique... [IltÆs liquid, itÆs shapeable, itÆs clay, itÆs an art material, it exists independently,ö (28) These artists saw videoÆs special properties as the basis for a new art form, the art form of the future. Along with Paik they believed, ôAs collage technique replaced oil paint, so the cathode ray tube will replace canvas.ö (29) Borrowing the ideas and terminology of computer programming, they began to think of these manifestations as a kind of language, and their work with video hardware as, in VasulkaÆs words, a ôdialogue with the tool and the image, so we would not perceive an image separately...We would rather make a tool and dialogue with it.ö(30) This led to the development of new machines such as colorizers and synthesizers, which, in turn, affected the development of special effects generators used today in the television industry.

Video artÆs ongoing acceptance of the latest technologies has left it committed to exploring the cutting edge of an almost science-fiction vision of art Because they are unfettered by the necessities of the marketplace, video artist: are often the first to see an artistic application for technologies developed for information processing, storage and retrieval (computers), or communications advertising, and entertainment (television). Since the first years of the twentieth century, artists have produced visual expressions (artifacts) of how they felt about the way new technologies have changed time and space. In addition to producing artifacts, video artists frequently follow a model of production and creativity that more closely resembles that of science, especially the think tanks of computer science where research consists of ôhaving ideasö and new projects are invented by imagining what might be possible from each new technological advance. (31) Video artistsÆ ongoing involvement in exploring what machines can produce has led to the recent fascination with high-end technologies such as computer graphics, special effects and editing, and current experiments in interactive video disks. Video art is well on its way to losing its earlier democratic promise because high-end technologies are more expensive to produce than low-end ones. Only a few artists will receive the funding to complete interactive video disk projects from state and local arts agencies, limiting the possibility of artistic success to an elite few. The rarity and high cost of viewing mechanisms further limit the accessibitity of interactive video disk projects because only a few places will be able to afford the elaborate, high-end & back mechanisms and only a small number of people will be able to have firsthand, hands-on experience of this new art form. Video artÆs current tango with interactive video disks puts the field in danger of falling into modern medicineÆs Catch 22, where limited resources are squandered on expensive, state-of-the-art equ...