By involving an experience perceptive and manipulatory at the same time,
Internet transforms our relationship with images. The implication of
the viewer is necessary: it is developed in interactive devices;
subject to loyalty building art orientated strategies; and it finally
generates rituals and reception contracts proper to digital arts.
The viewer has to gather his own different action strategies on
images. Then the necessity for the digital image of an equivalent of
what is in music the interpretation in sense of a devoted and constant
training intervenes. It creates attachments specific to Net-art and to
digital art but more widely revealing of new media-related paradigms.
Images meeting digital world
At the interface of interactive cinema, video games and Internet, more
and more artists offer to reinvent mise en scene and modes of
relationship with images. The interactive digital image does not
establish reality anymore: it offers to experiment as much as view
shared environments. Generated synthetically or digitally, images have
as a matter of fact more uses that were unseen. The interactivity
introduced in and by images promotes artistic devices as well as it
allows communicational exchanges possibilities and concrete actions for
the audience: the image can be played, it now can be seen as much as it
can be performed. Permeable and sometimes even alterable, it gains in
deepness. This digital image, equipped and extended by an operative
dimension, is offered to artistic experimentations and very different
media-related practices.
Reynald Drouhin project called Des_Frags seems exemplary of the fact
that, in this context, the piece of art and the image are not only
“already existing” ontological entities. On the contrary Des_Frags
proposes a media-related device for, via and with Internet, that can
only exist and develop online, as it plays a lot with dimensions of
dispersion and scalability characteristic of the network. This device
supposes to reuse already existing elements on the web – fixed images –
to compose a mosaic image. Each internet user is invited to select on
the internet or in his own archives a first fixed image. This “matrix”
image is going to compose the framework on which other images taken
from the web are going to appear. Thanks to a search engine, the user
is indeed asked, from two or three keywords, to collect on the internet
a lot of other images that will come and press against them – just like
labels – on the final mosaic. The piece of art therefore results from
piracy and share of images taken and diverted from their initial
context.
Samuel Bianchini Training Center carries out (once again) the TV image
of a football match. At first fixed, this image can be activated thanks
to a mouse allowing to point the cursor on the ball to grab it by
clicking. The cursor then takes the shape of a small hand and clicking
on the mouse animates the image. But, rather than moving normally, the
image seems to move around the ball and the cursor, evolving on the
screen according to the movements of the ball brought by the spectator.
In this context, the spectator carries the image and the football
player as much as he carries himself the image to understand how it
works and manipulate it. When he stops moving, maintaining the ball,
the principle of activities brought into play appear more clearly: only
the image and the football players are animated while the ball remains
fixed, in a position chosen by the spectator, the same one that he can
make evolve on screen. The exchange object, the ball, was stopped “by
hand” to become the center of a negotiation. Partially moving the
spatial and temporal center of the media-related event towards a
singular spectator, the situation illustrates an emblematic power
struggle between what’s happening and the way the match can be
replayed, between a collective media-related event broadcasted to be
simultaneously shared and the individual taking over of the media.
On the internet, the image can furthermore become a shared
environment, in the manner of Mouchette, that adopts the shape of an
imaged and evolving story closed to a personal diary, but now
editorialized, that can be seen and lived nearly live on the web. This
piece of art declines online potentialities of a visual and textual
archive that it is possible to display and look after on a long term,
usingor not the participation of visitors. The shape of the image-story
taken from the film system becomes the place of a play action and
communication environment.
The proposed interactivity consists in a possibility of intervention
on the sequence and the sequence of short scenes or dynamic
micro-stories that react in real time to the visitors actions. Those
“potential” images become the scene of operations distributed between
the artist, the program and the audience. Carried by artists/computer
specialist duets who are experimenting a form of interactive cinema for
internet, the interactivity gives to the public the possibility to
alter the linearity of the movie. The Net-art thus attaches itself to
the invention of new modalities of co-creation of a collective image.
Following the example of the pioneer device of the engineer artist
Olivier Auber, the Générateur Poïétique, those pieces of art give to
recent evolutions of mobility technologies (mobile phones, Palm Pilot,
GPS, etc…) new usage scenarios. In the urban space, for example,
artists create installations relying on the audience intervention like
during the Nuit Blanche in October 2004 in Paris, where it was possible
to play Tetris on the façade of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
The T2 tour having been transformed in a giant screen (20x36 pixels on
a surface of 3370 m2) using the window lightning. Phone calls and texts
had a creative impact on the lightning of the façade [cf. Chaos
Computer Club, Blikenlights].
The Net-art images finally tend to be part of physical objects. As
for example devices of Douglas Edric Stanley, that have been exploring
for many years experimental shapes of a transformed cinema, that he
calls interactive, generative or algorhythmic cinema. His major work —
Concrescence — questions the possibilities of narration and experience
modes peculiar to the programmed image. This device articulates an
interactive and generative narration software and a physical
interaction device with the image. It is a hypertable that, challenging
cinema projections laws, proposes an horizontal screen on which the
public can manipulate and experiment different stories and images.
According to the artist, the choice of images, meaning narration, comes
from the interaction between the hand (of the viewer) and the program.
Even without interaction, the artificial life program makes images
appear and disappear according to behaviour laws that react to
manipulations of the public. This independence of the two life systems
– of the hand of the manipulator and of the artificial life system that
pushes around – ensures the story in front of any type of interaction.
Images between interface and action program
The computer interface plays a key role here because of the dialogue
that it installs between the piece of art, the artist, and a public
that is now expected to actively participate to the creation process.
The mediation of a tangible interface, as a proof or the artistic
installation and as a framing of the public test, occupies a
predominant role for the setting up of this relationship. The user
interface is indeed used to create, promote and act on a piece of art
of which ideal future precisely supposes than some of its fragments can
remain potential or “to be done”. In this sense, the double function of
the interface is to provide a perceptible representation of the
profundity of the piece of art created by the author, in order to make,
secondly, a theater of operations for its users.
The contemporary evolutions of the research and of the artistic
creation lead to the giving up of an art image created as a unique and
completed object, in favour of artistic propositions that take the
shape of process or experiences shared with the public. L’image
interface, software component and visual at the same time, is divided
between an aesthetic and an operationality. It composes the tool, the
object and the socio-technical background in which the artistic project
will be able to be written at the same time as the visible part of the
piece of art will be displayed, and the active reception of the public
will appear. The viewer develops active actions on the image and the
piece of art at the same time, that he would be able to elude or play
again. Potential, it can only be viewed updated, or to use
computer-literate language: performed. During this symmetrical process
the piece of art acts at the same time thanks to the program (the
machine) and the actors of the interactive process, to which new
functionalities are thus added. It represents at the same time the
support, the media and the environment in which interactivities are
displayed and interactions that create relationships between involved
agents in the creative process.
Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
/ Sociologist, Lecturer
Université Lille 3 - UFR Arts et Culture - GERIICO
Centre de Sociologie du Travail et des Arts (EHESS)
More information: Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Art et Internet : les nouvelles figures de la création (CNRS Éditions, 2005).
Website: http://cesta.ehess.fr/document.php?id=80.
From: MCD 51
version Fr
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