<nettime> interactivity: Stalder, Byfield

[nettime@Desk.nl]

From: Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 11:30:24 -0400

From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>

> My question is: "Is *nature* interactive?"
......
> nothing could be more interactive than books!

It makes sense to distinguish between interactive and interacting, between
a property and a relationship.  It's a given that a human being -- Ted's
boys with sticks -- can interact with ANYTHING, in the sense that he/she is
able to create a relationship in which the person's activity has some kind
of effect. However, does hitting a tree with a stick -- interacting with it
-- make the tree itself  interactive? No.

The same goes with books. We can interact with them, but they cannot
interact with us. The interactive part is entirely on our side, it's more
like playing squash. Even though the players interact with the wall, the
wall is an essential part of the game, the wall itself is not interactive;
the players are.

As far as artifacts are concerned, on a conceptual level, interactivity is
not -- as Ted suggests -- in the eye of the beholder but built into the
artifact itself. It is property of changing what it does based on some
input which creates a new condition based on which the other side can
create further input. In this sense, the MYST CD-Rom on Ted's shelf is
interactive, independent from whether he plays with it or not.

This is, as Robert Adrian remarked, an impoverished notion of interactivity
pretty close to the notion of control. However, it is this notion of
interactivity which is usually implied when we talk about interactive
technologies.  And it is in this notion of interactivity that clocks are
not interactive, even though they are produced by human beings. They
evidently depend on human input to maintain them, however, clocks, at least
conceptually, do not change what they do -- measuring the time -- based on
that input. All the maintenance is to keep them working, not changing what
they do.

Robert Adrian's notion of interactivity as some form of loss of control
cuts across lots of vaguaries and reveals that most of what the industry,
and many others, are currently doing is trying to REDUCE the interactive
element in the technology by trying to standardize much of it. In very new
version of html code, for example, more elements can be fixed by the
programmer,  such as the font, the colour of the font, the time it takes to
load, the sequence in which the images are displayed (the ads first!) and
so on.

Interactivity in Adrian's sense, then, was a result of a technology that
got of control and now the industry is scrambling to get it back under
control by defining interactivity as push-button-control, which is what ANY
machinery has anyway to a certain degree.

Felix
-----|||||---||||----|||||--------||||----

Les faits sont faits.
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1998 00:51:01 -0400
From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>

Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca> Sat, 11 Apr 1998 11:30:24: 

> It makes sense to distinguish between interactive and interacting, between
> a property and a relationship.  It's a given that a human being -- Ted's
> boys with sticks -- can interact with ANYTHING, in the sense that he/she is
> able to create a relationship in which the person's activity has some kind
> of effect. However, does hitting a tree with a stick -- interacting with it
> -- make the tree itself  interactive? No.

It certainly makes sense to draw this distinction, but it also makes
sense (imo) to acknowledge that this supposed property of things, in-
teractivity, is contingent on the action, interaction. Now, that may
seem obvious, but it implies that this attribute of things will vary
depending on any given person's inclination to engage with them, the
extent of that person's understanding of its functions, and so forth.
My intent in making that argument was to avoid the--in my view--trap
of viewing this question in the monolithic terms of abstract objects,
abstract subjects. If "interactivity" is a valid categorical descrip-
tion, it should help us to describe and understand specific interrel-
ations: *this particular* person engaging with *this particular* sys-
tem. Now, you're right, a tree isn't interactive and hitting it with
a stick isn't an example of interactivity. Climbing a tree, OTOH, is
an example of interactivity, though, because at that point the inter-
action is structured as a series of problems involving possibilities
and limitations, which are continually redefined by the choices that
one has made. One could very literally interpret tree X and kid Y as
rule sets much like a chess game, with moves that are possible or im-
possible, coordinates that are occupied or not, commitments that cum-
ulatively restructure finite solutions, etc. The idea of "interactiv-
ity" may invite such an analysis, but it does very little to help it.

> The same goes with books. We can interact with them, but they cannot
> interact with us. The interactive part is entirely on our side, it's more
> like playing squash. Even though the players interact with the wall, the
> wall is an essential part of the game, the wall itself is not interactive;
> the players are.

Well, if interactivity is an attribute, then I would think that Pong
is interactive; in which case, squash surely must be so too. Unless--
and this is an interesting possibility--mediation is what defines in-
teractivity. But a game of squash isn't merely a wall, ball, racquet,
and player: it's a rule set *enacted* through these objects, it is a
way of structuring their contingent interrelations. So I'll amend my
earlier remarks and say that interactivity consists of a person's un-
derstanding of a situation as a contingent environment governed by a
set of procedural possibilities. But this kind of definition is very
safe, because it's abstract; but that's also a danger because it can
describe almost anything, for example, commuting to work during rush
hour or being prosecuted in a court of law. And that's why I pointed
out that *mediation*--an order of representation that places a given
enactment in a hypothetical or inconsequential state--might be essen-
tial: chess is interactive, imo, but war, which it symbolizes, isn't.

In this regard, I have to disagree about books. Nabokov's _Pale Fire_
is infinitely more interactive than 99% of the twaddle that's passed
off as interactive nowadays; Tom Phillips's _A Humument_, a novel he
has painted over and continually republished with variations, is too;
and, in a way, these authors aren't doing anything that one couldn't
find in the Book of Kings or Chronicles, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in
Montaigne's essays, in the 6th-century Gospel of Nemo (a bizzare cut-
up assemblage of sentences from the Vulgate that mention "nemo" ("no
one"), in the Talmud, in Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_... "Books"--that
is, literature, complete with conventions of style, of genre, of var-
ious forms of authority, and so forth--are mediated contingent plays
on structuring rule sets; and a library is, fundamentally, a problem
of navigation, of clues, of goals, of choices that define outcomes...

> As far as artifacts are concerned, on a conceptual level, interactivity is
> not -- as Ted suggests -- in the eye of the beholder but built into the
> artifact itself. It is property of changing what it does based on some
> input which creates a new condition based on which the other side can
> create further input. In this sense, the MYST CD-Rom on Ted's shelf is
> interactive, independent from whether he plays with it or not.

See above.
 
> This is, as Robert Adrian remarked, an impoverished notion of interactivity
> pretty close to the notion of control. However, it is this notion of
> interactivity which is usually implied when we talk about interactive
> technologies.  And it is in this notion of interactivity that clocks are
> not interactive, even though they are produced by human beings. They
> evidently depend on human input to maintain them, however, clocks, at least
> conceptually, do not change what they do -- measuring the time -- based on
> that input. All the maintenance is to keep them working, not changing what
> they do.
> 
> Robert Adrian's notion of interactivity as some form of loss of control
> cuts across lots of vaguaries and reveals that most of what the industry,
> and many others, are currently doing is trying to REDUCE the interactive
> element in the technology by trying to standardize much of it. In very new
> version of html code, for example, more elements can be fixed by the
> programmer,  such as the font, the colour of the font, the time it takes to
> load, the sequence in which the images are displayed (the ads first!) and
> so on.

Ecch. What we're seeing is, quite literally, an incredibly accelerated
effort to establish *rules* based on the (reasonable) presumption that
new media can and should be reliably and predictably functional. Clear-
ly, these standards and standardizations are being structured by capit-
al's dictates, and there are very strong forces that envision *control*
as a systemic imperative. I view them with just as much suspicion as I
view the aristocratic dream of creative endeavors as a playground that
is unsullied by the unwashed masses and their concerns.

> Interactivity in Adrian's sense, then, was a result of a technology that
> got of control and now the industry is scrambling to get it back under
> control by defining interactivity as push-button-control, which is what ANY
> machinery has anyway to a certain degree.

I have on word for you: hack.

Ted
---
#  distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/  contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl