Eleanor Dare

PhD Art and Computational Technology

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Research Question:

How can notions of subjectivity be embedded into software writing that generates dynamic intra-active fictions?

January 2009

Chapter 3: A Psychometric text adventure: navigating subjectivity along the South Bank.

‘apart from the experiences of subjects there is, nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness’[1]

(A.N. Whitehead)

Subjectivity and interactivity are the two key areas that inform my research and practice. The theoretical discourses around subjectivity that I have researched identify many problematic aspects in relation to the very notion of a subject, subjectivity and the supposedly diametrical construction, objectivity. The idea of individualism as a philosophical conviction (as opposed to an unquestionable phenomena) is now quite widely accepted, in, for example, the writings of Derrida (2002), Deleuze (1981), Hollway (1984, 1989), Foucault (1988) and Alcoff and Potter (1993). In these writings orthodox notions of the subject are held to be normative, static and solipsistic. The challenge of creating the South system has been to work in practical terms with these insights. To integrate new conceptions of the subject and subjectivising processes into my creative practice.

This chapter will outline those criticisms and show how they relate directly to the South project. In addition to my own practice, useful examples of artists working with issues of subjectivity are found in projects created by, among others, the artists Jeffrey Shaw and Graham Harwood, and the playwright Martin Crimp. Their work will also be examined in this chapter.

Firstly I will discuss the problems associated with Western notions of the subject and the tensions that these points of conflict raise in relation to my work. I will show how the notion of a unitary, rational and essentially disembodied subject has informed many of the assumptions embedded in notions of interactivity. My own work is particularly engaged with issues of evaluation, of constructing a model of a subject within my software and writing. I will explain the background to these problems and the way in which I have attempted to creatively destabilize evaluative processes such as repertory grids[2] and psychometric tests. The middle section of the chapter will explain new conceptions of subject-object boundaries exemplified by Karen Barad’s (2007) idea of the intra-active and of the situated knowledges of Donna Haraway (1991) and Lucy Suchman (1987, 2006). The later half of the chapter explores issues of embodiment and their implication for a new form of experiencing both narrative and computational interfaces.

Finally I expand upon how my practice has emerged in relation to theoretical ideas of the subject and subjectivity, illustrating in detail what I did, how I undertook my work, why this work is relevant and original, and what results or conclusions have arisen from it. As mentioned, I will look in some detail at the work of other artists concerned with subjectivity and subjectivising processes.

3.1 Problems of subjectivity, & evaluation

The South system is designed to guide readers through an initial process of subjective evaluation in order to generate appropriate content, both factual and fictional, about the South Bank area of South London. The processes deployed in this evaluation are the result of research into psychometric techniques but also of research into critical thinking around the very notion of obtaining an objective, categorical and stable assessment of an individual’s personality. My research indicates that all of these terms and indeed, all of these practices are problematic, but my research also indicates that there is a call for an alternative form of investigation into subjectivity and subjectivising processes. The philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2002) is energetic in her call for ‘more innovative and creative energy in thinking about the structures of subjectivity at a time in history when social, economic, cultural and symbolic regimes of representation are changing very fast ‘(Braidotti, 2002 :73). But Braidotti also asks, is the ‘model of scientific rationality a suitable frame of reference to express the new subjectivity? Is the model of artistic creativity any better? How does it act upon the social imaginary? Will mythos or logos prove to be a better ally in the big leap across the post-modern void?’ (173). It is interesting to note that a writer who so keenly identifies the dangers of oppositional thinking should create, albeit rhetorically, an opposition between scientists and artists, as if art can represent everyone anymore than science can. Writers such as Braidotti, (2002) Alcoff (1993) and Hollway (1984, 1989) have cogently argued that Western notions of the subject have been predicated upon universalising and damaging sets of dualisms, and in doing so these dualisms have shaped almost every aspect of Western culture, establishing entrenched, oppositional forms, of knowledge production. Foremost in the oppositions established by a Western conception of the subject are the separations between body and mind and between the individual and their society.

The Cartesian Cogito

My initial research into subjectivity pinpointed the centrality of the Cartesian Cogito in Western conceptions of the subject and of dualistic modes of thought. The Cogito is characterised as a unitary, rational and cerebral subject. Feminist epistemologists such as Alcoff, and Potter (1993) and Grosz (1994) emphasise the historical identification of the Cogito with masculinity, and by implication with an oppositional construction that frames the feminine as irrational and corporeal. My practice aims to connect the problematic constructions of the subject identified in my research to computational structures and conventions, in particular to some of the assumptions embedded into orthodox conceptions of interactivity and agency. These assumptions are also relevant to many works that generate and reformulate various types of narrative, in particular to works that make claims for the democratisation of writing, identified by Mateas and Sengers (2003) as works in which the computer is framed as a value free or neutral conduit for ‘utopian navigation’ (162).

The notion of neutrality is embedded in the empirical, positivist[3] subject who emerged from the paradigm of the Cartesian Cogito. Such a subject is someone for whom the senses activate a solipsistic, singular ability to detect universal truths. The absence of this ability is framed as a systemic failure, such as the state of being female, non-white or in some other way excluded from access to a received conception of rationality. If this appears to be an extreme characterisation of Western notions of the subject it is important to remember that this idea of the subject is an exceedingly limited conception. Such a construction was also used to justify disenfranchising and enslaving subjects due to their perceived inability to reason. Within living memory British women were denied the vote on the grounds of this incapacity, indeed in Switzerland women did not get the right to vote until 1971; two conservative half-cantons, Appenzell Ausserrhoden and Appenzell Innerrhoden did not grant women the right to vote until 1989 and 1990, the argument being that the constitutional reference to citizens did not include women. Whether a person is characterized as a citizen or a subject my point is that these are not neutral or natural categories but historically and politically motivated constructions that have the same provenance as the supposedly objective or value free empirical scientific subject or knower.

These constricted notions of the subject have informed scientific practice at many levels, and, as Alison Adam (1990) writes, this includes the field of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. The so called ‘view-from-nowhere’ identified by Thomas Nagel (1986) is predicated upon universal subjects, described by Adam as ‘the archetypal knowers, authors of scientific research are supposed to be anonymous. The individual is always abstract and it is held that this makes no difference to the quality of the research’ (77). But, as Adam points out, this is based on an idealized construction of the knower: ‘these “subjects” are interchangeable only across a narrow range of implicit group membership. And the group in question is the dominant social group in Western Capitalist societies: propertied, educated, white men’ (77).

The misleading presumption of neutrality is a core theme of feminist epistemologies. These presumptions have obscured the wholly located and subject specific nature of scientific practices. Writers such as Susan Hekman (1990), Fox-Keller (1985), Alison Adam, Alcoff and Potter, Lorraine Code and Sandra Harding have written at length about how, in Lorraine Code’s words ‘such beliefs derive from conceptions of detached and faceless cognitive agency that mask the variability of the experiences and practices from which knowledge is constructed’ (Alcoff and Potter: 26). This is not to argue for a relativist epistemology, (described by Sandra Harding as ‘anathema to any scientific project’ (61)) but to argue for the appropriateness of looking at new means of thinking about subjectivity and by extension subjectifying processes.

The interdependencies between subjectivity, epistemology and interactivity are central to my practice, and to the writing that accompanies my research, but the issues and conflicts, and more importantly, the alternatives identified by writers such as Braidotti, Holllway and Henriques et al (1984) uncover further difficulties which I will explore in this thesis, such as why, for example, certain facets of a subject appear to be immutable or resistant to change, and why companies and large organisations such as the army continue to use psychometric methodologies founded upon Western paradigms of the unitary subject.

Evaluation practices.

I have focused so far on one particularly pervasive notion of the subject, the empirical subject who is able to detect truths through sensory input. This subject personifies the idealised scientific observer who is neutral and trans-historical. But I do not want to give the impression that this idea of a subject has been uncritically accepted. The conception of the subject is contentious and has been the focus of many conflicting theories. Philosophers such as Nietzsche and Spinoza challenged Cartesian philospohy. Nietzsche in (1887[4]), rejected the presumption of humanist agency and rational intent, and in (1677) Spinoza’s conception of the irreducible Monad was a direct attack upon Cartesian mind-body dualism[5]. Likewise the processes of subjective evaluation developed from the nineteenth century onwards are the source of ongoing ethical and pragmatic disagreement. By and large I have chosen to work with, and critique dominant conceptions of the subject and the subjectifying practices that have emerged from those notions.

My own work asks many of the core questions that personality psychologists hope to answer through assessment methodologies. Finding answers to these questions is also useful, if not crucial, for any writer trying to build a conventional dramatic characterisation. The core questions embedded in my software and writing consist of the following:

• What are a person’s most important characteristics?
• How do they adapt to specific situations?
• What drives that person? What do they want?
• What are their goals and how do they fulfil them?
• What things does a person try to avoid and how do they try to accomplish such avoidance?
• How do they cope with difficulties?
• What is their overarching sense of their life’s meaning (if any)?

In creating a system to ask these questions I have been influenced by my involvement in predominantly commercial forms of subjective evaluation through intermittent work as a market research interviewer over a seventeen-year period. This work very often involved quantitative forms of subjective assessment. My own practice is aware of the conflicting and problematic issues at the core of subjective evaluations and personality psychology; it deploys evaluative methodologies with a view to generating critical engagement. But why, I ask myself, despite the clear limitations of these practices and in light of a growing body of opposition to fixed notions of the subject, did my various employers continue to use these techniques, and perhaps more puzzling, why did their clients continue to pay for this research?

Wendy Hollway (1984) asks a similar question of occupational assessment:

Does it work? The question immediately begs two others. First, what is ‘it’? Second, what constitutes ‘working’? In answer to the first question, it can be recognized more readily that psychological assessment is not a homogeneous body of knowledge when we see it as a production in various diverse sites (27).

Hollway frames the conception of the individual within occupational assessment as a ‘social technology enabling the administration and regulation of employees’ (28). Within institutional assessment practices it is naïve in her terms to look for a straight forward ‘progress towards truth’ (27). Hollway emphasises the historical motivation within what was then called occupational psychology, to aid organizations with ‘the complex problems of maximizing profitability’ (29). It is important to note the connections between personal psychology and commercial interests, and in my work, to make overt the connections between psychological assessment methodologies and market research practices.

Repertory Grids and ‘Man the Scientist’

An assessment practice that I have explored and indeed, deployed throughout my work has been George A. Kelly’s Personal Construct Repertory Test (1955). This involves the exhaustive formulation of bi-polar constructs from which hypotheses can be tested. Constructs are obtained through a systematic process in which triads are examined in order to select the two that are somehow similar and a third that is different. The source material for these processes may be, for example, the names of significant people. Exhaustive construct elicitation is designed to reveal patterns of experiential categorization or cognitive styles; these may be singular or inter-subjective.

This type of personality assessment has been held up as a somewhat heterodox form of evaluation, foremost because Personal Construct Psychology does not incorporate notions of personality traits, developmental stages or unconscious motivations. The person being evaluated constructs their own sets of hypotheses with the aid of an experimenter or psychologist/counsellor.

As such it may be tempting to view this system as an alternative to the normativising ideologies of other, more trait oriented tests, such as Costa and McRae’s version of the Big Five Test of Personality, Cattell’s Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire or Hans Eysenck’s Big Three Supertraits – which are all predicated on more or less monolithic notions of personality traits such as extraversion-introversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.

However, despite its seemingly unorthodox approach, Personal Construct Psychology does fit within an orthodox humanist tradition, framing its subjects as rational and innately able to identify and test hypotheses. In 1955 George Kelly wrote: ‘The aspirations of the scientist are essentially the aspirations of all men’ (Kelly 1955: 43). Kelly’s approach is a precursor to cognitive theories of personality, in which an individual’s social-cognitive style or adaptation is the key to assessing their individual psychology. It is an approach that is close to the information processing paradigms critiqued by Katherine N. Hayles (1999), Donna Haraway (1991) and Karen Barad (2007).

In framing all men (sic) as tantamount to the idealized figure of ‘the scientist’ it is important to ask what types of knowledge and what types of men, or indeed what types of people this statement rejects. Secondly it is important to remember, as Henriques states (Henriques et al, 1984), that Personal Construct Theory does not take account of the Experimenter Effect, in which the experimenter’s own feelings, attitudes or expectations effect the outcome, nor does it take any account of the irrational, seemingly self-defeating, paradoxical actions of certain individuals, it ignores inconvenient or messy variables that hint at a less than rational subject. Most significantly, Personal Construct Theory is based on a conception of the rational and unitary individual, which may be influenced by social forces or social contexts, but is nevertheless distinct and separate from their society.

I have explained how my work is concerned with investigating conceptions of subjectivity and subjectifying processes within the context of a system for generating both factual and fictional writing.

My deployment of these methodologies is consciously problematic, as I will demonstrate in the final section of this chapter, I have used these techniques in a way that destabilizes their core assumptions and seeks to reframe subjectifying practices as performative, situated and processual. The next section looks at the implications of working with new ideas around the knowing subject, these ideas challenge the notion of the Cartesian cogito who is implacably separate from his society. In questioning scientifically orthodox ideas of who and what a subject is the idea of the object is also examined, including the way in which subject-object boundaries are constructed or perceived in the conception of interactivity.

3.2 New forms of knowledge

Rethinking the subject is closely linked to epistemology (or theories around the nature of knowledge), but in problematising Western notions of both the Cartesian and the Empirical subject or knower (who have arguably dominated Western epistemological schemas and scientific paradigms of knowledge production) what alternative forms of knowing can be formulated and what type of knowers might engage in this knowing?

I have discussed how the orthodox Western subject has been narrowly construed, representing a particular group of people with their own expectations, agendas and historical specificities; I have also shown how the assumed neutrality of the idealized scientific knower has been challenged by writers such as Evelyn Fox-Keller, Alison Adam, Donna Haraway and Henriques et al, and in fact that expectations of neutrality have been largely abandoned by these writers. Donna Haraway is at the forefront of feminist scientists calling for a new type of knowledge that acknowledges the partial perspective and situatedness of epistemological processes. I shall show how these ideas, in tandem with ideas about embodiment and skills-based knowledge, relate to my own practices around interactivity and the of building computational structures.

Situated Knowledges

The writer Donna Haraway identifies the seemingly contradictory requirements of a so-called successor science, a science defined by Sandra Harding (1993) as a project that will address the systemic short comings identified in particular by feminist epistemologists and scientists, failings which Haraway defines as the ‘hierarchical positivist orderings of what can count as knowledge’. (Haraway, 1991: 188). Haraway frames this successor science as owning a ‘radical multiplicity of local knowledges’ (187). Such a multiplicity enables a new form of objectivity that can accommodate post-modern insights into knowledge production, particularly post-modernism’s emphasis upon power relations, and its attack upon the implicitly universalising, overarching and grand narratives of humanism.

A successor science proposes a new form of objectivity that Haraway describes as turning ‘out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility’ (190).

The building of multiple and multi-linear accounts of individual and site specific narratives within my own practice is corroborated in the idea of a successor science. The core insights of Donna Haraway (1991), Sandra Harding (1986; 1991), Lorrraine Code (1993, Lucy Suchman (1987; 2007) Karen Barad (2007) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) are in many ways congruent with my own practical interest in creating transparent and openly partial structures within the South project. Donna Haraway writes:

The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision, this is an objective vision that invites rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices (198)

Using visual practices as an example Haraway emphasises the corporeality of this sensory system, it is undeniably embodied and not as she puts it ‘a gaze from nowhere’ (188). Despite this, vision has been used within Western scientism to somehow signify a transcendental and neutral observer, it has been allowed in other words to ‘represent while escaping representation’ (188). But Haraway is keen to point out that her notion of embodiment and particularity also serves as a metaphor for non-human forms of vision, including vision in its varied technological forms:

I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation) are not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity (189)

Within my own software and writing I have embedded mechanisms for representing my own and my reader’s partial perspectives. Locating oneself and the particularity of one’s own vision represents an ethics of knowledge production, but also a more complex bringing together of subjects and objects, which, as I hope to illustrate by the end of this chapter, has opened up new possibilities for interactive literary processes within my work.

Non-isomorphic subjects

Throughout my practice I have used CCTV images (among other materials) taken from networked surveillance cameras located along the banks of the River Thames. I have used these images to generate subject and site specific narratives and to obtain supposedly psychometric assessments of individuals. The gaze of these apparently impartial cameras is re-subjectified by a series of processes both analogue and digitally instantiated. Within the digitally based works these images are dynamically taken from the web, emphasising a mutable and nomadic form of subjectivity. No image is identical to another, and yet, on the surface they appear to be monotonously similar. I understand these images, whose overt use is for the control and regulation of traffic, crime and the flow of the city, as having a direct relationship to the nineteenth century institutional photographic practices described by John Tagg (1988) as ‘a proliferating system of documentation – of which photographic records were only a part’ (63). On the surface these practices are stripped of partial perspective; these may be naively described as forensic or objective images; their origins in scientific or penal institutions camouflage an underlying perspective and partiality. But as Tagg points out: ‘Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own’ (63-64).

Above and below, CCTV imagery of the South Bank used within the South software to generate dynamic narratives.

My practice engineers, where possible, an end to representing ‘while escaping representation’. An end, for example, to the power of CCTV cameras to escape such representation. Throughout the South software CCTV cameras and images act as proxy narrators, (or narrative agents) bringing to the surface a range of desires, beliefs, agendas and motivations, factors that are suppressed in Western scientism and scientific notions of observer neutrality. Institutional CCTV images are deployed as story-telling mechanisms, this is not represented as a novel form of use for such camera lenses but their typically concealed metier.

Haraway’s application of both human and technological vision as a central metaphor in her notion of Situated Knowledges has pragmatic resonance with the South system, in which I attempt to pursue new forms of knowledge production through an epistemology that is embodied, non-neutral and always engaged with a view from somewhere. Haraway writes:

all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds (190).

Within the South system the overt deployment of CCTV cameras as narrative conduits is a form of both situated story telling and subjectification. The mechanisms I have designed within this system negotiate and test new forms of objectivity while exploring subjective and inter-subjective responses to test materials: news headlines, CCTV and other images, smells, sounds and tactile experiences. These mechanisms represent an attempt to deploy a creative form of successor objectivity, the result, in literary terms, is an artefact and a process that generates multiple, concurrent threads of partial and locatable knowledges. As I have stated before, this is not to be confused with a relativist project. A relativist account according to Haraway is ‘a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The ‘equality’ of positions is a denial of responsibility and critical enquiry’ (191). Haraway firmly states that relativism is also a denial of specificity, it is mirrored in its supposedly diametric construction, the authoritative, totalising claims of positivist science:

Relativism and totalization are both ‘god-tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science. But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective enquiry rests (191).

I have pursued a practice in which a new form of objectivity is embedded, this objectivity is also connected to the perspective of other people, and it is not ‘innocent’ of its power in creating an evaluatory practice. In response to this realisation I have built in mechanisms to make my partiality as visible as possible within the system, but as Haraway points out:

We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology linking meanings and bodies. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence the ‘death-of-the-subject’. That single ordering point of will and consciousness. That judgement seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this generative doubt the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories (191).

Within the South system the apparent isomorphism between one CCTV image and the next is subject to a similar form of generative doubt. The South system automatically seeks out differences between images, these differences are interpreted in narrative terms, readers are invited to provide their own interpretation of what these differences mean; readers are also automatically photographed and the results put into a database. According to data I have uploaded that day, (relating to my own state, a subjective index of mood, reactions, finances and other parameters), these I.D photographs will be subject to a range of image processing effects. Images of readers are also overlaid with time-specific data generated in the moments of their interaction with the South system. The result is a visual database of readers defined in overtly located and specific terms by my own shifting categories and responses. A range of categorisations and apparent isomorphisms can be retrieved by querying the database, but the fact that my own partiality is literally embedded in these images denies representation without being represented, which Haraway describes as ‘the cyclopean self-satiated eye of the master subject’ (191).

Below: reader images from the South system convoluted with my own image. Temporally specific data is imposed upon the images.

Interactionism

Haraway’s outline for a new form of objectivity also addresses the society/individual dualism described by many of the epistemologists I have referred to throughout this thesis. In a psychological context Wendy Hollway (Hollway, 1989) makes the connection between this society/individual schism and the notion of ‘interactionism’, identifying the ‘hopeless dualism’ (27) that separates an individual from their society in mainstream social-psychological practices. Interactionism has been used within social psychology to characterise the relationship of the individual to the social, it frames the individual as asocial and ‘inevitably reduces to biology and information processing mechanisms’ (28), bringing us back to a unitary, innately rational notion of the subject.

Both Haraway and Hollway highlight for me the importance as both a researcher and practitioner of not falling in with binary positions in relation to agency, of not placing agency solely in the hands of an individual (and, for example, their biology) or, on the other hand, of characterising agency as a phenomena determined by social forces alone. Rational knowledge according to Haraway is a ‘power-sensitive conversation’ (Haraway, 1991: 196), a view that envisions science as ‘the paradigmatic model not of closure, but of that which is contestable and contested’ (196). Likewise Hollway envisages a radically different relationship between researchers, their ‘subjects’ and the knowledge they generate:

My theorizing displaces objective rationality from the centre of the human subject and produces radical; possibilities for the use of subjective knowledge (Hollway, 1989: 25)

Haraway states firmly that is not identity however that generates scientific knowledge (or science as she puts it), but critical positioning, her alternative form of objectivity: ‘A scientific knower seeks the subject position not of identity, but of objectivity; that is, partial connection’ (Haraway, 1991: 193). To make claims for knowing the identity of another in its entirety is to enact what Haraway frequently alludes to as the ‘god-trick’. My practice is wholly committed to the removal of any such ‘god-tricks’, despite the arguable presence of such master standpoints within many orthodox computational practices[6] (not to mention psychological assessment methodologies). My own methodology and practice applies a conscious requirement to identify structures and assumptions that rely on the idea of an omniscient, idealized and un-represented, conquering eye. Likewise within the evaluation processes I have used there is an overt indexing to my own perspectives. My aim is to create as high a degree of transparency as possible within the South System. The South software deploys charts, diagrams and disruptive photographic processes that are designed to locate and embed a critical self-representation.

Donna Haraway’s descriptions of an alternative objectivity have been key research references for this project; her notion of a locatable form of rationality is resonant with the South project and its software architectures. These architectures are not ’the products of escape and transcendence of limits, i.e. the view from above, but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradiction, i.e. of views from somewhere ‘(196). In this vision of collective subject positions the notion of boundaries between objects and subjects becomes far more mutable than in orthodox scientific epistemologies. ‘Boundaries’ Haraway writes ‘ are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects’ (201). The indices to my own subjective evaluation within the South system (produced as instrumental weightings within the software) are also processual in nature and do not exhibit pre-existent states. They are defined by my own mutability and by the mutability of all the parameters within the evaluation processes, as such I would characterise the system as situated, both in the theoretical terms Donna Haraway describes and in Lucy Suchman’s (1987, 2006) conception of situated systems within computer-human interactions.

Lucy Suchman’s work is invaluable in offering both a radical agenda, in terms of key theoretical notions of who systems are designed for (epistemologically), as well as making a profoundly pragmatic contribution to understanding how these theoretical insights can be used within real-world systems. In tandem with the ideas of Karen Barad and Elizabeth Grosz I will show how I have engaged with an alternative and pragmatic form of interactivity, which Karen Barad calls intra-activity. This form of interaction is centred upon the notions of situated knowledge expounded by Donna Haraway, but it also places emphasis upon the embodied and processual nature of all interactions, interactions, that, as I will demonstrate, are not predicated on the separation of individuals from society or the separation of mind from body.

3.3 Interactivity and prior systems.

Lucy Suchman’s radical reframing of computer-human interaction relates to the degree of pre-existent representation needed for computer systems to work satisfactorily. It is also significant that Lucy Suchman, in keeping with the epistemologists I have mentioned in this chapter, emphasises sociality as an alternative to orthodox models of the unitary cognizer (or cogito) as the locus of rational actions. Suchman is deeply critical of cognitivist models of interaction that are characterised by information-processing paradigms. These paradigms are predicated on notions of environmental stimulus and behavioural response:

The first premise of cognitive science, therefore, is that people (or “cognizers” of any sort) act on the basis of symbolic representations: a kind of cognitive code, instantiated physically in the brain, on which operations are performed to produce mental states such as “the belief that p”, which in turn produce behaviour consistent with those states (Suchman, 2007: 37).

Though there is contention within the domain of cognitive science as to the exact nature of these interactions, there is, according to Suchman, a general belief that this model of intelligent human agency does not merely have a resemblance or resonance with computational processes, but that it ‘literally is computational’ (37). The notion of human intelligence as tantamount to the management of symbolic representations is exemplified in rule based computation such as expert systems and factory floor robotics. But as Suchman points out, these are narrow domains with a high degree of containment and predictability. As an alternative to the cognitivist emphasis upon the unitary Cartesian cogito, (and the specific forms of rationality associated with it) Suchman, like Haraway, suggests that we instead pay attention to the

specificities of knowing subjects, multiply and differentially positioned, and variously engaged in reiterative and transformative activities of collective world-making (Suchman 2005: 3).

Suchman challenges and inverts the cognitivist idea of similarities between humans and computers and instead asks how we might usefully understand, and instrumentally deploy, the significant differences between machines and people. In part she asserts that the inscrutability of computers is a contributory factor in their reification as entities, rather than as complex arrangements of interacting parts. It is our own projection or ideas of intentionality that sustains the mystique of the computer as somehow personified. This sense of intention, Suchman implies, is part of the mystique of interaction, the idea that we are interacting with an intelligent entity rather than ‘just performing operations on it’ (Suchman, 2007:42), but in naturalizing objects as entity-like and intentional there is danger that their human designers are neutralized.

Below, screen shot from the South software. Where possible the South system makes its embedded perspectives visible. The differences between the reader’s and the designer’s perspective are used as a creative weighting within the system.

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Removing the designer from view is very much in keeping with a scientific orthodoxy that seeks to neutralize the scientist or, indeed, to make him or her entirely invisible. My software does the opposite, my presence as an artist and software writer is overtly embedded within and throughout the South system. As a subject I am also arguably objectified: my practices, opinions and methods are commodified within the data structures and processes of my own software. Lucy Suchman places particular importance upon recognising these forms of boundary crossings, of

the ways in which it matters when things travel across the human-artifact boundary, when objects are subjectified (e.g., machines made not actants but actors) and subjects objectified (270) .

But in recognising these border crossings it is important not to establish further dualisms and monolithic conceptions of agency in the machine-human nexus. My practice has been informed by conceptions of agency and epistemology that are characterized above all by fluidity. These conceptions emphasise the processual rather than the more fixed territory of pre-given concepts.

Idealized states and concrete circumstances

One particularly rigid concept of interactivity identified by Lucy Suchman is of real-time control over the computing process, in which ‘the user can override and modify operations in progress’ (Suchman, 1987: 11). Suchman asks what other means of interaction can be instituted and what other notions of agency can instantiate these interactions? Suchman pinpoints language, or dialogic metaphors of interaction, as representing conventionally idealized forms of computer-human communication. This paradigm of verbal communication as the ideal model for interaction between computers and individuals has in large part been canonized by the Turing test.

The Turing test posits that if a human and a machine generate the same verbal responses in reaction to the same stimuli, then ‘regardless of the identity of their operations, one processor is essentially equivalent to the other’ (22). But Suchman (1987, 2007), Barad (2007), Hayles (1999) and Alison Adam (1998) (among others) deploy theories of embodiment and specificity to present a coherent challenge to this canonical form, not least of all, as I have shown, to the disembodied information-processing paradigm that arguably corresponds to the Cartesian Cogito. The Turing test, like the forms of rationality affiliated to the Cogito, has no interest in ‘bodily competences’ (Adam, 1998: 183); it deals only in symbolic representations. Continuing with the example of speech, Suchman challenges another canonized model of interaction design: that of means-end strategies or planning models. The idealized states represented by planning models, such as expert systems and task specific robotics, are the target of consistent challenges, not only by Suchman, but also by the writers cited in the previous paragraph.

The infinitely complex, unpredictable contingencies of real-world environments are far harder to plan for, it is these situations that new paradigms of interactivity address. Taking the example of speech, Suchman argues that plans and goals ‘do not provide a solution’ (Suchman, 1987: 47), in fact, she argues, they may do rather the opposite. The degree of a priori structures in any interactive system is an indication, in Suchman’s terms, of a system’s limitation and inflexibility:

The dependency of significance on a particular context, every particular context’s open-endedness, and the essential ad hocness of contextual elaboration are resources for practical affairs, but perplexities for a science of human action…it is an intractable problem for projects that rest on providing in advance for the significance of canonical descriptions – such as instructions – for situated action (48).

Lucy Suchman’s central image (or metaphorical alternative) to a priori planning is embodied by the mode of navigation deployed by South Pacific Trukese sailors, in which actions are taken in response to material and concrete circumstances and ‘plans are subsumed by the larger problems of situated action’ (50). Suchman is not suggesting an end to all forms of planning, but is instead emphasising that it is crucial to respond dynamically to unfolding situations. Lucy Suchman’s point is that In complex real-world circumstances other forms of knowledge come into play, for example embodied forms of knowledge that are not easily represented in predicate calculus or prepositional logic schemas. Suchman cites language as a form of situated action, as having an ‘essentially indexical relationship to the embedding world’ (60). To construct an interactive system that understands language requires not only an understanding of the specific situation in which that language is being generated, but also an infinite understanding of the underlying assumptions behind that language but not embedded, semantically within it.

There are, unfortunately, no usefully invariant structures available to me as the originator of a largely language-based interactive system. Instead I have looked to the situated processes and ad hoc contexts of meaning-making, rather than altogether a priori structures or an infinite regress of rules or predetermined outcomes. I have, to a large extent, relied upon building a system that makes interpretation and significant language generation a joint endeavour (but this is not, I would like to emphasise an ‘innocent’ negation of my own partial perspective within the South system). The task of interpretation is (albeit unevenly) distributed between myself and my ‘readers’ and the analytic properties of my software. I assign this aspect of the software a high degree of agency by virtue of the fact that, although written by me, it has a pattern finding ability that, in many circumstances, vastly surpasses my own. However, the understanding that the computer is capable of is far from symmetrical with a human understanding of language, this asymmetry is an unconcealed, and I hope, a creatively energising, artefact of the South system.

Below, misunderstandings between the computer and the user are used as a resource within the South system. They are a source of creative tension and a tool for investigating the differences between people and computers as well inter-subjective differences of meaning.

Questions of agency logically arise when orthodox notions of knowledge generation are confronted. Alison Adam (1998) asks, what types of knowledge are denied by the conceptualisation of knowing as a symbolic representation within traditional AI? Adam writes of ‘epistemic hierarchies’ (Adam, 1998) that privilege prepositional knowledge but denies or negates, other, typically less formalised, forms of knowing such as tacit or skills based knowledge. These other types of knowing are not separable from the experience of being embodied, as Adam writes:

Rationalist philosophy has sidelined the body in giving the mind the primary role in the making of knowledge and rationality (129).

Adam, like Hollway (1989, 1984) and Haraway (1991) asks what social constructionism can tell us about physical embodiment, and concludes that it is not sufficient to explain our embodied selves as the sum total of discourses. This is no more satisfactory an explanation than socio-biologically reductive accounts such as those proposed by Edward O. Wilson (1975), in which all social behaviour is characterised as driven by evolutionary imperatives. Likewise traditional AI cannot satisfactorily account for the processes that make symbolic representations meaningful. What is missing from these epistemic schemas is a holistic account of what Haraway (1991) calls the ‘material-semiotic’, in other words a non-dualistic description of the processes through which meaning is generated.

Agency in computer-human interactions

The philosopher Karen Barad expands upon Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic with her conception of agential-realism, in which meaning is constituted from specific situations and actions or causal intra-actions. These intra-actions are socio-material; they are not separable from society and its discourses or from physical materialities. Karen Barad’s agential realism does not emanate from one location or from exclusively human sources, neither is it located in words alone. Barad’s notion of ‘performative’ understanding (explained below, but essentially a form of meaning-making rooted in actual practices and real-world actions) branches away from forms of representation that place us outside of the world, it places us firmly as part of the ‘world in which we have our being’ (Barad, 2007:133). According to Barad, intra-action, unlike interaction does not presuppose ‘the prior existence of independent entities of relata’ (139). Barad does not take for granted atomistic or Cartesian separations between subject and object, instead she sees specific situations and actions as allowing phenomenological relata to emerge as specific causal intra-actions.

The notion of entanglement is central to Barad’s distinction between intra and interaction, and the distinction between objects that are separable, and phenomena, which are inherently more fluid. Performative understanding is Barad’s central challenge to the power we have placed in language as tantamount to reality, as the main agent in systems of representation. Discourse, Barad writes ‘is not what is said, it is that what constrains and enables what can be said’. (146) Performative understanding defies the anthropocentric forces, ‘the seductive nucleus’ (135) which Barad describes as binding us to our anthropocentric theories. Karen Barad’s agential realism specifically acknowledges and takes account of ‘matter’s dynamism’ (135). This approach is an opportunity to move away from the infinite regress of epistemological self-reflection and representation, to forms of knowing and knowledge generation that are rooted in practices and real-world actions, as such it has made a significant contribution to resolving a number of the problems raised throughout this chapter, not least in the idea of an alternative epistemology, a form of mutually constituted meaning that is not fixed but ongoing and multiply enacted.

Lucy Suchman also identifies the significance of Barad’s new conceptions of agency in relation to interactive system design:

This intimate co-constitution of configured materialities with configuring agencies clearly implies a very different understanding of the human-machine interface (Suchman, 2007: 26).

This arguably brings us back to Lucy Suchman’s question of the degree of difference between humans and machines, and the reification of computers as intentional entities. There are differences between machines and people but in identifying these differences one must not lose sight of their (and our) mutual constitution. However, Suchman is anxious to point out that it is not necessarily a symmetrical process of constitution. Machines and humans do have significant differences but they do not negate critical and non-humanist conceptions of agency. Suchman reminds us of the need to examine the new meanings that occur in the dynamic transformations of material-discursive practices, for this dynamism, as Barad points out, is agency. It is an agency that is present in ‘the ongoing reconfigurings of the world’ (Barad, 207:141).

Though Barad does not mention either Henri Bergson or Elizabeth Grosz it would seem that she is describing a processual and material form of becoming that has many similarities with Bergsonian philosophy and with the ideas of Grosz (1994, 1999, 2004) especially those around embodiment and epistemology. These accounts of knowledge production present radically different paradigms of inquiry that have aided me in developing a reflexive and situated form of creative practice.

Embodiment and the generation of meaning

Elizabeth Grosz in (1994) re-orientates subjectivity to the body, but this is not to frame the body as a historical or pre-cultural, neither does Grosz adhere to holistic, transcendental, or what might be termed ‘new-age’, ideas of mind-body cohesion. Grosz frames notions of seeking mind-body cohesion as reliant upon a problematic binary conception. In Grosz’s terms the mind and the body are like a möbius strip, consisting of neither a dualism nor an identifiable whole. Though the body, in Grosz’s terms, is still a social, political and cultural location it is not satisfactorily accounted for in social constructionist discourse, which does not (according to Grosz) see the body beyond fixed and biologically determined parameters. Elizabeth Grosz frames the body, not as an object of representation, but as an entity in an ongoing process of becoming. Grosz supports this claim by exploring a range of so-called psycho-somatic and historically specific conditions such as stigmata, phantom limbs and ‘hysterical’ paralysis, in which culturally perceived notions of paralysis are manifested in the body despite their physiological inaccuracy. Grosz, like Haraway sees the body as:

a point from which to rethink the opposition between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the self and the other and all other binary pairs associated with the mind/body opposition (Grosz, 1994: 21).

Throughout the South system I have deployed practices that result in a rethinking of the gradations of relationships between a subject and an object, characterized by Grosz as the reversible positions of subject and object, between, for example, feeling and being felt. My practice has driven a performative exploration of the gradations between being evaluated as a subject and self-observing as a sort of object. Specific examples and exercises involving such self-observations can be found throughout the South book and software.

Below, screenshot from South software, it depicts part of an evaluative process in which readers connect their subjectivity to site-specific textures, which they must find and experience through touch. This introduces an overtly embodied form of knowing into the epistemic schemas of the South project.

A central concept used by Grosz is that of the body image, or that which provides us with a sense of ourselves within an environment and our sense of having identifiable body-parts:

The body image is not an isolated image of the body but necessarily involves the relations between the body, the surrounding space, other objects and bodies (85).

The notion of the body image explains how consciousness can ‘establish a space or a distance between itself and its objects’ (91). Our bodies, according to Grosz, are defined by their relations to the environment, but also define the environment. It is an interchange highly reminiscent of Karen Barad’s agential realism and differential intelligibility, but also of Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic.

Once the subject is no longer seen as an ideality – whether psychical or corporeal – but fundamentally an effect of the pure difference that constitutes all models of materiality, new terms need to be sought by which to think this affinity within and outside the subject (209).

The need for such new understanding of the differences between elements is present in the writings I have cited of Bergson, Barad, Suchman and Grosz. All these writers point to the need for systems that have a high degree of contingency and openness in their generation of meaning. As I have shown (and will continue to show throughout this thesis), my practice has led me to explore contingent and open structures within the South system. Beyond the narrow domain of interactive systems, these writers are proposing alternative ways of knowing and of creative becoming that threaten dominant epistemological and subjective schemas. The schemas they challenge are wholly pre-determined, statistical, quantifying, fixed in reactive patterns of cause and effect. It is these schemas that I have sought alternatives to and will now describe in greater detail, also exploring work by other artists and writers whose creative interests intersect with my own.

3.4: Flexible data structures and flexible subjects: designing the South system

each time I recall fragment 91 of Heraclitus, "'You cannot step into the same river twice”, I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning ("The river is another") covertly imposes upon us the second meaning ("I am another") and gives us the illusion of having invented it (Borges, 1999: 323).

Isabelle Stengers asks, “What kind of practices do we create when we use the concept of subjectivity?” (Stengers 2008: 14), In a similar way questions of how computational works can engage with subjectivities are also embedded within the specific form of my own practice. How can this be done in previously unexplored forms? What kinds of systems will result? I would now like to frame the results of my research and practice around subjectivity as a series of cultural and pragmatic proposals. These proposals are embedded within my work, within the South system and within both the South egg and book. These three artefacts may be framed as test sites in which the ideas generated by my research and practice can be pragmatically evaluated in ‘real-world’ situations with ‘real-world’ readers.

The rationale for the artefacts I have designed stems from my core findings, which are as follows:

· Meaning (or intelligibility) in a situated system will not reside in an a priori model of the user (or their possible interactions), but rather in a relation between more generalised plans and specific circumstances.

· Likewise subjective representation is problematic, it is more useful to examine dynamic and situated differences.

· Dominant modes of knowledge production such as those based on prepositional logic, statistics and a priori notions of cause and effect (exemplified in rule-based systems) are fixed and reactive and as such are not ideal for generating new ideas or new texts. These forms also negate other types of knowledge, such as embodied, skills based, knowledge.

· Open-ended methods are preferable within a system designed to encourage divergent forms of writing and divergent subjectivities.

· The writings the system generates will, like the subjects who interact with them, be multiple, situated and multi-linear.

· Where possible, my own partial perspective should be transparently present within the system, not negated or hidden by it.

· The system should deploy knowledge generated through embodied processes, not only sight, but also smell, touch, taste and sound.

From these core findings I can encapsulate my theoretical and practical rationale into the following two statements:

· Interaction is a contingent process of shared and collaborative, ad hoc, understandings within the framework of generalised or more abstracted a priori intentions.

· Difference and specificity are key resources in an interactive system working with subjectivities.

The South system is an appeal to tolerance of complexity and the assumption that readers are intelligent, contradictory and multifaceted. Creating language based computer systems highlights the complexity of human language and also highlights the limitations in understanding currently inherent in computational systems. A key finding of my research is that the asymmetry of understanding between humans and computers can be framed as either a source of failure or a source of creative tension. Language based interaction is most conducive to failure in cases where a priori meanings are deeply embedded, precluding a dynamic understanding of situating circumstances and actions. Giving computational systems extended access to such situating material is a core concern of my practice.

To quote Lucy Suchman, situated interaction is characterised as ‘ lively, moment-by-moment assessment of the significance of particular circumstances’ (Suchman 2007:176). My practice deploys subjectivity and subjectifying practices as a form of situating resource or an expanded notion of an ‘environment’, but the fixed models of the subject present in the system (generated by schematised subjectifying practices) are designed to be decomposed and renegotiated by readers.

Rivers of meaning: ArrayLists

The river is a structure that retains its riverine identity because it is always changing; if it did not change constantly it would not and could not be a river. The South system emulates the form of a river and applies its flexible formations to the construction of subjectivity.

Claire Colebrook in Grosz (1999) describes Foucault’s so called games of truth around subjectivity as a ‘transvaluation of philosophy’s own order: the self is produced in the inquiry it makes into itself’ (128). This is characterized as a reactive strategy. Colebrook posits instead a non-reactive approach that would ‘affirm itself through the questions it asks about itself – not in passive recognition but through self-formation’ (128-129). This is close to the strategy I have adopted in designing the subjectifying processes deployed throughout the South system. Readers are invited to observe themselves in their own processes of self-evaluation and of evaluation by the system. In this way layers of subjectivity are generated, but they are, like Heraclitus’s river, never encountered more than once. The South system is embedded with flux, the networked or relational flux of subjectification and of situating circumstances, including the tidal transmutations of the River Thames itself. Arguably, the system is unable to generate immutable results. It is a network of meaning that is highly unlikely to repeat itself precisely. Though the system draws upon tide tables (Tidal data is obtained by the system through a feed from the BBC Weather Centre. This data is used to define, for example, the weight and range of the systems core vocabulary). These predictions are themselves subject to a significant degree of flux, caused by the raising of the Thames flood barrier, surface run-off from heavy rains or winds etc.

I have chosen to work with a flow of data that is essentially positioned between chaos and order, in this way I might define the South system as having, what, in Deleuzian terms, might be described as diagrammatic[7] qualities. Such qualities are contingent, nascent or diagrammatic. These are the conditions that Gilles Deleuze in (1981) describes as being necessary for generating the new, his description is highly resonant of a river, ‘The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens’ (72)

Below, tidal predictions for London Bridge, obtained

from the BBC Weather Centre, 06/11/08, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/tides/tides.shtml?date=20081106&loc=0113, accessed 06/11/08

The metaphor of tidal prediction is an apt one in light of my interest in the efficacy of planning and prior systems. Lucy Suchman’s ideas (1987, 2007) have been useful in reflecting upon aspects of my work, and her own metaphors around planning and embodied interaction often allude to moving through water, including the navigational techniques of Trukese sailors and the image of a white water canoeist manoeuvring through rapids. Unlike Lucy Suchman, however, my primary concern is not with the design of a user interface or the effectiveness of its instructions (she cites the example of an interface for a photo-copier machine) but with a dynamic and situated software and analogue system for text generation.

Despite these differences in intention, Lucy Suchman’s ideas of situated action have provided pragmatic examples of ways in which one might approach ad hoc text generation, and the creation of a system that has a minimal dependence upon a detailed and prior set of rules.

The South system has deployed some of the more conventional strategies described in (2007), such as obtaining a local and a global picture of user interactions. However, this does involve the analysis of specific tasks undertaken by a reader (such as their written reaction to a ‘live’ CCTV image), and an accumulating analysis of their general actions and responses, with direct relation to situating and locating factors. More radically, I take on board Lucy Suchman’s notion of plans as resources for action rather than as controlling systems. These plans are lose and sketch-like, they represent abstracted generalisations for the sort of situated actions that will work in conjunction with them. As Suchman writes, ‘the detail of intent and action must be contingent on the circumstantial and interactional particulars of actual situations’ (Suchman, 2007:183). The vague representation implicit in such plans is complemented by situated actions that, although destined to be concrete and specific, cannot be fully represented in a prior model. As ever Suchman finds analogies in human language, ‘in its efficiency’, Suchman writes, ‘language provides us with a shareable resource for talk about the world’ (183). But in citing language as an example, Suchman is not resorting to the problematic ideal of language as a model for computer-human interaction, but rather, looking at the use of language as an a priori structure that works effectively n conjunction with unpredictable circumstances:

By abstracting uniformities across situations plans allow us to bring past experience and projected outcomes to bear on our present actions. (184)

Suchman describes the way in which a priori formulations are deployed in tandem with unplanned circumstances and practices; her example of Micronesian navigators is an apposite paradigm. The archetype of water and navigation has also emerged within my own practice as an instrumental form. As my work is centred on the South Bank and the River Thames it was perhaps inevitable that riverine and liquid structures would materialize from it. Suchman cites Edward Hutchins[8] (1983), in which the situated nature of Micronesian maritime navigation is described. The type of navigation Hutchins delineates uses both the familiar observational techniques of celestial navigation, but also takes cues from a range of environmental referents, such as the shape and colour of waves, clouds, birds and other local, yet unplanned interactions. This process is characterized by Suchman as ‘interaction between a representation and the particular, contingent details of the environment’ (185).

Within my own practice it is this type of interaction that represents a significant break from previous notions of interactivity. In the context of a narrative generation system, (combined with the notion of subjective or psychometric assessment) my aim has been to create a radically contingent form of software that has a dynamic relationship to generalised goals. My software architecture has used mutable structures such as ArrayLists, a data structure in the Java programming language that can expand and contract to reflect ad hoc changes. ArrayLists are particularly flexible in allowing for duplicates and in having a potentially limitless capacity (subject to the power of the computer being used). Unlike a database structure, I distinguish the ArrayList for not relying upon a body of meta-data or a complex relation of further taxonomic structures.[9] The data these ArrayLists accommodates consists of contingent variables such as news headlines, tidal highs and lows, weather and financial information and reader responses to embodied encounters with the South Bank area. These types of information work in the same way that Micronesian navigators use environmental referents, they are navigational resources, not for a user navigating an ‘interface’ but for a system configuring itself in reaction to unique circumstances that cannot be embedded as rigidly prior structures or rule sets.

The Narrative Landscape: Jeffrey Shaw, Mongrel and Martin Crimp.

In researching alternatives to rigidly determined forms of both subjectivity and interactivity I have examined the work of other artists who share these concerns. In terms of interactivity the artists whose work has most in common with my own goals are not primarily concerned with interactive narrative generation but with an embodied and often spatial form of interplay closer to gaming or site specific art. Jeffery Shaw ‘s The Legible City (1989) and The Narrative Landscape (1985) are both eloquent examples of works that provide important frames of reference for my own practice. The Legible City is concerned with an embodied form of interactivity in which specific locations can be explored virtually by the action of cycling. Shaw’s audience navigate city environments such as Manhattan (1989), Amsterdam (1990) and Karlsruhe (1991), constructed from three-dimensional texts instead of buildings. Like many hypertext narratives the audience can follow their own pathway through each city, following pre-determined texts[10] .The resulting work generates an embodied but deterministic form of narrative experience. Likewise Shaw’s Narrative Landscape (1985) involves the navigation by joystick of pre-determined but multi-linear layers of visual and written digital artefacts. Where Shaw’s work enters interesting new realms of interactivity is when he allows for inter-subjective exchanges. The Distributed Legible City (1998) is a networked installation in which multiple users cycle through virtual cities, these users may be at different physical locations but are brought together virtually. In The Distributed Legible City audience or rather participant conversations and physical gestures augment pre-determined narratives. The Distributed Legible City represents a work that is far closer theoretically and pragmatically to the South project then Shaw’s earlier works.

Mark Hansen has written at length about Jeffrey Shaw’s work, framing it in the context of his thesis or ‘Bergsonist vocation of new media art’ (Hansen, 2004:12), in pursuit of which Hansen asks:

First: how the image comes to encompass the entire process of its own embodied formation or creation, what I shall call the digital image. Second: how the body acquires a newly specified function within the regime of the digital image. And third: how this function of the body gives rise to an affective “supplement” to the act of perceiving the image, that is, a properly haptic domain of sensation and, specifically, the sensory experience of the “warped space” of the body itself (12).

Though the South software also deploys images as epistemic artefacts or indeed agential presences, (such as CCTV pictures and reader ‘mug shots’) the South book and software also makes similar investigations into digital and analogue texts, asking how they might come to encompass embodied processes of generation. The questions of affect that Hansen emphasises are not central to the South project, (and do not seem congruent with the project’s broadly anti-individualist, relational, stance) however, the project clearly is concerned with visceral forms of knowing and with alternatives to orthodox computational representations such as knowledge bases or ontologies.

Mark Hansen also writes about another work that is overtly concerned with rigid a priori representations and clearly shares an interest in critiquing subjectifying practices. Colour Separation (1998) by the art group Mongrel deploys the inter-subjective relationships of its own members as a resource and reference point to construct eight rigidly schematised racial typologies. The work was distributed as Heritage Gold software, arguably critiquing the concept of both heritage and the commodification and classification of identity. Similar critiques are found in digital works such as Diller and Scofidio’s Indigestion (1995), an interactive video in which viewers were able to choose from various stereotypical character traits to construct the two dining characters. This work aimed to expose the ‘rhetoric of choice surrounding interactive technologies and at individual choice in relation to the cultural construction of sexual and class distinctions’ (Graham, 1996:32). Likewise Graham Harwood’s interactive installation, Rehearsal of Memory (1995), constructed an amalgam, visual identity from the collective identities of prisoner-patients in the Ashworth Mental Hospital. Rehearsal of Memory plays upon the subjective reductions such patients are defined by, in which they are pathologised as categorisations that describe behaviours and medical conditions but tell you little or nothing about their memories and lives.

Dramatic categorisations:

The critique of subjective categorisations embedded in my practice also has themes in common with the work of playwright Martin Crimp, typified in Attempts on Her Life (first performed in 1997), and No One Sees the Video (first performed in 1990) In light of my own experience. It is interesting to note that Martin Crimp worked as a transcriber of market research interviews between 1980 and 1983, chronologically close to my own time of initiation into the practices of market research[11]. No One Sees the Video presents market research as a ‘parasitic activity that is at best of questionable value and at worst positively intrusive’ (Sierz, 2006:33). Martin Crimp describes his play as a ‘post-consumer play, dealing with the idea that markets and aspects of business are like the air you breathe’ (34). The play can be viewed as an attack on the naturalisation of evaluative practices and intrusions. Aleks Sierz writes: ‘These question-and-answer techniques, so suggestive of police interrogation, give the play an air of manipulative power games with uncertain outcomes’ (33-34). This statement might also represent the South system, which invites its readers to enact their own processes of manipulation and self-representation. As Martin Crimp demonstrates in the play, the processes of subjection do not affect the ‘subjects’ alone:

Crimp is also interested in the way the job affects its employees. “There is a line in it,’ Crimp said, ‘where the man [Colin] is trying to persuade the woman [Liz] to take a job in Market Research and he says, “just acquaint yourself with the vocabulary and the rest will follow.” [p.45] Once you have acquired the tools, then that becomes set in your mind and you behave in a certain way (33).

In manipulating and assessing my own readers one might ask what type of subjective transformation am I affecting upon myself? As Martin Crimp’s character Colin says, ‘I’ll tell you something: we all turn, Jo, into the kind of people we used to despise’ (33). In a more positive light this may be rephrased as recognition of the participant observer and perhaps an inversion or variation upon the experimenter effect (in which the subjectivity of an experimenter affects the outcome of an experiment), one might rephrase it as a form of feedback loop in which the experimental methodology and its outcomes cumulatively re-affects or re-inculcates the experimenter. To quote Claire Colebrook again, in Foucauldian terms the ‘the self is produced in the inquiry it makes into itself’ (Grosz, 1999: 128), but, according to Colebrook, a less reactive self-position is possible, in which ‘the self it effects is not an essence but an event’ (132). This is a processual notion of the self, a mutable, nomadic assemblage who is invited to engage with and move throughout the South system, which is itself an assemblage, an event as much as, if not more than, a digital artefact or a set of encoded and prior structures.

Below, readers construct icons to represent themselves visually to the system, these images are then embedded in the egg device and in future analogue versions of the South book:

3.5 Conclusions

This chapter has shown how new accounts of epistemic processes and new ideas of the subject have the potential to rejuvenate interactive narrative practices. Specifically, my research into subjectivity and subjectifying practices has opened up new possibilities for the design of computational systems interested in the specificity of interactions and interacting subjects. Throughout this chapter I have sought to rationalise my response to this research and to describe the outcomes of that research in relation to my own project and practices. These outcomes can be summarised in the following statements:

· The South software and book frames subjective evaluation as a form of mutable, multi-linear fiction and performance.

· The software I have developed deploys ‘live’ CCTV images as narrative agents. These images are both distributed (as part of a city-wide traffic camera system) and subject specific, ‘shooting’ the interacting subject at the time of contact.

· Aspects of my own subjective and partial perspective are iteratively and longitudinally embedded into both the analogue and digital South systems.

· Subjective self-embedding is part of both an ethical commitment to transparency and a pragmatic re-conceptualisation of subjectivity and partiality as a creative resource.

· The South software and book uses generalised goals to work with specific, dynamically acquired, narrative materials and circumstances.

· The material is designed to evolve. As a corpus it is continually analysed by the system, the results influence facets of subsequent content generation. In this way the project content is both singular and collective.

These statements may be further summarised as taking aspects of interactivity and scientism that have been historically defined as problematic, such as the gaps in understanding between machines and people, the experimenter effect (and other subjective positions encroaching upon an idealised notion of neutrality), and transmuting them into creative resources. This is an original contribution to the development of interactive fictions and to a form of game play that uses real life situations, subjects and locations to augment, or, perhaps more strongly, to define and to situate digital works.

Many of the works I have cited (as well as aspects of my own work) share similarities to games as well as fiction. These works also have a clear provenance in the hypertext fictions that emerged from the late 1980s onwards. The next chapter will expand upon these similarities, looking at early hypertext theories and at other artworks that explore the relationship between virtual and real locations. In detailed relation to my own practice I will examine the relationships between the generation of digital fictions and site-specific art works, continuing to show the relationship of theoretical research to my practice and the rationale for the choices I have made in pursuing that practice.

Bibliography (at end of Thesis Overview)