December really is the festive season! It seems every arts and culture venue has pushed and shoved as much programming in the month of December as possible. At least we will be chomping down our respective Xmas dinners with much artistic saturation. And so last week – rushing from one event to the other between Rotterdam and Amsterdam – I attended the book launch of an Architecture of Interaction, a project initiated by artist Yvonne Dröge Wendel, in collaboration with Anna Best, Nikolaus Gansterer, Lino Hellings, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Wietske Maas, and many others who contributed in more or lesser ways.

The project, which spanned between 2004 and 2006, aimed to “develop a communicatory toolbox that can be used to talk about and compare the processes, meanings and effects of interactive work, especially the stages of interactive work where no outcomes or precise outlines can be defined a priori. ‘An Architecture of Interaction’ arose from a desire to connect vocabularies, to develop a more sophisticated discourse and to share the eclectic and hidden ideas and processes involved in interactive works in disciplines ranging from theatre, performance, music, dance, film and the visual arts to new media. The main goal is to make interactive working methods more tangible.” During the course of 3 years meetings and discussion were held in Amsterdam and London with various groups of artists, theorists, art practitioners and curators. The publication distills main issues and concepts from a huge amount of research material, and in effect functions partly as dictionary, partly as manual, and partly as something I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on.

With a professional background in new media arts, I naturally shudder at the word “interaction”: over the years it has traversed the regular trajectory of being a hip buzzword to becoming a notion that is completely depleted. So of course I was intrigued by a title like “an Architecture of Interaction”. I especially appreciated the lower case of the indefinite article “an”, which indicates this publication was going to offer nothing too defining and hermetic, but an interpretation and suggestion amongst many other possibilities. It would have been a different book, would it have been called “THE Architecture of Interaction”, or simply “Architecture of Interaction”. Yet, let’s stick to these 2 words for a moment: architecture and interaction. One of the main premises of the book is to try to understand what we mean by “interactive art work”, and cut across the notion that “interaction” is defined by a push-button or a reactive aesthetic. The authors have defined 3 basic elements which they call the “critical triad”, which classify works as interactive; this wording is perhaps chosen unluckily because basically triads (the mob?) and trinities (too holy?) don’t feature too positive within my conceptual framework...but then again…. Here they are anyway: a work can be considered interactive when the maker interrelates and considers:
• The form and substance of the work (i.e. Content)
• The context of the work’s timeframes and its going public (i.e. Context)
• The way how others perceive it (i.e. Contact)

Now these 3 Cs seem pretty obvious; I wonder whether it is possible nowadays – particularly because of how the art market works – not to take these elements (to some extent or other into account). Here starts my problem with the term “interactive”; sure these elements interact with one another, and are related to one another, this does not make them “interactive” in their ontology. What bothers me slightly about these 3 elements, is that they fit in (too) neatly into funding models and project proposal schemes, where you are always asked to specifically define the 3 Cs in detail in order to demonstrate the validity of your project. As for the word “architecture”; while I was reading the publication I got much more a sense that the authors were interested in developing a syntax or grammar of interaction, rather than an architecture. The visualisation models and toolkit proposed actually reminded me strongly of my introductory courses in linguistics, and the theory of universal grammar. Even the visual models proposed slightly resemble the tree structures, we budding linguistics would break our teeth on. On the other hand, an artist friend – enthusiastic about the toolkit – confided in me that she would never have made the effort to look into visualising her own working process, had it not been for the word “architecture”.

Interesting in the book is the chapter on “others”, by which the authors mean all individuals other than the initiating author of the work. Now this is intriguing, because by calling all these actors “others”, the singularity and authorial voice of the initiator is privileged. Whilst the publication promotes cross/inter/trans-disciplinary work, it is still the artist author/genius, who remains the source of all matters that follow. The visual models, in that respect, are time-based and processual, and all depart from this very important initiating actor. I do believe that a more networked approach and visualisation would have done more justice to how particular artistic practices develop. Categorising “others” under “participants” (who actually affect the work), “onlookers” (who directly witness and experience the work), and witnesses of traces (who only experience the work in an indirect way through documentation, reviews, etc) is in that sense limited, since in this scheme is the initial idea- no matter who executes it eventually – that becomes prime. How to deal then with a commissioner who has such strict guidelines or wishes, that the artist author becomes merely a participant in the whole process, and relinquishes authorship for the most part? How do you make those power relations more tangible?

I am also sceptical about naming this form of interactivity a “meta-discipline”. Though the authors characterise this as a “field" that informs other disciplines”, it would have been more correct to call it a “field" tot court. A syntax in and by itself, devoid of semantics, cannot make up a discipline, not even a meta-discipline. This brings me to my main discomfort with this publication: on the one hand it definitely needs to be applauded because it enriches a critical discourse on how art practitioners think and talk about their practice. Its main contribution lies thus in the latter, and how it stimulates and provokes thought, and not necessarily in its practicality. Ultimately I find the formalisation and quantification of the creative process a bit disturbing. Probably this has to do with the fact that the term “interaction” presupposes a degree of functionality or usability, like it or not. And these are things you do not necessarily (always) want associated with art. Though I can see why some artists would want to have a tool to visualise complex processes, these tools do not really provide for integrating the mess and the noise, the trials and the failures, which make up a creative, and dare I say interactive, process. In that respect, the publication reduces the creative and intellectual work of 3 years perhaps too hastily.

During the presentation I joked with a friend that this was the polder model for art. We thought that it would be great to do an exhibition without showing art works proper, but only with the visual models representing the interactive work processes of the art works, as these models do have a particular aesthetics to them. And though I have my reservations about the formalist approach and definition and deployment of terms in “an Architecture of Interaction”, perhaps I too should be less hung up, and allow the artistic aura to be cracked and decoded in ways which might seem unorthodox.

Still a few days to Xmas: Go get it!