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