TODAY:
Let's Get This Straight Clicking for Godot Table Talk - - - - - - - - - -
RECENTLY:
Working for Bill Apple's Apostates: Your boss is watching you Sexing the
machine Spam Bombers Little crashes lead to big crashes By Andrew Leonard - - - - - - - - - -
____________________ |
CLICKING FOR GODOT Anyone who makes, writes about or talks about interactive art understands that, fundamentally, it's all made by people. Just as Garry Kasparov wasn't actually beaten by a computer but rather by the scientists who built and programmed the Deep Blue machine, so all digital art -- even that generated by seemingly autonomous programs functioning without evident human intervention -- can be traced back to the hands of a human being who wrote some software. Still, there's a real divide between artists (like most at the Digital Storytelling Festival) who are satisfied with viewing computer technology as a tool and a medium, and artists who yearn to invent technology that generates its own art -- to hand over as much of the creative act as possible to the machine. The hypertext artists and game designers have pursued a crude kind of interactivity that locks the reader/player into a few limited software routines and blocks any active contribution from the audience; the digital storytellers have tried to restore the primacy of the human-told tale, and use technology to make the exchange two-way. Now a new wave of interactive theorists is arguing that this exchange of meaning can take place between a person and a computer, after all. Speaking at a recent conference on electronic art, Sherry Turkle argued: "We are moving away via MUDs, Tamagotchi, etc., from a conception of the computer as a reflection of self to one where the computer is an interactive other." There's a thorough and engrossing chronicle of this idea in "Hamlet on the Holodeck," a new book by MIT scholar Janet Murray about "the future of narrative in cyberspace." Murray tries to define the traits that make the digital medium unique: "Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic." (The first two traits, she maintains, are what we usually mean by "interactive"; the second two, by "immersive.") You can argue with some of Murray's definitions -- for instance, many digital environments aren't, in fact, spatial -- but she has drawn a valuable map of the terrain that digital artists are traversing and contesting. "Hamlet on the Holodeck" traces a vision of interactive narrative back to the literary experiments of "Tristram Shandy" and forward to the imaginary Holodeck, the Star Trek universe's virtual-reality playroom. Murray finds the stirrings of new digital art forms in everything from Joseph Weizenbaum's famous Eliza chatterbot -- which talks back to you in a parody of a psychiatrist's responses -- to today's MUDs, multi-user online spaces where players adopt alternate identities and struggle for fame and fortune (or just hang out). What's great about "Hamlet on the Holodeck" is its compilation of historical examples and experiments -- its version of the back-story of interactive art. But as Murray moves forward to trace her vision of where this art form is going, she begins to rely more and more on conditional phrases: The artist of the future might be something like this; the first interactive masterwork could develop along these lines; audiences of the future will perhaps experience such-and-such. At some point in its arc, "Hamlet on the Holodeck" switches gears from critical thinking to speculation; and while that makes it fun to read, it also leaves you with some nagging doubts. For all the splendor of Murray's visions of revolutionary new "digital narrative environments," she isn't able to name a single "proof-of-concept" -- an engineers' term for a prototype that demonstrates how some difficult project can indeed be made to work. At a place like MIT, Murray no doubt stands as a rare voice of humanism -- but within the broader debate over interactive art, her point of view is heavily tilted toward machine dreams. She sees the act of authorship beginning to disappear inside the cogs of software rules: "Future audiences will take it for granted that they will experience a procedural author's vision by acting within the immersive world and by manipulating the materials the author has provided ... rather than by only reading or viewing them." The end-point of the processes Murray depicts will be, she proposes, the arrival of "the next Shakespeare of this world," who might be "a great live-action role-playing GM [gamemaster] who is also an expert computer scientist." Anyone who has ever played the live-action role-playing games to which Murray refers -- the sit-around-a-table kind popularized by Dungeons & Dragons -- knows that they consume insane quantities of time. Perhaps Murray's cyber-Shakespeare will put his or her computer-science expertise to use in solving that problem -- and making it possible for such pastimes to be enjoyed not just by restless adolescents but by adults with lives. There's a deeper problem with Murray's dream, though. Like many teenagers in the 1970s, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons myself. The fun of it was almost entirely social -- watching my friends invent and transform characters, and creating my own to mix it up with them, all within a framework created by a human gamemaster, not a computer. There were always two styles of "GMing": You could build a detailed world, establish strict rules and maintain them inflexibly in the face of whatever your players did. This style was eminently fair, but resulted in long stretches of boredom, with GM and players both imprisoned by predetermined procedures. Or you could invent a world partly on the fly and do your best to keep things interesting for your players as they wandered around -- leading to a kind of improvisatory storytelling collaboration between the GM and players. This may have been less impartial, but at least it guaranteed a good time. Computers are wonderful for organizing rules and procedures; they are not yet, despite our best efforts, very good at knowing which story twist is captivating and which is dull. Maybe some now-unimaginable breakthrough in computer science will allow the invention of an algorithm for narrative pleasure -- but I'd be utterly surprised if it happens in our lifetimes. For the foreseeable future, I'd place my bets on the computer as a platform for people -- a space for human beings to tangle with one another, trade tales and wonder when some Muscleman character will crash their party or interrupt their drama. Still, the seductive fascination of the machine-as-artist won't stop haunting us. And each new experiment, each stab at developing autonomous computer art, commands our attention. We are like Beckett's characters at the end of "Waiting for Godot": "Let's go," they say, despairing that their Godot will ever show up -- but the stage direction reads, They do not move. We know how bad the odds are, but we don't want to leave the theater, either -- on the off chance that, one day, our machines will start telling stories of their own. Interactive art: Have you seen -- or participated in -- any you love? What works and what doesn't? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and interact. |
![[Illustration by William Duke]](src/02godot2.gif)
SALON | ARCHIVES | CONTACT US | TREATS | SEARCH | TABLE TALK
DAILY |
BLUE GLOW
|
BOOKS
|
COLUMNISTS |
COMICS |
FEATURE |
MEDIA CIRCUS
MOTHERS WHO THINK |
MUSIC
|
NEWSREAL
WEEKLY |
21ST |
ENTERTAINMENT |
WANDERLUST