Virtual Honey by Klaus Bartel
The media art project “Piazza Virtuale” is presented in the format of an official special event at the Documenta IX in Kassel.
As a scientist of literature and a media theoretician, Professor Klaus Bartel visited the artists in their studio in Hamburg; for PAGE he formulated his thoughts about media art and cyberspace.
In the so-called ‘bad times’ after the end of the Second World War, people could buy a yellow-brownish paste that wasn’t really hard, but it was grainy, melty and very sweet. It was similar to the natural product, honey, but it wasn’t honey at all. Because of its very particular characteristics I have learned to love the paste, and until today I don’t like real honey.
This artificial honey from the post-war period was my first encounter with virtual reality. Since then I assume that the worlds of art should be like artificial honey: at some point they should correspond to reality, in several other points they shouldn’t. Software designers don’t follow this rule. Their aim is total illusion, the complete substitution of the real through imaginative surrogates. I was thinking of virtual honey when, in preparation for a discussion with the organisers of the official special project Piazza Virtuale for the documenta IX in Kassel (13 June — 20 September 1992), I played a promotional video “Now you see an Italian Piazza”, and I thought, “which you cannot distinguish from a real one.” But I didn’t see a Piazza, only a Blue Box in which someone was walking around and a data glove floated about. The group Van Gogh TV, from the Ponton European Media Art Lab, the authors of the video, clearly were making fun of their design colleagues. Virtual Reality simply appeared as an ironical quote, as an icon of cyberspace. This anti-illusionist position corresponded with my “honey-rule”.
A discussion with Van Gogh TV then exposed their belief that cyberspace was a big postmodern swindle of illusion. The data gloves, goggles and VR suit are, according to the group, were spectacular as well as superfluous developments of the mouse and the keyboard. And, these were already the interface of the Apple Macintosh, a virtual desk with litter bin, scissors and rubber, simulating the real workplace and therefore representing virtual reality. They also declared that the TV screen was virtual reality, because it abstracts reality and produces tele-presence. Incidentally they prefer the use of the term tele-presence as opposed to cyberspace and virtual reality.
Tele-presence. Since the mass media dismissed cyberspace within the last couple of years – from the avant-garde to the Zeitgeist – the thrill of ‘the new’ vanished, and Van Gogh TV also became quite modest. The group is understood as taking terminology quite seriously. Their cues relevant to the debate are rather from novelists such as William Gibson whose Neuroromancer – trilogy formulated the myth of cyberspace, and from old hippies and druggies like Timothy Leary. More recently it has taken ideas from scientists such as Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Tele-presence, especially as per Marvin Minsky, sounds a little bit like telepathy, like spiritualism. According to his prognosis, the future will be “like parapsychology”. People will control the computer solely through their thoughts, “without hands, pencils, keyboards, mice, data gloves, suits, or all the other wonderful things of the world of tele-presence”. Instead they will wear a tiny neuro-plug on their bodies that allows neuro-electronic transfers of movement on to any configuration that is tele-presence. Or, and this would be the peak of technological development, they could achieve, by simply plugging in a lead into the neural interface, to download a human being into a computer - and there, not any longer subject to physical decline, able to live in eternity. The removal of death and heaven on earth are the declared ultimate aims of the AI-research and tele-presence.
Interactive television. Van Gogh TV bakes little rolls. The group will only transform) television. Tele-presence is understood [to them] as presence on TV. Via Blue Boxes distributed throughout the city, visitors of the documenta in Kassel can be cut into a live programme on TV, titled Piazza Virtuale, permanently broadcast during the exhibition. The real location of the Piazza is therefore the TV monitor. Because of many people want to be at least once in their life on TV, and the crowd could potentially be boundless, the amount of people having access to these boxes will be restricted. A further restriction concerns the content: two censors sit at the mixing desk of the studio in Kassel to ensure that not everything is shown. Censorship and suppression – in this case of the signals – creates precisely the condition for important artworks, as Freud already pointed out. To be at the Piazza as a real full-bodily presence will be the exception. Most of the participants will manifest themselves via the Autobahn of tele-portation: the phone lines, to get to the Piazza. The conditions are: your telephone has a keyboard and a dialling procedure with multiple-frequencies. The keyboard serves as a typewriter for a freely proliferating hypertext – bio-tope, as well as a keyboard of an interactive orchestra, a control station for video games and for painting programmes.
Access to the Piazza is also possible via telefax, computer with modem and videophone. On the screen, four simultaneous inputs can be placed side by side. The programme, which is divided into diverse themes, functions, and worlds of images, will be broadcast live for 24 hours, and will partly be available nationally on cable TV. The transfer of the programme to Europe, Japan and the United States is planned as well as interactive connections to Latvia, Estonia, Russia and Slovenia. In Milan, Riga, Cologne, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Paris and other European cities there will be branches – or “Piazzettas”, supplementing the live entry points in Kassel. The aim of these data travellers is a virtual media, a public in an imaginary market place where it’s like being on holidays: the people spend their time having coffee, chatting, reading, and with the possibility to portray themself anyway they like, without having to leave their chairs and crisps. It’s dialogical TV instead of mute monologue staring.
What a progress the installation of Van Gogh TV represents! Especially when compared to Stone Age TV, when the viewer of the family quiz “Wünsch Dir Was” had to answer questions by Vivi Bach and Dietmar Schönherr with floods of water and electricity, and before TED (Teledialog) energy-saving viewers chose the Yes! No-voices via the telephone. Van Gogh TV’s virtual orchestra is even more environmentally friendly. Instead of taking the aeroplane or train, amateur musicians could finally travel – as in other segments – via the Deutsch Telefon to Kassel, and together perform a concert on the Piazza Virtuale with the keyboard of their telephone.
Why has no TV director ever had the idea of installing interactive television until today? Because TV is a mass medium, and the twenty telephone lines switched on by Van Gogh TV globally cannot necessarily satisfy the demand of the mass. From a technical point, the Piazza virtually follows one law. But theoretically, the following conflict arises: a mass medium should attract a minority, ie: the art audience and it should attract it in a way that puts off the mass audience, the main users of the medium.
The complex access to Piazza Virtuale triggers anxieties about it’s operation. Without doubt, ninety percent of the German population knows how to handle the telephone and the TV. The difficulties emerge when coordinating the two systems, which is the attraction of game shows (“Der Goldene Schuss”). Dealing with an even less familiar media-environment such as the computer, the competence of the viewer decreases exponentially. Even the user friendly interactive TV-screen presented by Van Gogh TV does not easily solve this problem. Besides this, the art of interface and surfaces is not the main purpose of the Piazza.
Van Gogh TV intends to not leave new technologies only with established authorities, like the entertainment industry and the armed forces. They intend to develop an artistic alternative. This is a laudable but slightly blue-sky intention. Interactive TV is on top of the wish list of large companies like IBM and Sony. The Pentagon also invests considerable sums in research projects that deal with digital fusion, or the joining up of computer and media technology. Digital fusion not only describes the convergence of TV with the computer, but also the fusion of these media with publishing, film and the print industry. The condition for this fusion is a new norm for TV, including High Definition Television (HDTV) or Hi-Vision. The HOW-technology will revolutionise the TV landscape and make the mass medium into a personal matter. Interactivity, in this sense, gains a completely different meaning than what Van Gogh TV makes.
Intelligent TV or a void medium? Fusion with the PC makes HDTV-television an “intelligent” medium. The possibilities of the PC, the interactivity, the input on multiple channels through eye movement, mimic, gesture, and language, become characteristics of intelligent television. The PC functions, so to speak, as gate keeper for the floods of information. Familiarised with a personal profile, with the habits and preferences of its users, and informed about their aforementioned gesture, mimic, and glances, the PC finds the desired programme, saves articles from electronic paper, answers calls, reminds one of meetings and at the same time, writes letters. The meeting of these media transforms TV into personal TV, the daily newspaper into a personal newspaper, the desktop into a communication partner. It concludes the phase of monological, uniform, and unintelligent television. Public media will become intimate, and literally a private media.
Van Gogh TV instead, orientates itself towards an older television norm, but understands it in a different sense. The emphasis they make, in competition with the culture and military industry, is that TV is a rational mass medium, one that corresponds to Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s enthusiasm at the beginning of the 70ies, when he published his “Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien”. In keeping with the times, he makes references to Walter Benjamin and Berthold Brecht, that the communication channels are emancipatory. In the meantime in public, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has repeatedly renounced his former belief in the changeability of mass media, and, disappointed by unanswered and exaggerated love, criticised TV equally exaggerated as “void-medium”. In his critique, the programme disappears from TV, all that matters is broadcasting. Who pushes the button can assume that something is on and nothing much else. Digital innovations are restricted to stimuli of the surface, to new logos of the stations, extravagant editing and refined framing techniques: the stations present non-stop people from different countries and with ‘Gottschalk’ as a trial from the Vatican, to simulate presence as close to facts.
Compared to the status quo, the integration of digital media in the way it was done on Piazza Virtuale already means a step beyond the normality of everyday TV. On the other hand – and this is the dream of the director of television programmes – the technology ensures that the box never stops: Van Gogh TV broadcasts 24 hours live an endless programme supported by the audience, who also delivers the entertainment software, the programme, for free. And, which content should be broadcast? Everything that makes the clandestine eye happy! The makers suggest a confessional: “On to a black surface the viewer whispers his/her sins directly via the station.” A lonely heart exchange, a diary, or “intimate confessions, anonymously posted via the mail box” are all dirty things, which the Minitel-system in France so successfully created beforehand.
Art and tele-presence. In terms of content, Ponton does not bring out new features, but interesting formal results are always expected. The inclusion of writing, graphics, image, video, computer animation, sound and music, in what is screened extends the familiar interaction of sound, image and video text on TV. The possibility of manipulating these elements with the computer – both from the position of the broadcaster and the viewer – promises exciting semiotic adventures. Perhaps a specific language between human beings and machines can develop during Piazza Virtuale. Or, a prototype of a multimedia interface can emerge.
For some this would already be art. In the US the book “The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design” was published in 1990, in which well-known authors discussed the artistic aspects of human being-computer communication. The editor Brenda Laurel followed in 1991 with her publication “Computers as Theatre”. It deals with the dramatic structures of the interface. The aesthetic reference point is the proscenium. Laurel refers to antique theatre, Aristotelian poetry and theatre of the 19th century, in particular Gustav Freytag’s “Die Technik des Dramas”. In her opinion, modern theatre is not suitable for interfaces. She mentions explicitly the negative example of Berthold Brecht, whose epical theatre represents exactly the opposite of her cute ‘gogglebox’ – interface – theatre. To describe Laurel’s position ‘avant-gardish’ would be unfair; in fact it fits very well the wood engraving-dramaturgy of the repeatedly praised aesthetic model for computer games.
Van Gogh TV obviously does not want to be the Oliver Hardy of Brenda Laurel. Piazza Virtuale is not a puppet show. But, the group operates in a scene whose aesthetic competence helps to make the revival of the Cult of the Genius of the 19th century. They have a hard time, to detach their interactive art from this aesthetic, and are not protected from misunderstandings: at the exhibition Interface, which took place last year in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (museum for art and trade) in Hamburg, the jury awarded the first prize for computer art to a painting programme, because the automatically generated pictures could not be distinguished from hand painted pictures.
In the future, the virtual genius for painting will be awarded all kinds of prizes, according to Hans Moravec, a party supporter of Marvin Minsky. Moravec would presumably not disagree to produce a Van Gogh virtually and to let an infinite number of Van Gogh paintings be made, because tele-presence to him also means the rediscovery of dead super-intelligentsia by inputting their complete personal profiles into the computer. Either in the Greek dramas or in the concerts of Grateful Dead: the experience of art always mediates an aura beyond the empirical single ‘I’ of the artist, something brilliant and spiritual, something that comes from above. The experience of art is “the experience of being in the living presence of not only the artist but also huge spiritual forces”. Tele-presence in the highest perfect condition therefore is the evocation of sacred spaces.
Neo Romanticism. In Germany the melange of spiritualism, computer technology, art and electricity, falls on fertile ground. People, ecstatic about electronic immortality, are increasingly visible, including the electronic artist Peter Weibel. Van Gogh TV refers to 200 years of electricity to explain its way of artistic practice. They don’t mind being described as “Elektrizitätsbildner” (electricity-makers). William Gibson –not accidentally– called his cyberspace-trilogy ambiguously ‘Neuromanceer’ alluding to the epoche of Romanticism. Neo-romantic is the apotheosis of electricity in the art scene. It reminds one very much of Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s “Theorie der Geisterkunde” (Theory of the Ghost Client) from1808, highly praised by the Romantics, which develops a theory of tele-presence, electricity and the immortal soul.
Jung-Stilling was, as Dudesek is also, an admirer of electricity. From electricity a creature emerges, that as a little human being inhabits a human body and is responsible for tele- presence. Jung-Stilling lets it travel through time and space (tele-portation) and especially lets it tele-hear and tele-read. The peculiar phenomenon, that a somnambule was able to decipher a text carried by the last member of a human chain at some distance, he explains through the transmission of electronic impulses from member to member. Tele-reading could be realised, when the electrical circuit is closed, when the first member of the chain puts her/his hand on to the heart of the medium, the seat of the inner essence. This was written by Jung-Stilling in his Geistertheory (ghost-theory) published one year before the invention of the telegraph. His theory is in reality a theory of telegraphy.
According to the humanist Ernst Benz (1971) Jung-Stilling’s theory belongs to the “Theologie der Elektrizität” (theology of electricity). It originated subsequent to the discovery of electricity in the mid 18th century and continues, until now, as today’s computer-spiritualism. As with Jung-Stilling, electricity and a profound belief in the immortality of the soul came together, which provided a scientific basis for ghostly appearances. At the turn to the 21st century the theoreticians of tele-presence such as Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec or Brenda Laurel tie together microbiology, neurophysiology and computer technology to a scientific doctrine of the salvation of tele-presence. Whoever refers to the 200 years of electricity or is enthusiastic about post-biological immortality, has to also consider the theological tradition of electricity.
Copyright. The 19th century raises problems for the artists of Piazza Virtuale not only aesthetically and theologically, but also legally. Who has the right for the 600 video tapes of 240 minutes produced during the transmission time of 2400 hours? The two censors in the studio in Kassel, the owner of the studios, or the viewers who offer their products on the Piazza Virtuale? Do the viewers perhaps commit an offence when they copy someone else’s conributions? Or do they own a contribution, if they add only a little thing? Questions after questions come up, which will at the earliest be answered at the end of 1992 through the member states of the European Union.
Unitl then the Berner Convention from 1886 is in force. It protects the individual rights of the author for her/his work from unauthorised duplication. The constant increase of technological reproduction and distribution of media has led to more differentiated agreements and national special provisions. The ownership of the work remains however indisputable – no matter if the author is a writer, composer or film director. And this work always had material qualities experienced by the senses when reading, listening, or during the screening in a cinema. The immaterial structure of a computer programme can not be experienced by the senses and for this reason can not induce justice. Just as the creative qualities of software or its originality, because the one who copies a programme only generates the original.
The new copyright law will change the self-portrait of the artist and the concept of the work. In anticipation of future developments the packaging artist Christo now already produces something that “immaterialises”: he produces cities and landscapes for TV and the MAZ. What remains are the installations on tape, as artwork. In fact they disappear, are dismantled, or they decay. Compared to Christo, Van Gogh TV’s production is already television. Here it doesn’t require a real reality to be filmed anymore, the virtual is sufficient. Alternatives. According to Mark Weiser, director of the information-lab at the Palo-Alto-research centre of the company Xerox, where the surface of the Apple Macintosh was invented, the biggest service for the personal computer turned out to be the invention of virtual reality. Through this technology the screen of the PC imperiously attracted attention. The future of information technology consists, however, in the disappearance of the PC.
As in the course of the first industrial revolution, the gigantic steam turbine and electric motor became invisible through miniaturisation, the computer – during the second industrial revolution – has to become a component of embodied virtuality, for omnipresent, but unobtrusive data processing. Because, only “when things disappear in this way can we gain the freedom to use them without thinking about them, and through them to concentrate on new aims.
From Weiser’s thoughts two alternatives result for the Piazza Virtuale: Either it is already the goal and demonstrates on the screen of the monitor all the wonderful capacities of the PC. Or it is understood as a stage on its way to make the PC disappear and to consider new destinations There is no Third.
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Booklist
• Spektrum der Wissenschaft
11/91: Datennetze. Darin:
Mark Weiser: Computer im nächsten Jahrhundert, Seite 92 If.
• Erstes European Softwarefestival. Eine Publikation von
“Chip Spezial” in Zusammenarbeit mit Borland GmbH, 1991.
Darin: Marvin Minsky: Die Geistesmaschine, Seite 12 If.
• Hans Moravec: Mind children.
Der Wettlauf zwischen menschlicher und künstlicher Intelligenz.
Hamburg (Hoffmann und Campe)
1990
• Edith Becker und Peter Weibel:
Vom Verschwinden der Ferne.
Telekommunikation und Kunst. Köln (DuMont Buchverlag) 1990
• Brenda Laurel:
Computers as Theatre.
New York (Addison-Wesley) 1991
• Brenda Laurel:
The Art of Human
Computer Interface Design.
New York (Addison-Wesley)
1990
PAGE (Ideen und Know-how für Design, Werbung, Medien) is a
A member of the MacUp Magazine family, based in Hamburg, Germany.
Translated by Verina Gfader.