Reclaiming Interaction

There is a mania for interactivity, and a growing rhetoric about 'virtual reality'. I can understand why these things are so interesting for coders and technical people: it must be relatively new territory. But for anyone with a literary, film or philosophical background, ideas about simulated or imaginative realities are not new. Art and literature has been doing it for thousands of years and theatre, for example, has often been used as a metaphor for reality; in Shakespeare's time they called it theatrum mundi. And sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that we are all actors, operating in specific roles in different situations. So the 'simulated reality' of different personalities in cyberspace, for example, is nothing new either.

Much of the pleasure of reading a novel comes from its imaginative reality. Children are enchanted by a good story, and it helps them organise and process the experiences they are coming to understand. They are happy - in their little world - with a simple tale about a rabbit, a wizard, or a teddy bear. Adults want something more sophisticated but which is still, essentially, a welcome respite from the struggles and restrictions of actual living.

The difference between a novel and virtual reality is that with the latter, the body is immersed as well as the emotions, and you can usually 'interact' with the visual and haptic experience. You can argue that you are no longer 'passive' and thus experience a new kind of power which is not possible with reading. You can say that you are the 'author', and this seems to fit post-modern ideas. But both kinds of experiences are an immersion into a defined narrative that you creatively interpret. The technological version seems to offer a new kind of freedom, but the virtual interaction is not as subtle, comprehensive or expansive as actual physical reality, and its imaginative possibilities are much smaller than those of the novel. The same applies to cyberspace: you can pretend to be different from who you are in real life, but you are restricted to bandwidth, a monitor and a mouse.

Computer games have incorporated interaction for many years, and the fun derives from manipulating the joystick, mouse or keyboard in relation to sophisticated graphic narratives, which are often fast and exciting. But 'interaction' is not confined to a computer interface and a point and click mouse. The term is misunderstood, and it currently has an undue cultural status, as we see growing numbers of web designers, TV producers and digital artists scramble to develop their interactive portfolio. It is often a defining criteria in university level multimedia practice.

Walking through a gallery is 'interactive', so is reading a novel. You are not manipulating Lara Croft or battling to save the world from space invaders, but as you walk around - or lie on your couch drinking tea, flipping pages - you are registering images, symbols, narratives, personalities and plots. You make sense of the painting or the book in your own unique way. Literary study is an especially developed interpretive method, based on the relativity of perception. There is no one text, what it means is debateable, and the individual has to decide what they think and what they feel.

Film is perhaps closest to the digital media of the web page - interactive or not - and the haptic and commercial interfaces of computer designers. Film is technologically-based immersive moving imagery, and the most popular art form there is. Its imaginative pleasures are widely enjoyed, based on the temporary respite from actual life and your involvement with imaginary plot, character, action, sexual attractions etc. The darkened theatre, surround-sound and ritualised experience (Saturday night, popcorn, friends, girl/boyfriend, trailers, opening credits) encourage you to abandon your normal preoccupations and present-moment perceptions.

Of all the senses, visual experience has the most impact and is most intimately linked to our impression of reality. What we see is what we experience, more than what we touch, taste, smell or hear (hearing is quite a close second, and movies manipulate this too). A good, enjoyable movie involves us so we often feel slightly disoriented when we step outside into the high street again. One moment we are interacting with panoramic moving imagery, characters, lifelike sound etc., and then we are treading the pavement, talking to people, and interacting with the traffic to cross the road.

However elegant a scientific theory or hypothesis may be, you have to understand it rather than interpret it according to your personal thoughts and feelings. This is one of the reasons why I gravitated towards arts subjects rather than sciences - and mathematics and physics in particular, which I hated. With English or film theory, your interpretive powers are centre stage. Algebra does not care what you are thinking or feeling, it just presents you with methods and techniques which you have to comprehend and memorise. I suspect many scientists will disagree with this, maybe quoting Einstein's famous endorsement of the imaginative process. Cutting edge science probably is both creative and interpretive, but that is the pinnacle and therefore the exception. As everyone knows from their school days, most science is mechanical learning, unconcerned with what you are feeling and intuiting.

I hated physics for two reasons. First, it involved a high degree of mathematics. And second, the endless experiments we had to conduct with different apparatus - weights, pulleys etc. - had an invariable and pre-defined conclusion. What was the point of getting the apparatus out, playing around with it and then putting it away, when the objective was to demonstrate something like 'efficiency equals work output over work input'? I readily understood that it was an equation I could trust; no one was trying to deceive me. So why did I have to enact it? Memorising this equation as I did - EFFWOWI - was all I needed to do, and it is what I remember about twenty years later, when I do not recall in the slightest what 'experiment' we worked at to demonstrate its truth. It was painful, brain-numbing silliness.

Many subjects require you to learn their requisite methods and the techniques - this equally applies to literary criticism, painting and music. But the arts are quintessentially based on personal expression, not least because the work you study is someone else's personal expression. You understand what they were trying to do, you gauge how valid it is, you evaluate it according to your own perception, you understand the personality of the artist and yourself a little better. For me, physics didn't care about any of that. Unlike the pure scientific experience, computer based interaction has a high degree of subjective involvement. Computer code, I am starting to think, is unlike other kinds of sciences, as I have described them above. I'm sure many coders would describe it as an art; Bill Gates was once asked what he did for relaxation away from his software industry, and he said he writes code.

Unlike EFFWOWI, if I understand JavaScript I can do some cool things: manipulate text, imagery, data transfer and many other interesting phenomena. Code has its own logical parameters, like the Document Object Model for example, and understanding the logic is a method of information management which is both powerful and elegant: code has an aesthetic. Further, you manage concepts, data and operations to do something, and you can witness the results very quickly in your web page, Flash movie etc. It is a natural extension to blend this architecture with human response: click here, travel to the next dungeon, stab the invader with your sword, post your message. In this respect computer science is closer to artistic expression than physics or mathematics, in an experiential and practical way.

However, the technical person, the code person, is not best qualified to conceptualise cyberspace, virtual reality, and interaction. Computers express mathematics (code) and physics (silicon engineering). But cyberspace, VR and interaction are essentially humanistic, psychological and aesthetic concerns. As different kinds of human experience they reference the different arts and their ancient traditions, rather than contemporary theories of 'techno-culture'.

The term 'interaction' has to be reclaimed, and not reduced to mechanical-interface-technological stimulus response. The concept of 'virtual reality' and the abstraction of 'cyberspace' has to be recognised humanistically, i.e. as a human experience first and foremost, within a wider cultural and imaginative context.