CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
How Can one Face an Interface? Art, Science, Cultural
Studies, and the Question of Experience
Organiser: Tapio Mäkelä
Csikszentmihályi, Christopher P. (MIT
Media Lab, USA) ARTISTS RECONFIGURING TECHNOLOGY
Since the 1970's, practitioners of an obscure branch of science studies began to
move from an analysis of "texts" and "signs" around science
to participatory observation in actual laboratories. This transgressive maneuver
-- in which the researchers actually "studied up," seeking to
understand colleagues with more technical savvy and prestige than themselves --
led to their successively toppling one after another myth of how science is
done, what it purports to study, how it is falsified, and how these hermetic
labs communicate with the rest of our culture. What have the findings of the
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge meant to the work of actual technical
practitioners? Not much -- purely academic theory typically has little effect on
technicians. But recent work by several artist/theorist/engineers points to new
directions of applied practice and theory that has immediate technical and
social impact. By practicing cultural theory along with technical practice, they
work to move ideas fluidly into our material culture, as well as our
intellectual discourse.
Nigten, Anne (V2_Lab, The Netherlands)
ARCHIVING OF UNSTABLE MEDIA: VISUALIZATION OF DYNAMIC CONTENT AND
IINTERPRETATION OF UNSTABLE MEDIA
New ways of archiving are powered by scientific results in (visual, linguistic)
information management. Scientists are defining ways to index the visual, sonic
and text databases, enabling the user to interfere with the content in a
personal way. Artists and scientists share in this way a mutual interest of
software creation for creative processes. Content management is closely related
to the notion of archiving issues. Within this context I like to think of a
digital archive rather than as institutional, static, and authoritative, but as
a mapping, a social space, more about interaction than classification per se, a
dynamic, constantly changing content platform, a process, even sometimes
coincidental. The need to archive seems to be an important aspect in mapping our
environment, our digital resources. A consequence is that the artist's role
seems to have changed; often now artists find they are working as an editor, a
moderator, a bot designer, a hacker, etc. All kinds of artistic researchers are
investigating the cultural and artistic opportunities to create new archives or
to re-define / re-use existing archives. This brings about new interpretations
and new archival concepts, which can be valuable for current and future content
management design concepts. Coded personalities are a commodity on line these
days, in several artistic projects the user input is an essential element for
dynamic content created by e.g. user interactions, archiving of personal data
and open content management systems. So despite all bureaucratic or pure
functional efficiency and commercial tasks performed by bots, cookies or agents,
a growing number of artist / researchers are investigating the possibilities of
these software creatures for creative content processes. This paper will
elaborate on archiving of unstable media and the artist / researchers working in
this field, and how this relates to the scientific research and engineering.
Several state of the art concepts and research objectives will be included in
this presentation.
Tarkka, Minna (National Consumer
Research Centre, Finland) REPRESENTING THE USER: INTERFACE DISCOURSES AND
PRACTICES
This paper approaches interface design as a practice and politics of user
representation. In constructing interfaces, designers represent the user through
a variety of discourses and genres - conceptual, textual and visual
representations, as well as the tools and methods of work. In a more political
sense, designers are also said to be the representatives or advocates of the
users in the product development process. Users thus form the 'constituency' for
design, a discursively produced legitimation for the profession. The discussion
focuses on interface design as a field of clashing disciplinary discourses -
those of engineering, marketing and art/design. Through a reading of case
interfaces, different strategies and tactics for interface design, as well as a
significant discursive shift in user representation - from 'usability' to 'user
experience' - will be identified.
Tapio Mäkelä (University of Turku,
Finland) FLICKS AND CLICKS: INTERACTIVITY, CINEMA THEORY AND HUMAN COMPUTER
INTERFACE RESEARCH
Interaction and networkedness, and the simultaneity of multimodality are those
aspects of user experience, which are not grasped by cinema theory or its later
remediations. While interactive media does not fall into the category of
"flicks", Human Computer Interface (HCI) research seems to reduce the
user experience to "clicks", point and click -type of interaction. In
my paper I will look at the interdisclipinary intersection of media studies and
the HCI, through a critical reading of remediation theories in relation to
interactivity, while suggesting how the HCI could benefit from a better
understanding of multimodality and identity theories. As an example of
remediation and the irreducibility of multimodality and interactin to previous
user experience modes, I will use the interactive film by Nick Crowe titled
"Discrete Packets"
http://www.nickcrowe.net/online/index.htm
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