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