Today, a range of artists choose to use interactive digital media to create an work of art that is not a singular object but rather, a world of potentialities that can be accessed only through the gestures of the audience. An interactive art work is thus not a finite product, but a set of conditions set forth by the artist that the viewer must explore. These sorts of interactive works create a perpetually flowing dialogue between artist, audience, and environment. David Rokeby calls these sorts of discovery-oriented art works "navigable structures" that require the participation of a particularly open-minded viewer that he called a navigator.

I would argue that the most engaging component of interactive works is not the actual action or gesture performed by the navigator but rather, the process of actively learning to self-direct one’s own passage through a piece. The interactive art experience is one that blends together two individualized narratives. The first is the story of mastering the interface and the second is about uncovering the content that the artist brings to the work.

In this essay, I will describe the learning experience of the individual that navigates both interface and content in three of my own interactive works: Littoral Zone, Phene-, and Nosce Te Ipsum. These three installations deal with differing models of interactive engagement and each one disables and or heightens the agency of the participant. All of these installations ask the navigator to take part in the process of dissection in some way or another. The act of dissection, be it a literal incision or a minute examination of small parts forms the content of these three works.

Littor al Zone

Before discussing the Littoral Zone and the other two installations in detail, I want to briefly elaborate on my fascination with the performance of dissection. Dissection is my mechanism of decoding and understanding the external world. As a child, I spent a great deal of time at the river’s edge prying apart oysters and crabs to memorize their textures and internal consistencies.. I studied both marine biology and painting as a college student and then became interested then in creating art works that used content, or data from the laboratory workbench. Also, my technique of handling paint still involves cutting through a body of dried pigment. For me, the probing and seeing practices associated with dissection has given me a spatial sensibility that, in turn, impacts the way I construct art works. Today, I make art installations composed of layers and layers of compressed visual, auditory, and sensory information that the viewer must permeate.

I became interested in making interactive art because I wanted to create a dynamic forum for play and experimentation with unfamiliar tools. For the record, I am still painting thought this activity takes place in conjunction with my digital studio research which really began in 1996 when I began investigating ways to animate my multi-layered drawings and paintings. In 1998, I created Littoral Zone. Here I locate the viewer within the confines of a virtual laboratory as a dissector of language.

At the beginning of the interactive animation, you construct a virtual "wet mount" or a microscopic slide. You stab a word with a scalpel only to discover that the text swims away. Using forceps, you then grab a cantankerous letter to place on the slide. After dropping a blood-colored stain on the symbol, a cover slip floats mysteriously up to sheath the specimen.

In the simulacra of the digital laboratory, the navigator imitates the gestures of a dissector. Yet the insertion of text for flesh completely transforms the object of study. Many of the word specimens are slang terms like "DICK," "FUCK," and "CUNT." This substitution of profane language for a corporeal specimen is intended to lure the viewer into participating in the invasive gestures of dissection through humor. The process of dismembering a "dirty" word playfully anesthetizes its crass sexual connotations. Once the letters are jumbled, the impudent word is silenced.

The word games employed in Littoral Zone place the alphabet under the lens of the microscope. This interactive animation asks the viewer to imagine language as a specimen for self-study. After learning the functions of the multiple tools, the viewer consciously participates in the "destruction" of meaning in slicing apart the textual specimens with the scalpel.

Littoral Zone plays with paradigms of control that are prevalent in computer interfaces. In navigating with mice and trackballs, the general assumption is that the one dictates desire with a click. This paradigm becomes explicitly phallocentric with related interface tools such as the quote, "joystick." Littoral Zone intermittently ascribes power to the viewer to disrupt these patterns of control. When you initially touch the mouse, you can manipulate the lab tools using basic rollover actions. However, as you spend more time with the mouse, you learn that "something else" induces action in the piece.

Scripts written by me regulate the cycling of control in the animation and thus destabilize any clear sense of agency the navigator may have. I discovered that the process of giving power to and taking power from the navigator produced some frustration in the viewing population. Some people would leave the podium quickly because they felt they were not performing the piece correctly. These viewers did not consider that the piece might be directing their behaviors. Those who engaged with the piece for longer periods of time seemed to adjust to the push and pull of the animation.

Phene-

In the next piece, I considered ways that the virtual tools of Littoral Zone could become physical objects in space with interactive components that might challenge the navigator to discover their purpose. I wanted to escape the paradigms inherent in mouse-driven works. In Phene-, the type of tools that are used–a microscope and a magnifying glass–guide the navigator to investigate content that is not yet visible to them. In this piece, I was asking the viewer to engage in a different sort of dissective process, one in which he or she examined the structure of the piece minutely, part by part. Thus, Phene- presents a varied interface that encourages participants to look beneath the surface of the installation rather than to literally cut apart an existing entity.

As you approach Phene-, you hear garbled sounds that emanate from a microscope. Signs direct you to don gloves and inspect a group of slides. Bending over the microscope attempting to make sense of the visual samples, you twist the knob to focus the microscope. In this action, you focus not only the image but also the sound. The slide is "named" by the computer voice as it comes into view.

Behind the microscope, a wall displays vessels, texts, and drawings that contain hybrid features. Many of the containers displayed reveal unusual contents. For example, a number of petri dishes seem to contain routine cultures. However, on closer inspection, colonies of bacteria reveal "intelligent" behavior, having massed into simple word forms such as "CAT."

The focal point of the installation lies behind the exterior wall. Rounding the corner and entering the darkness, you immediately sense moisture emitted by vaporizers and a dank odor. The sounds of breathing are barely audible. Here you see an enormous petri dish illuminated by light from a projector mounted in the ceiling. Moving closer to the dish, you note that the specimen is composed of a rapidly changing animation layered atop a mass of fungal blooms.

Navigators "interact" with the chimera via a process of dynamic seeing with a magnifying glass. As the navigator positions the glass atop the specimen, small dots of light form that trigger a whole array of animated bodies to immediately swim out from beneath the lens. Photo sensors hidden beneath the dish activate the formation of the virtual life forms.

The participant that grasps the magnifying glass in Phene- must process a variety of sensory information and simultaneously learn the power of the tools. She smells the rot of the fungus, hears the sounds of breathing, and leans forward to examine the fluffy forms that grow up the walls of the dish. However, if the navigator fails to master the interface of the magnifying glass, she sees only a fraction of the installation. If, as Marcel Duchamp once said of conceptual art, "The spectator makes the picture," then only the navigator who learns to manipulate the lens fully apprehends Phene-. As the artist, I chose to put the seeing tools directly into the hands of the audience with no prompting or direction. The environment remains static until the potential navigators choose to experiment and move the glass.

No sce Te Ipsum

In terms of content, my creative work explores the intersection between aesthetic, scientific, and linguistic modes of bodily representation. In Littoral Zone, navigators use a virtual scalpel to slice into a profane word only to discover that the letters transform into abstract bodies and scuttle out of sight. In Phene-, navigators scrutinize a population of living matter composed of both virtual and real microbodies. The final installation I will discuss, Nosce Te Ipsum, presents the viewer with an opportunity to dissect a body composed of idealized forms appropriated from popular magazines.

Before I show the piece, I’d like to briefly mention two strong influences. Nosce Te Ipsum was inspired by two radically different efforts to dynamically dissect the human form: Vesalius’s early modern flap anatomies and the present day Visible Human Project. Often containing as many as fourteen layers, flap anatomies were the first printed images to suggest the three-dimensional relative positions of the internal organs. They were used as both medical references and popular entertainment in the 16^th century.

The Visible Human Project (VHP) is in many ways a contemporary iteration of the early modern flap anatomies. The goal of the VHP was to create an interactive virtual model of the average male body. In this case, the layers were generated from a one millimeter wedge of tissue shaved from the human core in a direction perpendicular to the spine. Each slice was treated as raw data and generated photographs, CAT scans and MRI scans. It is almost as if the scientists wanted to reduce and abstract the body quite literally into pages.

In my interactive installation, the viewer is invited to participate in tearing apart a virtual body book, that is actually a collage I made in a wax coated dissecting tray. Here, I set forth yet another mode of dissecting and reassembling the corporeal interior that is contingent on a live body’s presence and cooperation (as opposed to a cadaver). The very title of this piece references this focus. Nosce Te Ipsum is Latin for "Know Thyself." In simply walking toward my piece, the viewer unknowingly participates in an act of self-dissection.

Nosce Te Ipsum lures the viewer into the piece with the promise of visual self-realization in the work yet disrupts the process of self-imaging by re-forming another body, an idealized body appropriated from the glossy pages of a magazine publication. The large scale image of the appropriated body is disrupted and altered by the viewer’s passage through the installation space. The title of the piece, Nosce Te Ipsum, is Latin for "Know Thyself."

When you enter the darkened installation space, you view a projection on a large scrim suspended from the ceiling. The image consists of a spare contour drawing of an androgynous human figure. As you move closer to the image, you see a line of words across a floor that move toward the projection. The words are violent: "slice, pierce, slit, cut…" As you walk forward, following the words, you trip a pressure sensor that triggers a change in the animation. Suddenly, layers pull back and reveal that beneath the body lies an interior composed of flesh, letters, and marks. Stepping on each target makes the body folds back on itself revealing layers of images that give way to further images. Upon stepping on the final sensor, your face, filmed in real time from a video camera, appears beneath the embedded layers. At this moment, the observer of the projection, becomes the observed. Stepping toward or away from the projection reverses the process and reforms the body, causing the layers to rapidly fuse, hiding your face in layers of imagery.

If, as Rokeby argues, interactive interfaces act as "transforming mirrors," then the navigators of Nosce Te Ipsum embraced their cameo appearances in the piece quite literally, head-on. As I sat in the gallery, I observed individuals walk through the piece again and again to perhaps verify that the system would produce a similar version of what they had experienced previously. Even though repeat performers knew that they would appear in video form in last layer, they still waved their hands to authenticate their real-time presence in the animation. This installation is about creating the desire for participants to dynamically see and lose themselves in one body that is also a collage of idealized male and female bodies. Metaphorically, the interactive process dissolves the power of the single image. In the process of walking the line of words, the navigator creates multiple bodies from one.

In so many ways, interactive art works are about gaining and relinquishing control over a particular technology. The learning process of mastering an unfamiliar interface makes the navigator much more cognizant of the self-reflexive relationship between oneself and a work of art. In my work, I have emphasized the self-directing role of the navigator by choosing to make the act of dissection a primary focus in Littoral Zone, Phene-, and Nosce Te Ipsum.

Of course all of our experiences with art are interactive on some level due to the inexplicable process of how we perceive the piece in our consciousness. Barbara Stafford writes about this issue of connecting external and internal experiences: "Art constructs a tenuous point of contact between an infinite mass of precisely firing neurons and the chaos of our monadic inner atmosphere." It is this cognitive friction, or the "tenuous point of contact" that makes relationship between audience, art, and environment such a rich area for artists to explore in work that embraces or challenges the participatory power of the viewer.

About the author:

Tiffany Holmes currently works as a research scholar and artist with the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She will begin teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technology Program in January 2001. With a diverse background in painting, animation, and biology, Holmes explores the intersection between artistic, biomedical, and linguistic modes of corporeal representation. She has written extensively about the combination of gestural painting with computer animation in recent work. Her article, "The Corporeal Stenographer: Language, Gesture, Cyberspace" was published in the fall of 1999 in Leonardo . She has exhibited and discussed her work at the Digital Salon ’99 in New York and Madrid, the Viper New Media Festival in Switzerland, the International Symposium on the History of Neuroscience in Zurich, Siggraph ’99, Next 1.0 in Sweden, Consciousness Reframed in Wales and at World@rt in Denmark. Her interactive installation, Nosce Te Ipsum, was recently featured at Siggraph 2000 and was pictured as a result in the New York Times on August 1, 2000.