WEB INSTALLATION ART, INTERACTIVITY AND "USER CONNECTIVITY"
Elizabeth K. Menon, Purdue University, Division of Art and Design
Artists who create web installations challenge the boundaries of art as a communicative medium. They do so by appropriating the understood icons associated with computers, developing their own symbols or even visualizing structures within the computer invisible to the average user. Folders, trash can and other desktop icons are part of direct-manipulation systems, which attempt to bridge the gap between computer and user using objects analogous to those in the real world. This paper considers art and design examples presented on-line (web installations) as models demonstrating the impact of technology on the practice of art and design, and simultaneously providing a focus for examination of the nature of the relationship between the artist/artwork and the viewer/user within these environments. How do the form and content of an interactive work placed on-line theorize the identity of the viewer/user and stimulate interaction? How might the very nature of "interactivity" or "user connectivity" affect the role and/or identity of the author/artist/designer of that environment? To arrive at possible answers to these questions, a "digital semiotics" is used as a framework to interpret these web installations. Terminology from Ferdinand Saussure and Charles S. Peirce can be applied to digital media, as can Roland Barthes’ description of a text as a plural, unclosed process with no clearly identifiable origin created expressly for play (a process that indefinitely defers meaning). This approach, which allows an "original" meaning invested by the scriptor and layers of subsequent socially-constructed meanings added by viewers/users, is particularly appropriate in digital media.
DIGITAL SEMIOTICS
"Digital semiotics" is used herein to indicate interest in how meaning occurs in the digital realm.The theories of Ferdinand Saussure and Charles S. Peirce are particularly applicable to the web environment (Callahan, Sherson). Saussure described a signifier as the sound/image with which meaning is made, signified as the "concept" produced in the brain and the sign as a combination of both signifier and signified. Peirce used the terms icon, index and symbol to describe three types of signs. Peirce’s icon is a sign by virtue of its resemblance to its object (such as objects on the GUI—graphical user interface ). An index points to its object by virtue of a physical connection (such as a hyperlink). A symbol is a type of sign connected to its object by habit, and is the result of culturally produced meaning. The "browser" and "web" are among many examples of symbols in the digital realm—these terms have been appropriated because their meaning in their original contexts help to foster an understanding among the general public of processes and structures in the digital environment.
Semiotic theory as expanded by Michel Foucault, and especially Roland Barthes, can similarly be adapted to the digital. In particular, the web functions like the latter’s text, as an example of a plural unclosed process with no clearly identifiable origin created for play. In this sense semiology is useful, for it can describe an empowered viewer, and allows for multiple interpretations resulting in a level of democratization. Signification (attempts at semantic closure), on the other hand, is problematic because of its support of totalization (suggestion of a universal meaning irrespective of environment). The creation and distribution of works of art/design and texts on the internet accessed by viewers/users with more or less identical devices (although at a range of speeds) are in an important sense universal without necessarily being totalizing. Pierre Lévy observes that, "circulating within a private space of interaction, the media message [on the internet] is unable to exploit the particular context in which the receiver evolves; it neglects her singularity, social adhesion, microculture, her precise situation in a specific moment of time" (Lévy, 97).
WEB ART/DESIGN and WEB INSTALLATION
A definition of "art" versus "design" on the web has yet to be formulated, and is beyond the scope of the current investigation, which is concerned primarily with issues of user/artist identity and authorship rather than the categorization of web installations based on aesthetics. The range of possibilities between the two shall be indicated using a combined term art/design with an understanding that multiple factors could influence the choice of one term over the other in a specific instance. These might include the presence or absence of a specific purpose or the combining of function with aesthetics. A second consideration might be availability--can the work be copied or downloaded or does the artist/designer retain "authorship" even during the work’s engagement with a viewer/user? A third factor is location. Is the work annexed to a designer’s site (and therefore part of a promotion to entice clients), an artist’s personal site, or a museum’s digital gallery? In this latter instance an institution has declared the work to be "art."
An installation in the art-historical sense is a usually temporary environment in which viewers can immerse themselves. Viewers of installations participate in the work of art by entering it literally and/or engaging with it intellectually. The term ‘installation’ (which has only been in common use since the 1990s) is adaptable to the web both in the sense that works displayed there are frequently in process as opposed to finished; and many are temporary. Artists working in the digital arena are using "Web installation" and similar terminology. The Ars Electronica festival’s on-line exhibition has been called "electronic installation art" (Bolter/Grusin, 144) and the French art collective Le Ciel Est Bleu’s contributions to the website NikeLab.com have been termed "digital art installations" by How magazine (Kaufman, 105). The space of the web installation can be understood as extending from the illusionistic space created on the computer screen to the space where the viewer sits. In these contexts, ‘installation’ refers specifically to the material that appears on the screen rather than the initial act of setting up the computer program.
The range of interaction possible between the web installation and its audience will be expressed in this essay with the combined term viewer/user (with more limited or traditional contemplation expressed by the former, and a highly physical or intellectual engagement suggested by the latter). When viewers/users look at art on the web they control the sequence of viewing and make choices that result in personal creation of meaning. In some instances viewers/users add contributions to the art within these web installations, which result not only in the _expression of personal meaning, but the ability to participate in the creation of meaning among other viewer/participants. As Roy Ascott explained in the 1960s, the basic principle underlying what he terms "participational" art is feedback—"it is this loop which makes the triad artist/artwork/observer an integral art" (Ascott, 98). The production of a public, cybernetic art depends on the creation of flexible structures to house images capable of producing multiple meanings. This type of artwork exists in a constant state of transition—any possible "final" resolution must be determined by the viewer/user. The artist is responsible for the "general context of the art-experience" while its evolution is "unpredictable and dependent on the total involvement of the spectator" (ibid.).
Brenda Laurel, in Computers as Theater, describes the conceptualization of human-computer interaction through comparison to elements of the dramatic arts using six qualitative elements of drama described in Aristotle’s Poetics: action, character, thought, language, melody (pattern) and spectacle (enactment). These elements exist in a hierarchy in which each successive element is shaped by that which precedes it. While in a theatrical play the action is theoretically the same in every performance, in the computer-human realm the action is "collaboratively shaped by system and user" leading to the possibility of a different set of actions in each session (Laurel, 50). The high probability of variance in connection rate (dialup modem versus high-speed digital), along with processor speed, platform type, nature of software owned by individual viewers/users and their level of computer literacy determines the range of experiences that are available to the viewer/user, in addition to factors such as educational and cultural background, age, race, or gender.
Laurel determines that in the computer realm Aristotle’s elements of character (inferred predispositions) and thought (inferred internal processes) are identical to those manifest in drama, but are the results of agents and processes, respectively, "of both human and computer origin" (ibid.). Language is shaped by semiotics in human-computer activity, defined by Laurel as "the selection and arrangement of signs, including verbal, visual, auditory, and other nonverbal phenomenon when used semiotically" (ibid.). What is heard (melody) in the realm of drama is replaced with pattern, defined as "the pleasurable perception of pattern in sensory phenomena" while what is seen (spectacle) is replaced with enactment, "the sensory dimensions of the actions being represented: visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile" (ibid.). The connection of these dramatic elements to the realm of human-computer interaction is important to our discussion, since it is the level of engagement (defined as an emotional, not strictly cognitive process) that will help us describe the type and level of interactivity in the examples explored below.
In each example an artist/designer has created an interface—the "device which enables interaction between the universe of digitized information and the ordinary world" (Lévy, p. 19) which is presented to the viewer/user through a browser window. Some of the interfaces are open systems in which the viewer/user can participate in a dialogue with the artist/designer or other viewers/users; others are closed systems—highly controlled environments in which the action/art takes place. Artwork can be produced using script (HTML, XML, Lingo), programming languages (Java, C/C++, Perl) or software programs (Flash, Director). The primary distinction among these processes is the relative amount of control the artist/programmer/designer has in the creative process. Programming languages provide the greatest amount of control and flexibility (and are the most difficult to master). Script consists of language-based commands (versus the mostly numerical basis of code) and thus tends to be more intuitive and easier to use. Software programs are object-oriented, automatically producing the scripts that will control actions and appearance on the internet. Each method of creation results in a production of a set of textual commands invisible to the viewer/user. As in a theater setting, the viewer/user watches a performance played out by actors (visually manifest individuals or objects) based on a script (which controls the action and physically exists, although it is not literally visible).
The particular program or software used by each artist/designer effects both the appearance and the performance of the resulting interface. In the examples considered here the most standard of input devices (keyboard and mouse) are required for viewer/user interaction within the art/design environments. The communication systems present within these examples exist at one of two possible levels. Some exist at a "multilogue" level (with multiple participants or users contributing to the eventual shape and size of the permanently ‘unfinished’ work), while others function in "one-way distribution," (viewers/users choose a viewing sequence, but do not transform the original work for future viewers/users) (Lévy, p. 65).
COOPERATIVE DIGITAL QUILT
HyGrid, runner up in the web category at the 1996 Prix Ars Electronica, was created by Ed Stasny using a PERL script on a UNIX workstation and its interactivity is made possible though the hyperlinking capability of HTML (http://www.saddlesores.org/Coopart/history.html). HyGrid is an artistic collaboration that is continually in process and will never be completed. It is described as a "hyperlinked grid of visually interlocked images," a "cooperative quilt of works on the web" and an "installation" (http://www.sito.org). A related project, HyPod, was intended as an extension (a "physical HyGrid installation") but was abandoned and now exists only in the form of animations accessible on the site.
Figure 1. HyGrid Navigational Structure. EXPERIENCE HYGRID
One of HyGrid’s pages explains the complicated navigation interface (figure 1) and assigns purpose to custom-designed icons that promote a pixellized aesthetic typical of video games. While the visual characteristics of the explanatory pages are more suggestive of the realm of popular culture (as opposed to design or art), individual contributions to the quilt of images exist embrace a wide range of aesthetics. The method of reserving space in the system does not impose a hierarchy upon participants (as more or less "artistic.") A statistics page demonstrates there is no one author and illuminates the vast scope of the project—it is not possible to see it all at once. Individual works can be seen alone, or in sequences in conjunction with adjoining works (figure 2).
Figure 2.
The HyGrid system is reminiscent of creations made by artists who were part of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Seeking ways to allow the element of chance to enter into their production, they made collaborative works called "exquisite corpses" from folded pieces of paper. Each participant was responsible for a third or a fourth of a "body"—the first would draw a head and neck. The next would continue using the lines on the edge of the paper to create the torso, and so on. Working much like surrealist artists did with their cadavres exquises, artists in the HyGrid begin their work through a consideration of the works already completed by others with which their work will share a border.
All positions in the hyperdimensional grid are relative; a "pure data link allows a visually confounding freedom" as a square can simultaneously be linked to the "top" or "side" of pieces on both sides of the collective HyGrid structure (http://www.sito.org/synergy/hygrid/). The piece is interactive both in terms of creation and viewing—clicking on an image makes it central, enabling the viewer/user to move through the work. Because the grid in "reality" (or hyperreality) is three-dimensional, movement "up and right" is not identical to movement "right and up."
HyGrid provides significant support structures for viewers/users, including help files to guide participation and viewing. The site encourages interaction not only between the individual and the network of images, but also dialogue between and among the participants through the discussion board. Viewers/users self identify during the registration process and retain a sense of authorship over the works they submit into the network. The semiology of the site varies from the icons identified for navigation (clearly identified and "fixed" in nature) to open-ended representation in the artistic pieces themselves. The latter exhibit the "play" possible as layers of socially-constructed meanings are deposited by the participants through their connection of their contributions to those of others in the grid.
DIGITAL LANGUAGE
When artists utilize HTML, scripting or software programs such as Macromedia Flash to produce their installations, they are using a digital language. Some artists focus on digital language not only as a medium, but also as content that can be reflected upon and analyzed. A number of artists deal most specifically with typography (the design of typefaces or letterforms)—a fundamental part of graphic design. In typography, the lines between the verbal and visual can be blurred. The multi-media environment of the web enhances this effect.
Jim Johnson is interested in language, typography, procedural composition and integrated media. He sees the computer as uniquely interactive and digital images as especially ephemeral. A devotee of the "concrete poetry" of the late 1960s, Johnson has created works that embrace both verbal and visual structures. His Index series of prints, for instance, consists of an artist’s book displayed digitally.
Figure 3. Jim Johnson, Index. EXPERIENCE INDEX
In the Index, the letters of the alphabet are paired with images that do not relate in the traditional way, where the object pictured begins with a letter of the alphabet ("a" with a clock instead of an apple, for instance) (figure 3) or "b" with a pipe (figure 4) . Johnson calls attention to the play between the verbal and the visual by disconnecting this expectation and embracing a certain level of randomness. He states "I wanted to ‘see’ what pictures would result from the arbitrary associations and, in that sense reveal, rather than impose meaning" (http://www.altx.com/hyperx/johnson/statement.html). Johnson’s works are structured in a one-way distribution. Viewers/users’ physical participation is limited to the ability to choose the direction and sequence of the presentation of images. The fracturing of the semiotic link between word and image that occurs in Johnson’s Index encourages the viewer to construct personal meaning, and thus facilitates a high level of intellectual interactivity.
Figure 4.
Several of Johnsons’ digital works are based on a typeface he designed made from human skeletal forms. One version of the work A Thousand Words presents a randomized sequence of words presented relatively quickly (although the speed of this application depends highly on the viewer’s dial-up speed) (figure 5).
Figure 5. Johson, 1000 Words. EXPERIENCE 1000 WORDS
A similar work is controlled by the viewer/user clicking on selected word tiles. The sequencing of words and the antithetical position of the common use of some words with their representation in skeletal figures ruptures signifier and signified. Work with the skeleton typeface has culminated in animated sequences (figures 6, 7) which create morphing words, for instance "vile" becomes "evil," and then "live." While some of Bruce Nauman’s light sculptures attempted to elide words (his violins, violence, silence, is one example. for instance) the actual transformation of one word into another can only be fully accomplished in digital multimedia projects. The progression of words in each of the pieces utilizing the skeletal typeface demonstrates how the visual and verbal can overlap within the realm of typography; and enhances the overlap using the motion graphic possible on the web. The transformation process is capable of stimulating a high level of intellectual participation on the part of the viewer/user, especially vis-à-vis the creation of meaning from Johnson’s images/words.
Figure 6.
Figure 7.
Mono*Crafts also makes effective use of typography within an environment encouraging greater user participation. Yugo Nakamura, the designer behind Mono*Crafts, is interested in constructing innovative scripted digital spaces and human-computer interfaces. Nakamura calls his site a net-based studio. His interfaces are most often "reactive," where visual elements react to mouse movements and clicks (versus a "simple response" of a hyperlink). Nakamura sacrifices usability in interface design in favor of an experience. There is little in the way of instruction, which can be frustrating for the user. But in doing so Nakamura makes an important theoretical point underscoring the longstanding argument that if something is "functional" it belongs in the realm of craft or design, versus art, which exists without function, per se.
Figure 8. Nakamura, Typospace (original version).EXPERIENCE
TYPOSPACE VERSION 2 (when you reach this link click to "skip intro";
then click on "typo")
Nakamura is truly a hybrid of artist and designer. His Typospace (figure 8) is a full keyboard that performs based on the viewer/user’s own keystrokes. Key actions become typographic artistic compositions as the letters spin and transform, eventually "landing" in sequence. In its second version numbers have replaced letters and the actions are confined to a gridded space. Nakamura has other works on his site which seem to pose the question "can scripting itself be an art form?" Points inhabit a kinetic scripted space. Colored lines shoot between them creating works reminiscent of abstract paintings—again based on the sequence of clicks from the viewer/user (figure 9).
Figure 9.
Here it is the light of the monitor which traces the artist’s/scriptor’s hand. The viewer/user manipulates Nakamura’s tools to create transient, ephemeral experiences that are not retained (unlike the HyGrid site mentioned earlier). The emphasis at this site is based on physical interaction more than intellectual engagement. Unlike Johnson’s interest in semiotics, Nakamura uses letterforms as objects apart from their verbal meaning. Mono*Crafts is a site which continues to evolve, but unlike many sites each version has been archived, allowing viewer/users to witness the evolution of the scripted spaces. The latest version of the Typospace, for instance, does not have a keyboard pictured, rather black letters dance against a stark white space (EXPERIENCE THE LATEST VERSION OF TYPOSPACE).
THE DIGITAL BODY
Investigation of the relationship between the human body and computer is a logical subject for artists working with digital media, because it is a physical, bodily interaction that takes place in the viewing of such artworks. Carolyn Speranza’s Hole Poem (figure 10) uses two icons — the heart and the brain — to explore mind/body disorientation in general and the artist’s battle with alopecia and heart disease in particular.
Figure 10. Speranza, Hole Poem. EXPERIENCE HOLE POEM (click here, then click on Speranza's hyperlink for Hole Poem)
This multi-media presentation uses sound, text, images and interaction. The user/viewer decides the sequence of presentation and may not even see the entire site. Clicking on Speranza’s poem results in its being read aloud (presumably by the author/artist) (figure 11).
Figure 11. Speranza, Hole Poem. Resulting image when hyperlink on "tub" is clicked.
It incorporates hyperlinks that pull up images related to the poem, such as tub and woods—in the latter case the viewer sees documentation of environmental works of art mimicking the shape of enlarged alopecia patches. The chance to see different sets of images while hearing the poem recited encourages a variety of associations to happen between the verbal, visual and auditory functions, allowing individual visitors to the site to derive personalized meaning. Speranza’s self-designed icons on the top of the window range from easily identifiable symbols to abstract forms. These link to pages about heart disease and alopecia, as well as the artist’s biography and an abstract of the project. The question mark at right directs users to a page where they are instructed to resize the format of their browser window to best view the art. In the museum, curators design the presentation, while in the digital realm the artist might provide instructions giving the viewer a form of curatorial responsibility, even though the site is based on the one-way distribution model and using the simple response of hyperlinks. Speranza’s interests blends aesthetics with education of the viewer/user.
RGB COLOR AND THE DIGITAL AESTHETIC
Petrônio Bendito uses Macromedia Director and Shockwave to examine the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) cube, an "invisible" structure housed inside computers that controls display of color in the digital environment. The RGB cube provides the color palettes for software programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Bendito’s web-based installation uses animation techniques to reconstruct the RGB cubes from the palettes familiar to computer users in an animated informational sequence. While his original work was concerned with revealing the structure of the cube, Bendito believes it is not only a placeholder for mathematical structure, but is a cognitive tool from which both logical and poetic color relationships can be extracted. Bendito’s Color Digits moves from the structural interior of the computer (hardware and software) to production of art from the digital light/color of the computer monitor. He "paints" experiences with computer-generated colors based on the visualization methods he developed for the RGB cube. This is taken even further in Bendito’s Digital Kinetic Paintings, where color palettes extracted from slices of the RGB cube create color abstractions which move lyrically as colors shift size and placement (figure 12).
Figure 12. Bendito, Digital Kinetic Painting. EXPERIENCE DIGITAL KINETIC PAINTING
Color fields within a dynamic grid structure are animated using a motion graphics approach. Here the mathematical system of the RGB cube is replaced with aesthetic contemplation. This work is meant for display on a monitor — not printed — for the Bendito's color palette is intrinsically digital and should be experienced in the digital realm. Bendito’s Digital Kinetic Paintings are designed to create an experience for the viewer using not words or pictures but digitally produced color. Viewing these works is an exercise in patience not normally associated with "surfing" activity on the web. The shifts in size and placement of the color areas are intentionally slowed and are sometimes barely perceptible. This work intends to stimulate both intellectual and emotional engagement, but not physical participation on the part of the viewer.
Jason Salavon’s commission Bootstrapping the Blank Slate for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Digital Gallery also uses the principles of the RGB digital color model to inspire the creation of works that consist only of color and line (figure 13).
Figure 13. Salavon, Bootstrapping the Blank Slate. EXPERIENCE BOOTSTRAPPING THE BLANK SLATE
Salavon’s work, launched in June of 2003, promotes a strictly formalist aesthetic articulated using Macromedia Director and Lingo for structure and the internet as a method of data collection and distribution. Like Speranza, Salavon is interested in combining art and biological models; like Bendito the unique nature of digital color forms the prima fascia content of the work; as is the case with Mono*Crafts, "usability" is sacrificed in order to foster an experience and like HyGrid, Bootstrapping the Blank Slate, depends upon a high level of viewer participation for its existence. But the result is fundamentally unlike any of the previous sites examined in this essay and comes the closest to fusing the participation of the viewer/user to the designing/programming of the artist to create a true collaboration in the digital realm.
Salavon has designed a work that accepts viewer/user inputs (whether intentional or random) in the creation of an ever-expanding database of "works of art" identified only by number. Salavon explains: "sprouting from a singular null state, the piece records, converts, and stores the collective actions of its participants into an ever-growing population of image-pairs" (http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=jsalavon). Salavon expresses an interest in evolutionary biology through his description of the image-pairs as genotypic and phenotypic, and this characterization gives an important clue as to how he sees his role versus that of subsequent viewer/users of his artwork. The genotype, which Salavon provides to the viewer in the form of a color grid, is defined as the specifically genetic constitution of an organism, as distinct from its physical appearance. The phenotype, defined as an environmentally AND genetically determined observable appearance, is produced by the viewer/user (figure 14). The genotypic grid presented automatically when entering the site is the result of the last viewer/user's actions, but the entire database can also be browsed (not unlike HyGrid's navigation), allowing a submission into other parts of the structure.
Figure 14.
In Salavon’s system, the viewer/user becomes part of the machinery used to generate works of art. The artist has provided the first color grid, which performs according to a specific set of rules discovered only through experimentation with the structure. Color choice as well as line width are controlled by clicking and dragging on the genotypic grid and other "rules" can be predicted as a result of experimentation with actions of the mouse. A viewer/user who masters the rules can produce "figurative" works and graffiti in addition to "abstract expressionist" digital paintings.
A clue to Salavon’s theorizing of the artist’s identity versus that of the viewer/user is provided in his artist’s statement through his pairing of a quote from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker ("It follows from the idea of evolution that there is one uniquely correct branching family tree of all living things") with one from Genesis ("And a river went out of Eden to water the garden"—2:10). Artists have traditionally been equated with God (because of their ability to create in their own image); Salavon's work mimics—using digital color—the evolutionary paradigm. He is thus is Creator in a doubled sense and has "turned the river out" to scores of viewers/users.
While the work is somewhat collaborative in nature, and viewers/users might have a great deal of control (once they believe they’ve figured out how the piece works), Salavon’s work does not allow them to retain "ownership" of works submitted, other than an assigned number in the database. Thus to an extent the user is manipulated by the artist to participate in the production of a desired database of "art"—a phenomenon aided by the accessibility provided by the internet. Salavon prefers the term "user connectivity" versus "interactivity" as a better estimator of the peer-to-peer role of the viewer/user in the Bootstrapping environment—as new users connect to elements previously produced by other users rather than those fostered by the artist/programmer.The title of the work embraces fundamentally different definitions of the term "bootstrapping," creating yet another division between the identity of the artist/programmer and that of subsequent users/viewers. In popular vernacular, "bootstrapping" suggests the use of available resources to make the best of a particular situation (with minimal outside assistance)—in other words, "do the best you can with what you are given". Salavon’s lack of instruction for use of the work implies that the viewer/user should "figure it out for himself or herself"—again alluding to the illusion of control given over by the artist/programmer. At the same time the absence of "functionality" in the strict sense reinforces Bootstrapping the Blank Slate’s position as Art.
The "average" viewer/user is less likely to be aware of the evolutionary etymology of the term bootstrapping as it was appropriated from biology and applied to personal computing to describe the generation and propagation of structures in the digital environment through code (analagous to DNA). This second meaning is part of Salavon’s insider’s joke—it reflects how his art works within the open space of the internet, but is more-or-less unintelligible those outside of the world of computer programming. In its form, however, Bootstrapping the Blank Slate promotes a modernist [formalist] aesthetic. Despite the complicated structure of its inception and implementation (through code), despite its resulting form (a database), the work is, after all, about color and line—the most basic of formal elements. As Rutsky has stated: "it is in modernist art that a different conception of technology begins to emerge, a conception in which technology is no longer defined solely in terms of its instrumentality, but also in aesthetic terms" (Rutsky, 73). Salavon realizes the aesthetic potential of both the mediated space and the viewers/users movements within it.
Bootstrapping the Blank Slate can only be accessed after downloading plug-ins, which requires the viewer/user to customize his/her computer environment to be in harmony with that of the work to be viewed. The viewer is presented only with a color grid (the genotype). Any mouse movements made against the grid by the viewer are recorded and the work "builds" a visual representation of the color and movement (the phenotype). Browsing the pairs already created allows viewer/users to understand the branching tree structure of the database and choose a different "parent" structure for subsequent submissions, if they wish. The process appears limitless and deceptively simple (for the structures that record and process the activities of visitors/participants are complicated). While the viewer/user participates directly, contributing to the database assembled by Salavon’s work, the artist retains authorship because the individual viewer/user is assigned only a number; his or her individual identity has been stripped in the process. The viewer/user is both essential to the process and dispensable.
CONCLUSION
Installation has become a preeminent postmodern practice and has changed substantively since its inception. It has helped distinguish the postmodern from the modern through its compromising of boundaries between the visual arts and other cultural forms including performance, architecture and video. Whether they use HTML, scripting or software such as Macromedia Flash or Director, the examples cited above have extended the nature of installation art into the digital environment. In so doing, human-computer activity is revealed as a "designed experience, and it reconfigures the design of applications and interfaces in a single integrated process" (Laurel, xviii). The past goals of installation — use of ephemeral materials to provide institutional critiques and a resistance to commodity status — are thus enhanced and are ultimately democratized in web installations.
Direct engagement through interactivity creates an emotional dynamic in addition to the cognitive values present in the simple manipulation the average viewer/user encounters when using a word processing program or a search engine. Bolter and Grusin have commented how the artist/programmer/designer draws upon the "logic of hypermediacy" to call attention to the medium as a medium by redefining "visual and conceptual relationships among spaces" ranging from "simple juxtaposition to complete absorption." Ultimately the viewer/user should not only recognize the role played by this new medium, but "delight in that acknowledgement" (Bolter/Grusin, 42). Each of the examples chosen for this brief survey of an emerging art form —web installation—meets those requirements.
REFERENCES
note: portions of this paper were presented by the author at the 2002 Digital Resources for the Humanities conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Websites cited:
Petronio Bendito: http://www.petroniobendito.com
_____. Digital Kinetic Painting: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~pbendito/digital_kinetic/dkintic_intro.htm
Hygrid: http://www.sito.org/synergy/hygrid.html
Yugo Nakamura: http://www.yugop.com
Jim Johnson: http://spot.colorado.edu/~johnsoja/Home.html
_____. Index series: http://spot.colorado.edu/~johnsoja/Index.html
_____. 1000 Words: http://spot.colorado.edu/~johnsoja/1KWords.html
Jason Salavon: http://www.salavon.com
______.Bootstrapping the Blank Slate: http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=jsalavon
Carolyn Speranza: http://www.speranza.net
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