The Geometry of Interaction
Philippe Codognet
Université de Paris VI
If you desire to see, learn how to act.[1]
When he
wrote this motto,it is almost as though the
cybernetician Heinz von Foerster, one of the theoreticians who influenced the
school of constructivist psychology, had in mind Du Zhenjun’s works, which
reveal themselves and acquire their meaning only in response to the active
participation of the viewer. Indeed, for von Foerster, “perceiving is making”
and all perception is therefore created by the subject’s action upon his
environment. In the field of digital arts, the concept of interaction has repeatedly been identified as a fundamental
characteristic and this notion is one of the fundamental advance
brought by the use of computers in art installations. In the paradigm of the
interface, interaction has often been considered as a necessarily reduced and
incomplete dialogue between the human and the machine, as a means of access
that will always be frustrating since it is imperfectly codified according to
the digital reality hidden at the core of the machine, in the shadow of memory
banks and over-clocked chips. This is because the computer is still thought of
as a simple repository of binary information, a database in which the
phenomenon of interaction is reduced to a question of more or less easy and
more or less efficient access to data.[2]
This vision is all the more applicable to one of the latest developments in new
media, the World Wide Web, the rhizomatic reification of a nearly infinite library
of Babel. In taking up this route, numerous artists have done their utmost to
devise interfaces that are more or less natural to allow for an improved
interaction with their digital works, as if the viewer’s immersion should
necessarily go through a complex technological apparatus with computer or
electronic elements facilitating the difficulty and ambiguity of interpretation
that all artistic production offers. That approach, however, forgets that
immersion is cognitive before being perceptive, the “reality” of a work clearly
being invented and recreated by the viewer and not just perceived and
undergone.
Du Zhenjun
clearly situates himself within this new conceptualization of interaction. The interactive technologies he uses are relatively simple, as
the presence sensors (through floor pressure or infrared detection) merely
record and send binary data: on/off, present or absent. Thus, far from
technological artifice, he rather invents an epure of interaction,
which, through its minimalism, makes light of any given technological
implementation. He thereby exposes the digital medium employed with no
reticence, to the point of bestowing it with the authorship of his piece Fountain (2001), which is labeled
“Macromedia”, the publisher of the software used.
Du Zhenjun
strives to lay bare the very logic of
interaction: “I want to go beyond video,” he says, “I need a new language to
formulate a possibility.” Beyond the instantaneousness of painting and the
linearity of video, it takes the form of diagrams with the multiple
bifurcations that his works often engender, thus representing different
possible worlds connected by viewers’ actions. The viewer is never thought of
as being outside the work and in dialogue with it, but rather, he is considered
as being well inside it. The work is therefore conceived as a dynamic system
receptive to the actions of the user, so that it can produce feedback actions
and communicate an intense emotional response. And the ultimate creation of Du
Zhenjun is indeed the situation the viewer will find himself in. Therefore, the
center of this work is each and every viewer and the circumference is nowhere,
as it does not stop at the video projection screens. Instead, it opens up onto
our social collective memory through the use of sequences of found images
simultaneously cut off from their original context and immediately identifiable
as cultural archetypes everyone can reinterpret in his own way. Thus, in Presumption (2000), the ghostly nude
figures in the shower surround the viewer and integrate him into their world of
misery; the illegal refugees chased down in The
Raft of Medusa (2000), whom the viewer catches by surprise and makes
vulnerable, question the viewer’s complicity—a questioning that reappears in He Hurts Me Every Minute (1999). More
complex in their arrangement, the TV images in A Week in the World of Du Zhenjun (2000) mesmerize, intoxicate, and
daze each viewer, despite the fact that he has been well-accustomed since
childhood to dreary indifference in front of the post-spectacular media
atrocities invading his living room everyday . . . In one of the most recent
pieces, I Erase Your Trace (2001),
the figures projected on the ground take great care to clean the floor, closely
following the viewer as if telling him that his presence has disrupted some
pre-established order and that he is in fact undesirable since his literal
presence can only soil the work’s dark virtuality. Through the work’s absence,
the viewer in fact becomes a center and takes on a sort of accursed role (“part
maudite”).
These
pieces therefore present a disrupted space between reality and virtuality, in
which the viewer is engaged, sometimes in spite of himself,
in an action that takes him as if by vertigo to a point he does not want to go,
in a mental state he had nevertheless thought banished from his sterilized
vocabulary of microwave-reheated emotions.
But how can
the viewer be so deeply implicated in the work, trapped in it even, and unable
to escape?
The notion
of a work’s context and the viewer’s implication in various “technological”
media (photo, film/video, computer) has often been analyzed in terms of
semiotics. We could also adopt C. S. Pierce’s classification, which
distinguishes between three types of signs: icon, index, and symbol. The symbol
corresponds to a conventional association (i.e., arbitrary) between the sign
and its object (for example, the word |red| and the corresponding color); the
index corresponds to an existential association (for example, the gesture of
pointing toward something); and the icon corresponds to an association of
similitude that somehow exposes an abstraction of the object (for example, a
drawing or diagram). But perhaps a fourth category of signs could exist, a
category that is at work in Du Zhenjun’s multimedia installations. Indeed, we
can imagine a sort of reverse index,
that is, a sign that would point not to its subject, but from its subject, like for example a sign that would refer to the one who interprets it, and would
therefore charge the sign with all the energy of its “observers,” just as a
solar battery charges more when the light is brighter. This singular process is
nevertheless at work in our post-spectacular society, with subject/signs that
acquire existence only through the desire of millions of people to possess
them, and those individuals/signs that gain (media) interest only through the
millions of people who look at them; thus the sign almost explicitly refers to
its observers/interpreters as a whole in order to charge itself with their
gazes like an exchange value in a fool’s bargain where it must find its place.
Du
Zhenjun’s work isolates this very process since each piece is unmistakably a
sign that refers to its observer and calls on him as a witness. It is a concave
sign of sorts, lying in wait for a human presence, which it will take on an
uncertain journey toward the disturbed landscapes of his own
consciousness—as if only a “thought from outside” (Foucault) could circumscribe
the new modalities at stake in our contemporary society.