Faculty Seminar on Interactive Media: Theory and Technologies of Representation

Report  to the Humanities Center for 1995-96

In Fall and Winter 1995, we visited several examples of new interactive media from the domains of performance and literature.   For example, Glorianna Davenport and Michael Murtaugh from the MIT Media Lab spoke about novel ways to construct evolving interactive documentary video.    Larry Friedlander surveyed interactive theater projects, including his collaborations with the Media Lab, works by Brenda Laurel, and others.   Diane Middlebrook presented as a case study, her  multimedia biography of jazz musician B. Tipton.   Charles Kerns summarized five years of research at the Apple Media Lab on digital video as social forms. 

In the latter part of the year, we explored, in preliminary fashion, a several conceptual frameworks.  For example, John Keeling discussed hypertext and narrative structures in relation to contemporary poetics.   Sha Xin Wei presented some ideas on multi-modal representation, and the structures and materialities of performable writing.   Barbara Tversky presented a broad survey of research on pictorial representations and diagrammatic communication.  Bob Horn previewed typologies of signs from his book on Visual Language.  Daniel Potter introduced us to a study of the essay film and mnemonics in the presence of electronic, networked media.

Conceptually, if not chronologically, we started by closely examining individual "artifacts" or "events" -- a multimedia theater performance, a CD ROM, a World Wide Web page, and so forth.   Of course, this bracketed out issues of interpretive context, audience, politics of design etc. But it seemed to be one way to understand the eyestrain and the (necessary?) myopia that writers endure.  This then yielded to a survey of some particular examples of art and performance, which inspired questions with a larger scope. These could be characterized as questions about the interpretation and manipulation of media. In this context, we visited problems of information, semantics, translation, metaphor, systems of reference or navigation, and models (embodied or otherwise) of media structure or action.  

But in the last part of the year, we passed from the study of individual symbolic artifacts to consider larger symbolic systems. Especially as digital media is distributed through networks, and since designers of large-scale software systems are now appealing to metaphors from urban design, it seemed crucial to expand our critical study of media to include larger social systems.   For example, we started with a critique of the epistemic and social commitments that underlay the design of the emerging Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML 2.0), which purported to provide a framework for the description and enaction of behavior in a spacetime simulacrum delivered through the World Wide Web.   We read some critics (eg. Benjamin, Lyotard) in light of these notions of media and authoring.  And we traced the development of the appeal by computer scientists in the 1980's to canonical theorists such as architect Christopher Alexander in an attempt to design coherence in increasingly complex object-oriented computational media.    

We celebrated the end of the year with a lecture/performance by composer Mark Goldstein who pointed us toward future investigations of temporal media and a-linguistic representations of gesture and music.

Of course, architecture and urban design are just one way to segue from "individualist" and dualist theories of interactive media/performance/art to systemic or historicist critiques of the technologies of interactive media.   Next year, we intend to select two or three different conceptual approaches to interactive media for more intensive study.

The seminar's dynamics changed during the course of the year as we alternated between semi-formal presentation by a single speaker to open discussions of a set of readings.  We had a loose structure in which all participants were theoretically free to jump in and have their say.   But some graduate students complained that the air-time was hoarded in an unproductive fashion on occasion.   Next year, we will adopt a few simple facilitation techniques suggested by some participants to make sure that the quieter voices are heard.   We also conducted a small part of the discussion in electronic form, which gave us the opportunity to pursue a few threads of analysis that were left unexplored during the seminar session.

We thank the Stanford Humanities Center for its generous support, and look forward to more stimulating and fruitful investigations in next year's seminar.

Sha Xin Wei		   		Larry Friedlander