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| From Technology Review, August/September 1996 You Too Can Be a Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan ONCE WHEN I WAS five years old and needed cash in a hurry, I went door to door peddling paper models held together with Scotch tape and staples. An ocean liner and a locomotive, both priced at a nickel, sold well. But the item in which I had the most faith, priced at a mere two cents in anticipation of volume sales, was a little book entitled Fun with the Family. It was a slim, poorly stapled volume. The beauty of it, to me, was what lay inside: absolutely nothing. I had toyed with the idea of producing a conventional book, with actual words in it, but finally decided to leave the content up to the reader. One advantage, of course, was that I wouldn't have to write anything. But more in the spirit of the book's title, I imagined that families would have fun collaborating on stories and filling up my smudged, crooked pages themselves. How wrong I was. One after another, my neighbors thumbed through the book and handed it back, mystified. The world was not ready for Fun with the Family, which, as I now realize, was an early example of interactive fiction. The book anticipated by nearly a decade the complaint voiced by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes in his 1970 work S/Z: "Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its consumer, between its author and its reader." The goal of literature, according to Barthes, should instead be "to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text." In its perfect vacuity, my little book satisfied that ideal pretty well. Computers, of course, have opened up more sophisticated ways of dragging consumers into the creative process. A growing body of hypertext fiction, trashing the musty concept of linear narrative that dates back at least to Homer, offers the reader a swirl of story fragments that can be assembled in any number of ways. The outcome is in the hands, or more precisely the mouse-finger, of the consumer, who clicks on different options as the Muse dictates. Some hypertext novels even invite readers to compose their own contributions to the plot. The author is dead, long live the reader—and so goes the whole world of letters, according to those who regard the internet as a single, cross-indexed body of information, undifferentiated by the varying talent, credibility, and sanity of its countless contributors. "The most radical solution," writes Jay David Bolter, an electronic media theorist at Georgia Tech, "would dispense with the notion of intentionality: there is no privileged author but simply textual networks that are always open to interpretation." As you might expect, the grip of "intentionality" (read "something to say") is loosening in other creative fields as well. Brain Opera, a monumental collaborative work being mounted at New York's Lincoln Center this summer by Tod Machover, a composer at MIT's Media Lab, invites audience participation in spades. Not only has Machover solicited source material—sound clips and digital images—from the public, but ordinary people can shape each performance as it unfolds. Audience members make music at electronic sound stations—for example, the video game–like "Harmony Driver" produces more consonant or more dissonant harmonies depending on how one travels through an onscreen landscape. Meanwhile, participants on the internet can modify the performance using special software. Doubtless, the new age of interactive artmaking will produce some stunning successes, as well as no end of fun with the family. But like the neighbors who turned up their noses at my "interactive book," I smell a rat. What the concept of consumer-as-writer/composer/artist categorically excludes is the concept of expertise. In divvying up the work of the world there is a simple wisdom in assigning tasks to those who are best at them. When a pipe bursts, I might try to fix it myself, but I am seldom so satisfied with the result as when I call a plumber. In its rush to be inclusive, interactive technology seems to brand as elitist the idea that persons of extraordinary gifts—literary, musical, or other—bring something of special value to the process of creation. A future literature free from the "tyranny of the author" will be just as good as the old Shakespeare-dominated one. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will be just as glorious, not to mention more democratic, when it embraces not only universal brotherhood but also the input of the folks at home. Certainly, technology makes such participation possible. You and I can now remix instrumental tracks of Peter Gabriel songs, we can navigate through "interactive art" on the Web, we can decide whether the novel's hero lives or dies. Yet I'm not sure consumers of art have been yearning for that sort of "liberation." If we had, perhaps more of us would have acquired the skills to write novels, compose symphonies, or create sculptures. Held up to the light, the ideal of consumer participation begins to look like an academic invention. I wonder if Barthes was as worried about the "pitiless divorce" between the producer and the user when he ordered a meal in a fine restaurant. Did he long to elbow aside the Cordon Bleu chef and become a participant in the creative process? Or did he, like everyone else, cede control to the person most likely to produce something edible? Even if the new participatory artforms address a genuine need, it is questionable whether they engage people in genuine creation. The level on which consumers now exert control is many steps removed from the primal act of making art. Readers of hypertext do not think up a story but thread their way through bits of someone else's thinking: it is a tale told by a mouse. And Brain Opera's success as a work of music may depend less on the talent or sensitivity of the audience-participants than on the ingenuity of those who have designed the special instruments and conceived the whole, and on the instincts of three "real" performers who, as a hedge against chaos, select and merge the streams of sound issuing from the audience. The real art in each case emanates from processes that take place in the sub-basement of a creative mind—from low-level machine code, so to speak. The consumer is simply manipulating high-level prefab modules of musical or literary thought. I submit that my early experiment in book publishing came as close to true participatory art as any work before or since. After all, nothing captures the art of creation better than actually creating something. So if ever you turn to this page in a future issue and find it completely blank, you will know what to do, won't you? db |