What Lies Ahead

Two-Way Mirror Power

The Difference Engine #3 is a multisited art work that joins a “real world” sculptural installation at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) to an immaterial, screen-based environment.11 These elements are in turn connected to remote viewing stations via the Internet. Thus, the piece operates concurrently at multiple sites—online and throughout the ZKM museum—with up to forty-five multiple users at any given time. The portion housed in the ZKM comprises computer equipment, digital cameras, and a series of screens dispersed throughout the exhibition galleries. A large display screen greets visitors at the museum’s entrance and three smaller bidirectional browsing units (BBUs) are stationed on pedestals at various points throughout the institution.

The BBU screens display graphical, perspectival renderings of the physical museum interior to visitors so that, as in many of the media installations examined thus far, the space inside the monitor depicts the actual gallery space surrounding it. Museum visitors are encouraged to tilt or rotate the BBUs to observe different computer-rendered viewpoints and perspectives inside the museum.12 Equipped with sensors and digital cameras, the units are indeed “bidirectional”; they enable spectators to observe digital renderings of the museum interior even while the museumgoers themselves are being “observed” via the same devices. Courtesy of the attached cameras, the BBUs capture images of whatever (or whoever) is in front of them.

When a museum visitor approaches any of Hershman’s three BBUs, a digital camera indiscernibly captures an image of that person and immediately feeds it into a part of the installation the artist dubs the “avatar archive.” (An avatar is a graphical representation of a person within a virtual environment, often used to manipulate information or to navigate through virtual spaces.) Digital avatars of the museum visitors stream through the circuits of Hershman’s sprawling sculpture, periodically appearing on the various display screens and BBU monitors dispersed throughout the museum. While many media installations incorporate spectators’ images into the work itself (such as Bruce Nauman’s video corridors or Peter Campus’s Interface), The Difference Engine #3 differs in the way that the spectators’ images go on to become independent entities; the visitors’ avatars are stored in perpetuity online, as part of an ever-expanding database in the work’s virtual, screen-based environment.13

Hershman exploits the connectivity of the Internet to allow The Difference Engine #3’s remote online viewers to observe the same computer rendered views of the ZKM museum on their personal computer screens that visitors are observing on the BBUs in the museum. That is, spectators simultaneously see the same computerized views on their screens whether they are virtually or literally inside the museum. Like the visitors to the brick-and-mortar museum, online viewers are granted the privilege of manipulating the BBUs, although, in this case, the action is telerobotic, carried out on the monitor via the user’s keyboard and mouse. Empowering remote audiences to make changes in the actual museum has curious collateral effects. For example, the museum visitors are first made aware of the two-way connectivity of the BBUs when the screens appear to move independently. The boundaries between viewer and viewed become distressingly frayed at this moment: while it is one thing to project a (qualified) truth value onto a screen world, finding oneself literally connected to that world is quite another.

Significantly, one’s degree of agency vis-à-vis panoptic manipulation is further conditional upon where one encounters the piece. The Difference Engine #3 reveals sharp distinctions between the spectatorial experiences of its two audiences—viewers who are physically in the museum and those who access the work online. While viewers in the material museum are unavoidably incorporated into Hershman’s work in the form of their own digital images-cum-avatars, online viewers navigate the piece by selecting a “generic” avatar to represent them on their simulated journey through the virtual ZKM museum. Visitors who physically enter the Karlsruhe museum alternate the three BBU screen views by manually moving the monitors, whereas online viewers change the imagery at the comparatively secluded site of their PCs. Thus, while one group is automatically subject to external control mechanisms, the other has the relative luxury of deciding how and to what degree they’d like to be implicated in the work. Put simply, viewers who engage Hershman’s installation inside the ZKM building are physically vulnerable in a way that the dispersed online audience is not. Although in its current configuration The Difference Engine #3 precludes the infliction of serious bodily harm on its viewers, it is not impossible to conceive of an interface being configured in such a way as to allow a remote observer to violently shift a BBU held by an unsuspecting museumgoer or to trigger a series of painful electric shocks for viewers on the “other side” of the screen.

Ken Goldberg’s The Telegarden takes the as yet uncertain artistic promise of screen-based teleaction in a slightly different direction. The piece made its first appearance at the University of Southern California in 1995 before moving to the lobby of the Ars Electronica media art center in Linz, Austria, the following year. The museum component of the work consists of a small real-world garden, robotic gardening equipment, and an Internet-enabled PC that allows museum visitors to access the work’s Web site. The Web site features more or less real-time images of the sometimes scraggly, sometimes lush garden taken from the perspective of a camera attached to the robotic arm. A schematic of the robot itself appears nearby and can be observed in tandem. Equipped with this visual information and detailed textual instructions, viewers can direct the robotic arm to plant and tend to a selection of petunias, peppers, eggplants, and marigolds. For the purposes of the present argument, it is important to recognize how, regardless of whether viewers encounter the installation in the museum or online, their ability to partake in tending the plot of earth is always screen-mediated. The closest they will get to touching garden soil is by manipulating pixilated images on their PC monitor.

Similar to The Difference Engine #3, multiple observers can interact with The Telegarden at the same time, regardless of their physical location. According to the artist, the ways in which members rely on each other to execute their remote gardening activities and nurture the physical plot on an ongoing basis is central to the meaning of the work itself.14 For instance, the primary function of the “Alternate Village Square Chatroom”—an online discussion board located on the project’s Web site—is to facilitate communication between the telegarden’s computer users-cum-horticulturists.15 This arrangement is also efficacious from a practical standpoint: the robotic interface can be hard for novices to understand without the help of other experienced users, and visitors—at least those keen on making the garden grow—must cooperate enough to avoid crushing each others’ plants, over- or underwatering the soil, and so on.

As in Hershman’s installation, not all spectators are granted equivalent opportunities for experiencing the work. The reasons for this discrepancy differ, however. The Telegarden incorporates a series of ingenious limits on viewer participation; users who officially register on the Web site are rewarded with greater opportunities for growing the garden as well as for collaborating and communicating with other gardeners.16 Planting privileges are reserved for registered users, with further preference given to dedicated, repeat visitors. (For example, after 100 hits one is allocated a single seed, after 500 another seed, and a final seed at 1,000 hits.) Goldberg’s decision to favor regular visitors is perhaps best explained in relationship to what media and architectural historian William J. Mitchell identifies as the phenomenon of “persistent” virtual spaces. Persistent virtual environments have many characteristics of successful brick-and-mortar architecture; that is, they “become increasingly familiar with repeated visits; seem to possess power to evoke memories of previous events that took place there [and] change and grow over time.”17 In the process of engaging such spaces, explains Mitchell, users are more likely to behave as they would when encountering a “real” place in person. He explains the conduct this way: “If you know that your environment will be there, as you left it, the next time you log in, then you have some motivation to invest time and resources in improving it.... If you realize that you will have to live with your fellow inhabitants for a long time, and that you will need them to respect and trust you, then you will be less tempted by role-playing and momentarily amusing deceptions.”18 In a seeming paradox, the more the spectators engage The Telegarden’s Web site as “real,” the more they will treat the garden as such.

What is essential to note is that the spatial relationship between the viewing subject and the screen is dramatically redefined in both artworks. The telematic reach of Hershman’s and Goldberg’s installations demonstrates that the passivity of the so-called “virtual window” cannot be taken for granted. The various interactions between the online viewers, museum visitors, and objects in the museum reveal the digital screen’s lack of boundaries, with the tacit understanding that the world on the “other side” of the screen may also directly impact the world in which the viewer is situated. Surveillance and control emerge as the flip side of the expansive spatial realms associated with the Internet. If the virtual window analogy might fail to capture this changed dynamic, what metaphor might be more appropriate? Lev Manovich argues that the computer screen constitutes a “battlefield for incompatible definitions”: it concurrently suggests both depth and surface, opaqueness and transparency; it proposes the “image as illusionary space and image as instrument for action.”19 His assessment is instructive in drawing out the computer screen’s uneasy balancing act between screen-as-window and screen-as-flat-surface. However, it is the digital screen’s capacity to serve as a connecting portal between multiple remote spatial environments, and not merely its ambivalent objecthood, that restructures the possibilities of media art spectatorship. The remarkable form of screen-reliant direct causality exhibited in Hershman’s and Goldberg’s computer-based installations is one heretofore unrealized in media art.

For these reasons, I propose that the appropriate allegory for the digital media screen is not a virtual window but an automatic sliding glass door: a pervasive yet unobtrusive object with exceptionally tenuous boundaries. Much like the commonplace automatic glass doors at an airport or supermarket, any activity can inadvertently open or close the screen’s connectivity, and there exists a certain ambiguity as to which side of the door/screen has instigated the action. As architectural theorist and historian Anthony Vidler succinctly puts it, the digital screen “[is] not a picture, and certainly not a surrogate window, but rather an ambiguous and unfixed location for a subject.”20 The viewing subject’s inability to establish hierarchical relationships among potential arenas for the viewer’s presence and action, as Vidler points out, can be intensely unsettling. Indeed, the computer screen facilitates open-ended and nearly limitless interactions between the spaces inside and beyond the screen and the viewer’s own, ostensibly discrete psychological and phenomenal space.

Like Vidler, feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has approached this issue from the perspective of lived, architectural space. Her questions about the interimplication of screen spaces are provocative for thinking about the distinctive features of computer screen-reliant art spectatorship. She asks: “Can the computer screen act as the clear-cut barrier separating cyberspace from real space, the space of mental inhabitation from the physical space of corporeality? What if the boundary is more permeable than the smooth glassy finality of the screen?”21 Even as Grosz’s comments largely reinforce the pertinence of the automatic glass door metaphor, they also encourage us to make an important qualification: while the computer screen as automatic glass door offers a compelling way to think about this changed spatial dynamic, it can go only so far. After all, it provides a conceptual, not literal, parallel for thinking about screen-based spectatorship: there is no direct body-to-body contact between the screen-connected realms in networked digital installations as the glass door analogy might suggest. This distinction is pivotal. Parsing the subjective effects of the spectator’s potentially detached and disembodied viewing experiences with digital spaces will be the chief concern of the rest of this chapter.

Between You and Me

The critical literature on The Telegarden, in contrast to that on The Difference Engine #3, rarely describes firsthand, in-person experiences with the material objects in the installation—in this case, the museum-bound patch of earth. After all, for visitors to the Austrian museum, there is something more exhausting than exhilarating about sowing a seed with a computer-powered robot arm when the seeds, soil, and tools to get the job done are only a few feet in front of you. It is revelatory that the discourse surrounding The Telegarden is preoccupied with the question of the garden’s “realness”—an area of inquiry that Goldberg identifies as “telepistemology.” That is, how can one know whether one is tending a real garden or a convincing facsimile? The artist offers some advice on the matter on the project’s Web site: “What you are looking at is a live image of the Telegarden. . . . If you are still not convinced that you are actually controlling a robot, click on the button to see the robot from a different perspective.” Even the most generous visitor is likely to be unnerved by the seeming capriciousness of the qualification that follows, however: “[The robot] may be in your current position,” or, Goldberg discloses, “It may be servicing someone else.” Fair enough. The technological details involved in pulling off this project are complex and one could certainly envision how delays might happen. But how would one ever know for sure? Does it even matter?

As Gilles Deleuze first articulated in Difference and Repetition, there is an evocative way to understand this dynamic by radically undoing conventional distinctions between the “virtual” and the “real.”22 For Deleuze, all distinctions (mind and body, active and passive, actual and virtual) are collapsed or flattened into an even consistency on the plane of immanence. As a consequence, there are no preexisting hierarchies between the real and its representation; screen world(s) and the material world are coextensive (and thus equally “real”) because both are images on the same plane of immanence.23 Instead of troubling the question of whether Hershman’s digitized museum or Goldberg’s telegarden are “real,” Deleuze, by proposing that no fixed hierarchies exist among such sites or experiences, presents a constructive way to rethink the proposition entirely. As helpful as this model is toward conceptualizing the ambiguous relationships among screen-reliant spaces and their connective interfaces, it unfortunately sidesteps the complexity of lived bodily experience that is central to media installation art and its spectatorship.

Ultimately, disembodiment and impassiveness toward screen-based spaces may be the threats posed by the preponderance of screen-mediated activity in our digital era. This can be conceived as an ethical issue. Philosopher Herbert Dreyfus writes: “Now, as more and more of our perception becomes indirect, read off various sorts of distance sensors and then presented by means of various sorts of displays, we are coming to realize how much of our knowledge is based on inferences that go beyond the evidence displayed on our screens.”24 The difficulty, as Dreyfus sees it, lies in how we respond to the growing variety of tele-experiences. He cautions that Cartesian skepticism becomes increasingly reasonable to the extent that “the reality mediated by this teletechnology can always be called into question.”25 Philosopher Michael Heim similarly underscores the risk of knowing the external world primarily through representations on screens. He likens contemporary screen-based communication to Leibniz’s theory of monadism, in which monads themselves are the only things in the phenomenal world and everything else is simulations and representations. Heim’s description of monadology is presented as a thinly veiled cautionary tale for a society awash in media screens: “Monads have no windows, but they do have terminals. The mental life of the monad—and the monad has no other life—is a procession of internal representations.... [The monad] only knows what can be pictured.”26

Both scholars point to the way in which the uncertain spatial dynamics engendered by telepresence and teleaction, whether in art environments or in everyday life, may lead spectators to doubt external reality—indeed, to question whether anything exists in the experiential material world outside of the world represented on the computer screen. Heim and Dreyfus suggest (the former implicitly and the latter explicitly) that these epistemological questions will be discredited only if viewing subjects have a sense of being in direct touch with real objects and people through the screen interface. Even to the degree that installations such as The Difference Engine #3 and The Telegarden can persuasively establish a direct relationship between remote sites and viewers, however, it is perhaps even more significant that they productively reveal the extent to which certain foundational elements required for meaningful human-to-human communication remain glaringly absent from telepresence and teleaction. Consciously or otherwise, these artworks demonstrate that mere connectivity may not be enough to turn telepresence into presence.

Focusing specifically on the spatial aspects of technologically mediated experiences, philosopher Albert Borgmann identifies qualitative differences between what he terms proximal space and mediated space. He contrasts the suppleness of the former with the fragility of the latter and theorizes how only proximal space—face-to-face, body-to-body interaction—allows for continuity and repleteness.27 This positive valuation of direct bodily experience echoes the proposition shared by phenomenology and feminist philosophy, which holds that subjects primarily learn to trust and feel intimacy via human touch and in the physical presence of other bodies. By now, the relevance for screen-based artistic production should be clear. If contemporary vision and communication are mediated more and more by digital screen-based technologies—if, that is, digital screens and their extensive yet unstable spatial realms orchestrate ever more interactions between subjects in art as in everyday life—then bodily contact between subjects and human interdependence risk becoming, on some level, conscious acts of will.28

Extending this critique to its logical conclusion, it is not enough merely to identify these new spatial realms. Critics and practitioners of new media art will need to develop an account of viewership appropriate for the spectator’s unprecedented power to instantly control material reality from a distance through its screen-based image while also confronting the ways in which new viewing technologies can generate intensely destabilizing spatial dynamics for viewing subjects. The digital installations by Hershman and Goldberg underscore the curious condition that viewers may never really know if an environment represented on a screen is an actual remote locale or not, even when it is. Perhaps even more important, they persuasively demonstrate the ways in which activities represented in screen-based sites can easily fuse with material reality in terms of surveillance, control, and the teleactive and telepresent passage of subjects, objects, images, and information.

As further digital screen interfaces appear daily, installations like The Difference Engine #3 and The Telegarden provide exceptional opportunities for critically evaluating the impact of these viewing technologies. Familiar art historical questions about real and illusionary spaces achieve a new urgency: What is our subjective relationship to these screen-reliant spaces? How does the subject’s radically decentered and deterritorialized condition of being “neither here nor there” in relationship to a definitive scopic center ultimately challenge key premises of spectatorship as it has been conceived conventionally in art, film, and media theory? While these questions may preoccupy mainly new media theorists at present, they promise to be central concerns for screen-reliant artistic production in our digital age.