4 Poets

THE CRITICAL DISPLACEMENT OF INTERACTIVITY: 4 POETS

One direction the digital Avant-Garde has taken is the foregrounding of the subjectivization of the interactor. We can see four very different takes on this same moment of subversion by following these links:

SONDHEIM • LEY • STRASSER • MEZ

• Alan Sondheim's poem, of course, is a critique of the notion of the interactor's engagement with the work (and by extension with the world) simply by clicking the mouse at certain designated points. This is no hypertext, of course, so nothing happens--which is precisely Sondheim's point. The ideology of the empowerment of the interactor and the illusion that the interactor can somehow influence events with this action is the focus of Sondheim's criticism.

• Jennifer Ley takes a different approach in "The Midas Touch." Here the interactor does actually trigger a hyperlink, but the outcome is an Error Message accompanied by a rejoinder to the interactor.

Where did you want to go?
This is JUST a piece of html ...
Get a grip!!!
Stop trusting your systems to provide a safe way out ...
Don't put your faith in software
When was the last time you gave any money to charity?

The final link opens a duplication of the main window (implying an infinte regress of interactivity) and a mini popup window that reads, "OOPS! Now you've done it!"

• From March 27 to June 10, 1999 Reiner Strasser coordinated a collaborative website entitled Weak Blood. The extensive web installation provided a place for web artsists to respond to the crisis in Kosovo. One of the key entries, to my mind, was the April 14 collaborative work "No Pasaran," created by Strasser and Pedrag Sidjanin.

What interests me here is again the displacement reaction of the hyperlink, this time a link triggered not by the mouseclick but by the mouseover (simply passing the cursor over the link). Version 2 features a visual block divided into eighteen animated rectangles. The JavaScript animating this piece is also scripted to produce a random distribution of a series of rotating text-images. This random automation is itself already a challenge to the "control-through-choice" ethos of web interaction.

The images themselves display highly filtered scenes from the Spanish Civil War, some of which are overlaid with one of three segments of the republican slogan W "ĄNo pasaran!"

Once the interactor waves the cursor over these linked images, a new series of images from Picassso's "Guernica" is randomly inserted into the automated display. While this insertion takes place as a result of user interaction, it does not happen in the customary way, which normally involves a rollover effect (the substitution of one image in the place of another used as a common navigation effect). Here instead the rollover effect is displaced, changing images in several unexpected places, but never in the place of the trigger image.

I would argue that this work by Strasser and Sidjanin mimics the displacing and destabilizing effects of History as Trauma. History enters the text not simply as content--both contemporary (Kosovo Conflict) and past (Spanish Civil War)--but more importantly as the hystericization and desubjectivization of the interactor. Events appear out of our control, and yet they appear to be following some invisible underground intention (that of the JavaScriptor). This authorial intention itself is qualified, however, by the insertion of the random order within the script. The subtext of this interactive allegory seems to be that our actions and intentions are displaced and replaced by the traumatic irruptions of the Real of History.

• The allegorical figuration of the traumatic irruption of the Real also seems to lie at the heart of Mez's recent work, " >di][e][lation manifesto-:-a sliver of the future f][br][eeder<." As in Jennifer Ley's "The Midas Touch," here the mouse click serves to destabilize the interactor. First of all, the question is where to click? Web navigation usually proceeds from some the interactor's recognition of a significant "button," a visual element promising to function as a hyperlink and as such to fulfill the interactor's destiny as the champion of choice. But the visual clues, made up either of garbled word chunks or apparently meaningless punctuation series, are barely clues at all. Once the interactor does click on the right buttons, however, popup windows appear. And here is where the traumatic irruption of History seems to be figured: what we get when we click on a button is either a scrollable mini-window containing more disjointed text OR a popup window conatining a Flash movie, each one featuring some new alien creature who comes closer and closer to our faces, all the while giving off or being accompanied by some disturbing sound that somehow resembles the sounds of breathing or of a bodily pulse. "Oh my God! What have I done? What has my innocent interaction here brought into being? This is not what I had intended!" The question of who exactly the future feeder/breeders will be now becomes disturbingly indeterminate and alien. A manifesto normally claims to clarify the issues of the future; this wo/manifesto instead gives birth to some future rough beast.