On Totalitarian Interactivity is an essay by Lev Manovich that talks about interactivity and interruption.
For the West, interactivity is a perfect vehicle for the ideas of democracy and equality. For the East, it is another form of manipulation, in which the artist uses advanced technology to impose his / her totalitarian will on the people. (On modern artist as a totalitarian ruler see the works of Boris Groys.) Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously and despair when it does not work. Post-communist artists, on the other hand, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, will always breakdown, will never work as it is supposed to…
In The Language of New Media Manovich has two sections on interactivity that continue the critique of interactivity. Early in the book he argues that “to call computer media ‘interactive’ is meaningless – it simply means stating the most basic fact about computers.” (p. 55) In other words, on the modern GUI computer you have to interact with the media.
Manovich moves quickly from this dismissal of interactivity (after dismissing the digital nature of new media) to asking why we would be fascinated by interactivity and ascribes it to an ongoing confusion between mental life and representations. He selectively quotes people like Jaron Lanier to show that psychologists, VR theorists, and cognitive scientists believe that computer media can present mental states – externalize the mind. At best media are representations, not the thing itself.
I think Manovich is right about the categorical difference between mental life and its representations, he may even be right that there is a sloppy tendency to get so excited about the logic of computers that we conflate media and ideas. That said, I don’t see what interactivity has to do with it, unless both are, for Manovich, examples of how post-communists have a special perspective – that of how technology is about interruption not control.
The heart of the argument lies in whether,
All classical, and even more so modern art was already “interactive,” requiring a viewer to fill in missing information (for instance, ellipses in literary narration; “missing” parts of
objects in modernist paiting) as well as to move his / her eyes (composition in painting and cinema) or the whole body (in experiencing sculpture and architecture). Computer interactive art takes “interaction” literally, equating it
with strictly physical interaction between a user and a artwork (pressing a button), at the sake of psychological interaction.
Methinks Manovich has just discovered that he speaks prose and therefore prose as a category is meaningless. The point is whether multimedia designers (especially game designers) can deploy a different type of interaction and control. Or, from the users point of view, if there is a different experience of control when playing a game. To dismiss interactivity is to not ask about it. Interactivity is interesting because people who talk about games use it to describe something they think makes a game different from other genres of human artifacts – are we not interested in such claims?
As proof of how interesting interactivity is I would point to the later section in The Language of New Media on “Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity” (p. 205-211) where Manovich finds “the message” of new media in the interruption of illusion when we are confronted with the computer (and the need to interact with it). This is the “new metarealism”. “The user invests in the illusion precisely because sh is given control over it.” (p. 209) Sounds like the return of interactivity to me.
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