Sharon Daniel
answer ... collaborative systems, or interfaces to agency
answer ... collaborative systems, or interfaces to agency
An "interface" is "a point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact". Within the social register, the human computer interface can act as both a boundary and a bridge. My work as a public/net artist is a bridge building project. The goals of this project include ... 1) transferring the role of author and distributing authority over system design and/or self representation to collaborating communities and individuals... 2) addressing the special problems of communities with limited access to information technology and culture 3) building tools and transforming technologies for use by communities for their own empowering, authoring practices in short, providing interfaces to agency The media industry has rapidly and completely absorbed and co-opted the utopian vision of media-assisted interactivity in the service of that which it was supposed to overcome - the hegemony of the media industry and the monolith of global information culture. However, there is an important distinction to be made between "interactive" art and "collaborative" systems. The various subject positions of Interactor, participant, and collaborator are fundamentally different. There are significant, political implications embedded in a shift in authorial perspective from the "audience-as-viewer / interactor / participant" to the "audience-as-collaborator". I share Walter Benjamin's conclusion, that what matters in "authorship" or art practice is not the "attitude" of a work of art to the "relations of production of its time", but what its "position" is within them. Quoting Benjamin, "What matters (...), is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers can be turned into producers - that is, readers or spectators into collaborators ..." (1) I am developing and exploiting information and communications technologies for the design of "Collaborative Systems" - systems in which participants are given a framework for building a database based on their own experiences, and the tools for structuring and interpreting that data themselves. In his online essay "Strategies of Interactivity", Dieter Daniels enlists John Cage (my philosophical hero) and Bill Gates (the anti-christ) as representatives, respectively, of "open" and "closed" systems. This rather humorous comparison/contrast helps to place in the foreground the social, economic and political implications of the distribution of authority in interface, software and systems design in the context of art practice, consumer media and information culture. Interactive systems address "users" or "consumers". "Collaborative" systems evolve through the contributions of collaborating participants. "Open" systems - designed to allow participants to contribute data to the system, or reconfigure the system design itself, are "collaborative" systems. While political and economic power are increasingly dependent upon access to and presence within the global information culture the voices of the culturally, economically, and technologically disenfranchised, are becoming less and less audible. This dangerous trend might be reversed if all communities of interest had the access and the ability to self-represent, publish and broadcast in information space. Public/Net/Media artists can become context providers, assisting communities, collecting their stories, soliciting their opinions on politics and social justice, and building the online archives and interfaces that will make this data available across social, cultural and economic boundaries. Context Provision is an exercise of agency which can change the conditions of disenfranchised or marginalized communities. EXAMPLE: "Need_X_Change" I have initiated a collaboration with Casa Segura, an HIV prevention clinic and needle exchange program, to create a "distributed" work of public art - accessible "on-line" and situated in and across the Fruitvale district of Oakland - that will stimulate dialogue between the safe house and its community, and increase awareness and understanding of the crucial services offered there. Because Casa Segura provides needle exchange, it is politically embattled and continuously attacked by its district city council representative and others interested in the "economic development" or gentrification of the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. As of 1998, at least one out of every 3 AIDS cases there were directly related to injection drug use. There are an estimated 22,000 injection drug users in Oakland and Alameda County, California. A total of 37.8 % of all AIDS cases in Alameda County are related to injection drug use. Needle exchange programs are a proven method of reducing needle-related HIV risk behavior among injection drug users. The project "Need_X_Change" is designed to help the staff and clients of Casa Segura attain a social and political "voice" through dialogue with their local community and participation in global information culture. Casa Segura's philosophy of "harm reduction" therapy and my own practice, developing Collaborative Systems, share a premise of respect for the "client" or "participant" and a recognition of the value and dignity of all individuals, their experiences and their perspectives. The project which has been funded by the Creative Work Fund, has three phases, Outreach, Voice and Education. A website and a series of billboards and bus boards will provide information about Casa Segura, its services, its staff and its clients, to the Fruitvale community. The website and public graphics will be created collaboratively by allowing staff and clients to tell their personal stories in their own words and participate in the visual design of the web-pages and billboards that disseminate their stories. The "voices" of the many individuals who both use and staff the center will be made "audible" to the public through the website and public graphics program. Each of these representations will be developed primarily from "first-person documentation". In order to collect this "first-person documentation", I have begun distributing inexpensive audio tape recorders and disposable cameras to selected Casa Segura clients. These clients document their daily experience and tape their own stories in their own words. I am currently working with ten Casa Segura clients on the development of their "first-person documentation". I meet with these eight extraordinary people during the Fruitvale Needle Exchange to discuss their progress and supply them with tapes and film. I have just begun working, one on one, with these participants to put their images, audio files and texts online. Through this process the participants will attain basic computer literacy training, email access, and learn how to design and publish their own web pages. Most of the participants have never used a computer before, and, although they have "heard about" the Internet, have never been online. Asked why people become injection drug users Rand Corporation Sociologist Ricky Bluthenthal, who has contributed to several studies of Oakland needle exchange sites, answers "For most folks it's a pretty tortured path, and it certainly isn't based on the fact that you have a program that's taking used syringes from current users and replacing them with clean ones. I'd be interested to meet the person who said they started using because there was a needle exchange program in their neighborhood". The Need_X_Change collaborative team wants the Fruitvale Community to "meet" the clients of Casa Segura. We believe that if Casa Segura clients' stories can be heard, then the community will no longer misunderstand or fear Casa Segura or the impact of its presence in the community. The collaborators believe that the website and public graphics program will initiate this "meeting" and encourage dialogue, which will lead to better understanding, empowering and "giving voice" to those concerned who currently have little power and no "voice". In public art, the artist must serve as an agent or operator, in Benjamin's terms, "not to report but to struggle; not to play the spector but to intervene actively." (2) For example, "A-Portable", designed by Atelier Van Lieshout in collaboration with Dr. Rebecca Gompers, is a refurbished shipping container that functions as a mobile gynecological clinic. "A-Portable" was built so that women from countries where abortion is illegal can terminate their pregnancies safely and legally in international waters. The text, which accompanies the exhibition of "A-Portable" at the Venice Biennale last year, begs the question of agency.... "To understand the work, one must move from ontology, (what is art?) to pragmatism (what can art do?). Herein lies a possible revival of avant-garde politics - no longer historically "ahead", nor operating through shock and estrangement, but rather producing works that make things possible right now ... ." (3) Instead of representing or illustrating political issues, they engage, from a monolithic or uni-vocal perspective, "A-Portable" and "Need_X_Change" make possible new practical and political realities for the individuals and communities they engage. Each contribution that is made through a Collaborative System interface is part of a conversation - a negotiation between individuals and communities who are ready to take responsibility for representing their own subjective experience, social position and political perspectives. By engaging communities of interest who have limited access to information technology, and developing tools and interfaces specific to their needs, I hope to provide contexts for self-representation, communication, and education that will effect direct and substantive change in the political and material circumstances of their lives, and the lives of their communities. In the historical narrative of social and political systems, local exchanges proliferate as global states - nothing is inevitable. Sharon Daniel Santa Cruz, USA ------ (1) Benjamin, Walter, "The Artist as Producer", In Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, transl. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1978. (2) ibid. (3) Allen, Jennifer, "What? A-Portable". In: Biennale Di Venezia, 2001, Catalog copy provided courtesy of Biennale Di Venezia. |
