ALL ELEKTRO — a discussion around the concepts of

interaction, dialogue and provocation

1.

Moving from one place to another normally means that the most peculiar, old things suddenly appear out from drawers and cupboards. It can be quite ordinary things; things that were peripher perhaps even then, at the time when they first were put aside and forgotten. However, the sudden reappearing of old photographs, belongings or toys, can make you aware of the fact that moving in space is also about moving in time, or perhaps rather — changing one time-dependent context of meaning for another.

When we recently moved to a new flat I happened to bump into one of those things. Among de- and reconstructed biographical material the green and red box of "All-elektro" appeared, a family game from the early sixties. There was probably something with the design of the box that caught my attention; the three-dimensional letters on the front describing a futuristic diagonal on their way into a virtual space of possibilities. There was no doubt; the content of this box had to do with technological dreams.

The game consisted of a number of illustrated plates with questions and possible answers. Each plate illustrated different subjects concerning everything from famous newspapers and their country of origin to exotic plants and their latin names. All of the plates had an answering code of its own, activated through the placement of the perforated plate on to the battery-driven, "all-electric" game board. The variation of the perforation from plate to plate was meant to prevent the players from memorizing the position of the correct answers, something which, according to the game constructors, would be "a fact which gives both excitement and agreeable diversion to the game". With the contact rod you marked your chosen answer, whereupon a red or green light would show. The rules seemed simple: "All-elektro can be played by two or more persons, however you can also play it alone". For a correct answer you would get three points; a wrong answer would mean a reduction of one point.

I don´t have a very clear memory of "All-elektro". It could have been a success; one of those Christmas presents that strikes the spirit of the time enough to become the Christmas gift of the year. Often, after a short but intense period in the light, those things turn out to be quite boring or completely useless, occupying a place on a shelf somewhere until they are finally doomed to a continuous existence in the shadows. Nevertheless, the reappearance of a "All-elektro" can tell us a great deal about the technological landscape of meaning in which we are moving around. Today, recharging the "All-elektro" game board with a torch battery, picking up the contact rod, making it bring about a green or red reaction, may not give much of a sensation. But it could reflect, or illustrate, the origins of the human-machine matrimony.

The ambition of "All-elektro" was interactivity. As merely interactive it wasn´t epoch-making; games are in principle interactive, that is one of their characteristics. But it was an automate, a mechanical device, and above all it was intimate: The naive simplicity of "All-elektro" makes it an interesting methaphor for the gentle machine in human service, ready to perform a human-machine interaction. The red- and green twinkling of the little lamps is the reaction that should bring the prefix inter- in action. However, having played "All-elektro" with your three brothers and sisters you know that the most interesting happenings are not the ones on the board, within the game, but the ones around, like noices, laughter and protests, like discussions about whose turn it is next. The isolated human-machine interactivity opens up towards a living-room of dialogue and provocation.

Within an Interactive Institute research theme dealing with youngster´s use of urban space we developed two different game-like projects — the Townscape Transfer and the Human Machine Action — where we, among other things, discussed a broadening of the interactivity concept. Townscape Transfer was an interactive presentation of the video material collected in a study, in which we had followed teenagers around the city of Malmö. A concept of tangible computing had been developed by Ane Skak in collaboration with two ID students, Per-Anders Hillgren and Svante Sjöstedt. In the end this resulted in an interactive video game board, in the form of a city plan, where different video clips or short stories were brought up by the positioning of three different teenager dolls. Tags were used to indicate identity and position on the game board, which in turn immediately made the corresponding teenager and place appear on a screen.

In contrast to the "all-electronic" structure of the Townscape Transfer stands the "non-electric" and totally "non-tech" idea behind the Human Machine Action. The research ambition was to collect geographical information from teenagers concerning their routes through the city. An old wardrobe was turned into a fake slot machine, thereby creating a "pay-by-information" situation. The slot machine was manually operated from the inside. From the outside it was activated by a physical handshake. Once activated the machine would deliver maps of Malmö, which were filled out by the teenagers and subsequently returned back through the incision on the front. On occasions the map would be rejected and redelivered by the interior researcher engine, but after final approval the Coke would thud down into the frontal pigeon-hole.

Structurally, or as situations, the two projects borrow essential "All-elektro" characteristics, perhaps more than we would like to believe, as do many human-machine situations. But they also diverge on some important points, and perhaps most obviously on a level of awareness. Where "All-elektro" establishes an unreflected and immediate connection between question and answer, the projects we carried through had the ambition to open up the isolated back-and forth oscillation and relate the situation to the surrounding world. An interactive technology has to create more than the All-elektro "poke-and see" situation, but the solution to this however, is not a question of creating a more complex surface or a more intricate navigation through an even more subtly coded landscape. Instead it is a matter of questioning the underlying presumptions about interactivity. The limits of the situation are set by the "All-elektro" episthemology rather than by its technology; interactive situations being based upon a concept of knowledge implying a definite relation between question and answer, between the so called poking and the evoked result. The pleasure brought about in this kind of interactivity is the pleasure of control; the feeling of being on top of a situation, even though it is a question of a precoded or scripted one. This is an activity going on between a fixed and stable entity, or a tool, and an agent using its inherent scheme, something normally reffered to as work. By stressing the activity that takes place, the fact that something is going on or is happening, such a work oriented interaction also stresses the rational opinion that doing something always is better than doing nothing.

2.

In her by now quite legendary book "The War of Desire and Technology" from 1996, the Austin based cyborg Alluquère Roseanne Stone fights for interactivity as something more than merely a law-and-order practice sprung out of a disciplinary work ethics. She shows, for example, that many of the developers of the personal computer from the very beginning had a very creative and techno-social ambition, trying to break through the limiting barriers of the machine as an organiser or a deputy human being. Here Stone quotes Andy Lippman, one of the early interaction researchers at MIT. Lippman stresses the intimacy in interaction: Whether it is a human-human situation or a human-computer one, interactivity should be mutual and simultaneous, and it is not necessarily a process aiming at a common goal. Through her book, Stone emphasizes the vast "ludic dimension" of interactivity; the human desire for, and curiosity in, the connectivity itself — as a game, or as a curious search for new ways of expression.

Stone wrote her book during a period of time when action theories where formulated from many different scientific perspectives. The emerging awareness of communicative action also led to a new interest in aesthetic theories, or theories of intersubjectivity and expressivity as a reaction to the cognitive tradition and its focus on an individual intelligence in exchange with a world of objects. Lippman´s five important aspects of interactivity, put forward in Stone´s book, is a good example of such a critique of rationalism. Interaction should include mutual interruptibility, which means that both participants should be able to interrupt the other whenever they feel. It should allow graceful degradation, a way of handling unanswerable questions so that the conversation can go on, for example through association or reflection. Interaction should also imply a limited look-ahead, or a certain amount of the unexpected or unforeseen. As a consequence, there should be no default agent with the possibility of using a preplanned path.

The fifth aspect in Lippman´s definition is perhaps the most crucial, opening up this path towards an entire landscape: True interaction is a discursive activity taking place in a specific setting or environment at a specific time, where it has to be related to a surrounding world of experiences. Therefore the participants should have the impression of an infinite database. "This principle", says Stone, "means that an immersive interactional world should give the illusion of not being much more limiting in the choices it offers than an actual world would be".

This "database" is a parallel to "the life-world", a concept used by Edmund Husserl in his phenomenology; a world that is the sum of both the factual and subjective content that constitutes "a person". What Stone suggests could be described as a phenomenological approach to technology, where technology is understood as a common place, a field of overlapping life-worlds, a linguistic field of social possibilities. But where phenomenology points out the meaningful in constructing the subject in relation to the surrounding world, Stone stresses the possibility to play with this relation. Technology opens up an extended aesthetic possibility, a possibility to express yourself in relation to others, dramatize or try out life-scenarios. This is a displacement of the idea of technology as a tool, representative, substitutional or instrumental, towards the idea of technology as a medium, as the environment through which the ego approaches a symbolic and unlimited world.

The image of overlapping life-worlds, or chronotopia (time-spaces), was used by Michail Bachtin in his descriptions of aesthetic interaction in litterature. These chronotopia, says Bachtin, can embrace each other, co-exist, intertwine, shift, stay side by side of each other, confront each other or find themselves in more complex relations to each other", but always in a dialogic way. In spite of the very active, or interactive images of Bachtin, he chooses the concept of dialogue. This is interesting as both interaction and dialogue describe the same kind of image, beginning with a prefix stressing the fact that this is a question of one thing happening through something else: inter- in Latin and dia- in Greek signifying simply the mediating through. But where interaction in its latter part stresses activity with an underlying reference to problem solving or work, the concept of dialogue focuses on logos, referring to language or linguistic activity; an activity that constitutes aesthetic communication. What Bachtin wants to point out is that when different circumstances or chronotopia come together, they receive a meaning through each other, through the relation, through their different qualities. This definition also comes closer to the popular meaning of dialogue as an intersubjective activity, and perhaps also a little bit closer to the playful qualities of "All-elektro".

The idea of using game situations in dealing with teenagers was of course the idea of the game as a social door opener. Covered up by the human-machine interaction we wanted to draw attention to the individual experiences of the teenagers, their their chronotopias, their desires and dreams. The interactive video game board "Townscape Transfer" consequently built upon this idea of using technology as a rhetoric framework, producing stories not only whithin itself but perhaps as much around it, in the form of reactions, reflections and associations. We hoped that the documentary presence of the teenagers in the videoclips, the simulation of transfer through different time-spaces and the possibility of relating them to each other, would create a surplus of communicative activity, either as an inner dialogue or as an open discussion around the content. Perhaps you could say that we made use of the "All-elektro" structure for a communicative purpose, using a "ludic" desire in order to squeeze an abundance of meaning out of it.

This displacement of isolated interaction into dialogic communication is also a step away from the tool-oriented view of communication technology towards a more media-oriented one. And with this view follows the possibilities of using technology, not as a substituting prosthesis, but as a prolonging one, a prosthesis that gives us possibilities to reach the borders, the fringes, the gaps. When Sandy Stone describes the early media lab pioneers, she describes their work as a fight for technology as experience; symbolic and dialogic. This is also what "the war of desire" is about, a combat amoreux , using a Paul Ricoeur expression, where technology should be invaded by a desire for experience and symbolic meaning, thereby transforming it strategic structures into expressive patterns. A dialogue is, parallel to the definition of the true interaction, mutual only if it embraces also interruptions, conflicts and deviations. This is the critical dimension in all dialogue, a possibility for individual desire to break through the legitimate: norms, systems, technological organisation.

3.

Significantly enough there is no shortage of interactive combats on the communication market, flooded as it is by astonishing action. This may have an important entertaining value, but it also shows that technological complexity does not distinguish a mechanical or strategic interaction from a dialogic one. The claims we have in the war of desire is different from the ones we have in the mechanical war. We have already pointed out the claim for an unlimited world of references, for the right to bring in new forces, arguments or experiences. In a dialogue you need the possibility to change the subject, but also the right to change the rules. This interruptability and unpredictability is essentially a question of presence; a situation dependent upon your personal contribution. It is therefore precisely here, on the border between what is mutual in a dialogue and what is distinct, the concept of provocation appears.

Provocation should be understood as a calling for voices (Lat. pro, for, and vocare, call, using your voice). This call depends on your ability to raise an interest or create a feeling of presence, which often means bringing in new pieces of your life-world into the communicative situation, approaching distinct chronotopia to each other. Therefore, provocation is intimitely related to active listening. Can we imaging listening in a situation of total understanding, in a situation where provocation is completely absent? Is it worth listening if we already know what comes next? In this sense, provocation in a dialogue means constant awareness of possible changes of the context, of possible surprise; in a dialogue provocation is a desireable war-machine within a communicative structure, thereby warranting the presence of an unlimited database, an outer world.

In this sense provocation must be understood as the active principle in communicative action. However, as an active principle, as a call for, the provocative also implies intention, just like a tool; and the observant reader might already have noticed me using intentative expressions like "door opener" or "purpose". In this sense provocation is intentative, deliberately introducing obstacles. Bachtin focuses on this by showing us the importance of contradiction, unfamiliarity, thresholds and turningpoints in a dialogue, going as far as pointing out the importance of the bizarre. All this movements, or tropes, are linguistic or rhetoric tools in dialogue, which also makes it obvious that provocation also guarantees the tension between a calculated result and the unforeseen occurence. The provocative activates both the dialogic principle that something can only be expressed and understood through something else, and the fact that communication is the consequence of a tension between tool and medium.

The Human Machine Action, carried through in Malmö in August last year by myself in cooperation with Ane Skak and Camilla Grunnet, could be regarded as an attempt to investigate the provocative both as a medium and as a tool. Here, the call for voices was the ironic use of one of the most common human-machine interactions — the soft drink slot machine. Emptying it of its everyday function of anonymous provider, turning it into an active, dialogic counterpart, we played with both the wonders of technology, the passive fascination, and with scepticism and critique. Through this contradiction, a meeting-place was established; a meeting-place with a simplistic technological structure, but with a redundancy of communicative action.

In a way this statement brings us back to the "All-elektro" box and its beautiful images of car models or famous architectonic motives. Is this Milano, Rome or Verona? Red or green? It all started with the amazement of its technologically created response, which could never be more than a start. As a knowledge-machine "All-elektro" is worthless, as metaphor it has its mediating possibilities. In its simplicity, it is a setting for communicative action, for dialogue; not through the system it offers, but through the expressions it provokes. And this is also the most important point in my criticism of interactivity: Activity is not enough. Human activity, even human-machine interaction, is about something for someone, and this can be refferred to as language. Human activity is always linguistic activity, something else would be mechanics — or nature. Therefore, interaction through technology cannot merely be a question of replacing human qualities with twinkling lights, even if the potential of this idea has been amazingly elaborated. Rather, the interaction we would like to develop opens up towards a scope of significance, in itself an entrance, a threshold, a lounge, a stair, an archade — a room of disjunction in which human meaning still moves.

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