Lev Manovich

ON TOTALITARIAN INTERACTIVITY 
(notes from the enemy of the people) 


In "Art, Power, and Communication" (RHIZOME DIGEST: October 11, 1996. 
http://www.rhizome.com ) Alexei Shulgin writes:  

"Looking at very popular media art form such as
"interactive installation" I always wonder how people (viewers) are
exited about this new way of manipulation on them. It seems that
manipulation is the only form of communication they know and can
appreciate. They are happily following very few options given to them by
artists: press left or right button, jump or sit. Their manipulators
artists feel that and are using seduces of newest technologies (future
now!) to involve people in their pseudo-interactive games obviously
based on banal will for power. But what nice words you can hear around
it: interaction, interface for self-expression, artificial intelligence,
communication even. So, emergence of media art is characterised by
transition from representation to manipulation." 

	
Alexei Shulgin is right in analyzing the phenomenon of interactive art and 
media as a shift from representation to manipulation. Yes, interactive 
computer installations indeed represent an advanced form of audience 
manipulation, where the subject is put within a structure very similar to an 
experimental setup of a psychological laboratory or a high-tech torture 
chamber of CIA or KGB, the kind we saw frequently in spy films of the Cold 
War era. Yet -- precisely because I -- who was in Moscow and grew up there 
during Breznev's era -- is so happy to agree with Shulgin's conclusions -- I 
recognize the limitations of this analysis, or rather, its cultural specificity. It is 
only a post-communist subject who can see interactive art and media in these 
terms. (No surprisingly, in a conversation I had last year, another post-
communist subject -- art critic Boris Groys -- analyzed interactive computer 
installations in a very similar way). 
	The experiences of East and West structure how new media is seen in 
both places. 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... (For instance, 
Moscow conceptual artist and poet Dimity Prigov did an event during ISEA 
'94 in which he used business translation programs to translate a famous 
nineteenth Russian poem by Pyshkin from Russian into Finnish and then 
from Finnish into English; he declared the mistakes in translation a new  
work of art.) A Western artist sees Internet as a perfect tool to break down all 
hierarchies and bring the art to the people (while in reality more often than 
not using it as a super-media to promote his / her name ). In contrast, as a 
post-communist subject, I cannot but see Internet as a communal apartment 
of Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present 
line for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen. Or I can think of it as 
a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their 
used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up. Or as a new, Mass 
Panopticum (which was already realized in communist societies) -- complete 
transparency, everybody can track everybody else.
	I apologize if I am making you mad. I promise to write on the 
blackboard, until the chalk runs out: Internet is good for the people, Internet 
is good for the people, Internet is good for the people, Internet is good for the 
people. Down with the Museum, Down with the Museum, Down with the 
Museum, Down with the Museum. Workers of the World, Connect; Workers 
of the World, Connect; Workers of the World, Connect; Workers of the 
World, Connect. I promise to march in happy columns, screaming slogans, 
my face reflecting the shiny pixels of new version of Netscape browser. 
Ideology, history, class struggle are finally over, replaced by Microsoft vs. 
Netscape war and Java objects. Long Live Digital Revolution!  
	But before I give in, I would like to offer you one more thought, the 
last download from "the enemy of the people" -- one more argument about 
interactivity as a totalitarian art form. 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. The psychological processes 
of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification -- which are 
required for us to comprehend any text or image at all -- are mistakingly 
identified strictly with an objectively existing structure of interactive links. 
	This literal quality can be seen as another example of a larger modern 
trend of externalization of mental life, the process in which new media 
technologies -- photography, film, VR -- have played a key role. On the one 
hand, we witness recurrent claims by the users and theorists of new media 
technologies, from Francis Galton (the inventor of composite photography in 
the 1870s) to Hugo Munsterberg, Sergei Eisenstein and, recently, Jaron Lanier, 
that these technologies externalize and objectify the mind. On the other hand, 
modern psychological theories of the mind, from Freud to cognitive 
psychology, also equate mental processes with external, technologically 
generated visual forms.  
	Interactive computer media perfectly fits in this trend. Mental 
processes of reflection, problem solving, memory and association are 
externalized, equated with following a link, moving to a new image, choosing 
a new scene or a text. In fact, the very principle of new media -- links --  
objectifies the process of human thinking which involves connecting ideas, 
images, memories. Now, with interactive media, instead of looking at a 
painting and mentally following our own private associations to other 
images, memories, ideas, we are asked to click on the image on the screen in 
order to go to another image on the screen, and so on. Thus we are asked to 
follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations. In short, in what 
can be read as a new updated version of Althusser's "interpolation," we are 
asked to mistake the structure of somebody's else mind for our own. 
	This is a new kind of identification appropriate for the information age 
of cognitive labor. The cultural technologies of an industrial society -- cinema 
and fashion -- asked us to identify with somebody's bodily image. The 
interactive media asks us to identify with somebody's else mental structure.   
	
      
P.S. I develop the arguments about modern media technologies and 
externalization of mental life in more detail in "From the Externalization of 
the Psyche to the Implantation of Technology." In _Mind Revolution: 
Interface Brain/Computer_, edited by Florian Rštzer, 90-100. Mźnchen: 
Akademie Zum Dritten Jahrtausend, 1995.