Kunsthalle Kowloon

This is the extended version of a discussion between Ben Houge and Robin Peckham (in italics), to be published in a forthcoming publication focusing on new media. It was carried out in person and via email between September 2009 and April 2010.

Ben Houge performing "Study for Insomnia"

When you work with Chinese artists and musicians, how do the cultural politics break down? Do you speak English or Chinese? Are you ever made to feel like an outsider? Are there many mutually-missed cultural references?

I make my best effort to use Chinese in communication. My Chinese isn’t as good as I wish it were, and I actively, aggressively even, try to practice whenever I can. I think my written Chinese is a little better than spoken, which is a little weird. It’s useful for MSN, though I don’t use that so much anymore, and I’ve found that other than maybe Yan Jun, folks just don’t use email that much. It depends a bit on the English level of the people I’m talking to; with folks like Chen Hangfeng (my collaborator on the Fat Art piece) or Lawrence Li, it just feels silly to use Chinese. But with the Torturing Nurse guys, Yan Jun, Feng Hao, Wang Changcun, Li Jianhong, etc., most of the conversations are in Chinese, and most of those guys know enough English to fill in an English word to give me a signpost when I get stuck.

Casual observation suggests Beijing laowai Chinese proficiency is far beyond that of Shanghai laowai. I’ve been here over five years now, I’m starting to feel very self-consciously behind the curve, since I’ve never studied formally, outside of a tutor my former company used to bring in for about a year. I usually spend about two hours in Chinese study (currently trying to read Lang Lang’s stupid autobiography) every day. I’ve got a spreadsheet of 2313 characters I’ve studied. This is probably way more than you wanted to know!

But usually I feel pretty welcomed by folks; I think people realize I’m genuinely curious and trying my best, and we share a common passion, so it’s rare that I feel like an outsider, at least among people who do share that passion. Yeah, occasionally there are missed references, but when a name comes up that I don’t know, I usually try to make a note and flag it for future research. I think there’s a pretty good basic understanding of what’s going on globally, if not up to the minute, at least in the modernist era (and I don’t know what’s going on up to the minute anyway). One guy who really impresses me is Torturing Nurse’s Xu Cheng. He’s been a voracious listener of cut-out classical CD’s, so he knows Messiaen, Lutoslowski, John Adams, all kinds of folks I wouldn’t expect. In any event, with sympathetic folks, you can usually figure it out.

What do you think of the differing creative environments in Beijing and Shanghai? Do you have any comments on the music or art scenes in one place or the other? As a foreigner in Shanghai, how do you deal with the cultural specificity of the place?

Well, I know Shanghai much better, so it’s hard to compare. Shanghai’s really expanded its music scene in five years, but I get the impression that Beijing is really crawling with bands. Beijing’s got more/better music venues, but Shanghai’s kind of catching up, with Yuyintang recently expanding, Logo small but often packed, Dream Factory for proper mid-sized shows, and Live Bar holding down the fort way out in Yangpu. The 0093 rehearsal space (an old bomb shelter a block from my apartment) has started hosting band showcases, and both they and YYT seem to be doing a lot to encourage young bands, so it seems there’s a lot more going on than there used to be, which is great.

I have a Beijing-living German friend who feels adamantly that the culture there is much more sitting around and waiting for government handouts and guanxi, but I can’t really back that up with personal experience. The scene I like the most in Shanghai is the noise scene, because it’s the most fully antithetical to that idea; these guys (Torturing Nurse, primarily) are actively putting on shows, putting out CD’s, encouraging other artists, and building a community, and that’s what I think it’s all about.

I often get lumped into this scene with my experimental stuff, though I don’t think of myself as a noise artist at all. I consider myself a classical composer, actually, but from my observation classical music is absolutely dead in China, from Lang Lang to He Xuntian. Both Beijing and Shanghai conservatories seem derelict. Shanghai’s is super insular, when they really should be taking a leading role in the city’s cultural discourse. And I’ve heard nothing good about the Central Conservatory, despite (or in some cases because of) their illustrious alumni. A former professor there, when asked what he would do if he identified a “genius” among his students, allegedly responded, “I’d tell that student to get out of here before we ruin him/her!” The Shanghai Symphony and opera (I think there’s one) don’t have a vision, or even a clear program for the year’s shows; once they even stooped to allowing audience members to vote for their favorite pieces, a surefire downward spiral into lowest common denominator-land.

Maybe this is just a vague generalization, but I kind of feel like Beijing foreigners are more connected to Chinese culture than in Shanghai (Chinese proficiency being just one manifestation of this).

As far as cultural specificity… I don’t know, I just kind of try to do my thing. I think you suck up and respond to your environment no matter where you are, if you have an inquisitive disposition (which I consider an artistic necessity). I’m always trying to seek out new things (for example, Chinese pop and classical composers), working on the language to foster communication and make connections, but I’m more inspired by the energy of a fast-changing city than some of the more historical aspects of China, though that of course inevitably filters through.

Ben Houge performing "Statement of Purpose"

Many artists in Beijing attempt unsuccessfully to drift back and forth between the “high art” scene and the “entertainment” circle, but you seem to be able to inhabit curated exhibitions, the sound art world, and the DJ/performance circuit. Do you find this common in Shanghai? Are you criticized for it?

I’ve always been a bit weird in this regard. I went to college and got a classical degree because I loved pop music, then I used that degree to get a job in video games. While working at my first company Sierra, in Seattle, I used their continuing education program to get a masters in music at University of Washington (focusing on digital art, algorithmic procedures, synthesis, etc.; they’ve got a great digital art program). That was when I really felt it; co-workers in the games biz would think I was some kind of art snob, and classmates at UW would think I was some kind of corporate whore. That was when I really started feeling like my mission was to try to bridge these worlds, not necessarily the general worlds of art and commerce, but the specific world of videogames and more academic digital art. I think the tools and media are so new that both sides are grappling with some of the same questions from different angles, often unaware of what the other side is doing and how their perspectives might help.

I’d also say that for me waiting a bit to do the masters degree was good because I’d already been in games for a few years, so I had formulated some questions I really wanted to address more rigorously. But, yeah, I’m a bit odd in this, and I wish I wasn’t; I’ve long been on the lookout for someone else with this shared perspective, especially a video artist or visual artist who also understands videogames from the inside. So, no, I don’t find this common in Shanghai or anywhere, really. Game people usually turn to blockbuster films or comic books for inspiration, rather than the art world, and art world folks seem more interested in the affect, the sheen (or worse, the nostalgia; I have no love for this undying 8-bit trend) of games, rather than the guts of what makes it a fundamentally unique medium.

The other thing that makes a difference is that I’ve been working in the industry for 13 years, most of that time on staff at a game company, not just doing sound, but seeing how the whole thing fits together. I think that’s a hard perspective to get if you’re working as a third party “content provider” on the outside. I’ve talked to so many composers who want to break into games, because they perceive it as hip or lucrative or whatever, but when I ask them if they play games, they usually say something like, “Not since Mario Bros.” To me that’s like wanting to score a film without ever having seen a film!

I wouldn’t say I’m criticized for it, necessarily, but I often feel misunderstood. This year in particular, which I’m calling my “sabbatical,” since leaving Ubisoft last August, I’ve been doing a wide range of projects, and the diversity is in fact kind of the point. I want to show how these things are all connected, to show that if one guy is able to do pop shows and experimental sound art and installations and visual art and videogames, maybe there’s some common impetus binding them. Of course, it’s really hard to do all of these things well, and I can’t claim to have succeeded yet. But for my practice, it’s really important to have this diversity, to see how little breakthroughs or shifts of perspective in digging into one area can inform something else that might seem totally unrelated.

And maybe as a result of feeling a little misunderstood, I’ve noticed I’m starting to get quite impatient with dabblers, film composers who want to skim some money scoring games, as well as with artists who want to dabble in games by doing a simple Quake mod or whatever, without understanding how games are fundamentally put together. Sure it’s great to experiment, but you’ve got to know how your rudimentary stuff fits into a bigger context. I think I come to art with very few prerequisites, but I do think it’s important to know your medium, know your materials.

I had the pleasure to hear your piece “Radiospace” at Dos Kolegas in Beijing, and I’m listening to a recorded version now. I like the way you’re absorbing cultural information–the crap floating around Chinese airwaves–and then processing it in a way that seems relatively anti-humanist. What’s the relationship between material and algorithm for you? You’ve said that during the live version you act as an algorithm. To what extent do you mean that the algorithmic processing becomes humanized, and to what extent do you mean you function mechanically? How much randomness is involved in the live piece?

Thanks very much! I would say that of all my pieces, “Radiospace” is probably the one that gives me the most continued pleasure to listen to, and I think one reason is exactly what you touched on, the relationship between material and algorithm. Much of my work is focused on the algorithm, because that’s where I think there’s so much interesting work to be done. In this piece, the material is secondary (although I’ve noticed the input doesn’t vary as much as I originally supposed, as radio is actually pretty homogenous, usually mainstream music or people talking), and because of the constantly changing input and algorithmic behavior, it’s still capable of surprising and delighting me.

There’s a lot to this. I’ve certainly written plenty of traditional linear music, pop songs, soundtracks, music for string quartet, choral music, etc., and there’s of course so much you can do with the elements of traditional linear music, so I don’t want to say that I’m tired of melody or whatever. I’m working on a CD of pop songs now, in fact, with nary an algorithm in sight. But I guess this gets back to my aforementioned “mission”—I really do consider it that—to explore non-linear structures in sound. There have been a lot of interesting solutions to structuring non-linear sound in games, and I think the last game I did, Tom Clancy’s EndWar, has a pretty clever music system, which combined linear phrases in random permutations and multiple layers.

The first observation is that a loop is the least imaginative solution to a very interesting problem, which is how to make sound continue indefinitely. And here it’s not some abstract, avant-garde concern from the ‘50s; it’s an absolutely practical necessity, since games are an inherently non-linear medium, and you never know how long a player will take to finish a certain level. The solution needs to be considered anew for each game, in the same way that, in effect, every time you make a game (or at least a game engine, which indicates a set of preconceptions about what kind of game you’re making), it’s like inventing a new movie camera each time you want to shoot a movie.

So I’ve scoured John Cage and Earle Brown and Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman, as well as Stockhausen and Lutoslawski, for techniques that can be reappropriated for videogame soundtracks, and I’m also interested in completing the loop (so to speak) by taking some of these ideas that have found practical application in games and turn them back into pure music. I’ve never tried to compile some kind compendium of non-linear precepts, but I think I am developing something of a personal vocabulary. I’ve come to think of linearity as a scale from non- to very, rather than a binary thing; it’s almost like meta data for traditional linear music. Granularity might be a more appropriate term, defining where are the seams in the music, to decide when it can change and how. I wrote one piece a few years back with the goal of being completely non-linear (an acoustic piece for piano, soprano, flute, and cello), and having done that once, now I’m much more interested in finding the sweet spot between non-linear behaviors and linear behaviors (whatever that may mean for a given piece).

Some people seem to think an aleatory composer bows down to random numbers in some kind of blasphemous way, but it’s always a continuum; there are an infinitude of ways to make something out of random numbers (and actually randomness itself is already somewhat limiting; I’m more drawn to stochastic or statistical behaviors in a lot of cases, not true randomness, but it’s an easy catch-all term). The artist has to decide where the randomness goes, and how it’s configured. So if you’re writing phrases of traditional linear music, and you’re searching for the best sequence, as John Cage said, “instead of choosing just one solution, we use them all!” I really think in terms of Calder mobiles (of the previous composers I mentioned, drawing the most from Earle Brown, who was also a big Calder fan), where the individual elements are fixed, but the configuration is constantly changing.

There are lots of aesthetic or even philosophical stances one can take on this point. For Cage, it was a Zen thing, this idea of non-intention, the idea of accepting whatever happens, and this is where I diverge from him, although of course he remains a huge influence. What I’m often trying to do is more deterministic: to create an environment in which the most fruitful results are most likely to occur. I consider composition to be the establishing of this domain, and my work encompasses all possibilities of the system. (This is really just as true of a traditional musical score; there are an infinitude of interpretations for a molto rubato expression marking or whatever, but it’s still considered to be the same piece. This gets back to the idea of a spectrum of non-linearity; all music is non-linear to some extent.)

Ben Houge performing "Radiospace"

Technically, where does the “background” unintelligible sound in the piece come from? Do you want to keep a distance from pure noise? Your work seems much less physically impressing than many other artists, including those you played with that night in Beijing. Do you see this kind of work as functioning more cognitively?

It’s actually all the same thing. There are two fundamental behaviors in the piece. One is the high level chunks that get repeated at irregular intervals. The idea is that it kind of takes something that might go ignored and insistently draw your attention to it, and then put it up against something unexpected. There’s a great little phrase that happens in the “Hotel California” section of that rendering, where the boring old chords of that song are suddenly jostled into a weird little progression; that’s the kind of thing I love. The other behavior is actually still the same thing, but with much smaller chunks of sound, a fairly basic implementation of a technique called granular synthesis (see Curtis Roads, Microsound). Both behaviors are drawing from the same set of 6 10-second buffers that are randomly replenished at regular intervals (allowing for a kind of mid-level referential coherence), but in the second behavior, little chunks are kind of sandblasted into the speakers with much greater density. I have a drunk/random walk reading through a bunch of tables to determine the position in the buffer, density, volume, all kinds of parameters, and the tables are hand-drawn, to give it a bit of human touch. What I love about this is that it turns melody into harmony, kind of freeze-framing chunks of the original recording and turning them into these hovering clouds that still vaguely evoke the original source. A lot of these pieces are trying to get people to hear common or ordinary sounds in new ways through unexpected juxtapositions.

Pure noise as an end unto itself doesn’t really interest me that much, though as I said, that’s the crowd I’ve kind of fallen in with here in Shanghai. I view noise as an acoustic element like any other. And really pure noise just means a chaotic collection of pitches, i.e., a string or random numbers in a computer system. Once you start to color the noise (even changing the sampling rate in a computer), attenuate it, structure it, you’re using the same tools that any other musician uses. Noise artists are really just musicians like anyone else, but with an aggressive veneer (but don’t tell them I said so).

I think a good piece should have some kind of visceral attraction as well as functioning cognitively, and I do try to make an effort to keep my shows from being just some dude behind a laptop who might as well be playing a 45-minute MP3. With a few pieces I try to tackle this by making it clear that all of the material for the piece is being recorded live on stage. That’s true of my pieces “Psalmus” and “A Reading from _____,” maybe less true of “Radiospace,” although I’m trying to make it clear that I’m tuning a radio on stage as part of the piece. But, yeah, lack of physicality can be a problem for laptop-based performance, and that’s one reason I’m getting into Jitter and graphics, to try to give folks something to watch.

This is not only true of the performantive aspect of what I’m doing. A good piece should fire on all cylinders, cognitively, structurally, viscerally, philosophically, contextually. You should feel an attraction, and it should hold your attention as you dig deeper. But of course what constitutes “attraction” and “attention” can vary significantly from piece to piece. Some pieces are small, with modest aspirations, but they can do what they’re designed to do very effectively. Attraction is a function of the context people bring to your work, and as such it can’t be universal. Nothing happens in a vacuum, but these are the issues of audience that any artist deals with.

I always come back to the Brian Eno quote, that he’s after a music that is “as ignorable as it is interesting.” I’m not so interested in aggressively beating people over the head with stuff. One thing I learned from a friend of mine in Seattle with whom I collaborated on a bunch of projects was the importance of empathy; you’ve got to give people a reason to listen, since especially with the glut of media available these days, if they don’t care, they’ll just tune you out.

That said, non-aggression has its limits! After doing an ambient laptop set at the Creek Art Center in December 2009 for a very chatty crowd (during which some nitwit actually tried to do a little networking, asking if I’d like to be involved with some future project; if he demonstrates such blatant unawareness and disrespect for what I’m doing, I’m absolutely not interested), I’ve decided I’m done doing ambient sets in clubs. My last show at D-22 suffered some of the same problems.

You’re using “found” sound, but it’s far from a field recording, partially because your found material is inaudible to human ears–without the mediation of the radio device. Is this a translation of some kind? Or more of a slippage between different registers of intelligibility?

Yeah, I think, along the lines of your algorithm/material issue, the found sound itself, while sometimes quite beautiful in its untouched form, is often less interesting (to me) than what you do with it. I’m getting to be of the opinion that art lives in the transitions; it’s like the derivative of sound, or maybe the Rauschenberg idea of taking something and doing something to it and doing something to it again.

There’s definitely a translation going on. If I had to say in one word what digital art was about, I’d say mapping. You’ve always got inputs and outputs, and meaning comes from how you put things together. If you’re not careful about what you’re doing, it’ll be the equivalent of playing a word doc as a wave file, just garbage coming out; that kind of digital art’s very easy, and usually extremely blunt. Meaning’s in the mapping. Or like with the Calder idea earlier, it’s in the hinges, how things are connected. And I think a lot of these mappings happen as a continuum, not a discrete thing, so there’s a spectrum of intelligibility, a spectrum of linearity, a spectrum of indeterminacy, a spectrum of interactivity.

Oh, we didn’t even touch on interactivity. That’s another area where videogames seem way ahead of most installations I’ve seen. Most installations take the refrigerator door approach to interactivity: open the door and the light comes on. Once you figure it out, there’s no reason to keep engaging with the piece; there’s none of the ambiguity that keeps you coming back to a masterpiece for fresh perspectives. We can talk about that another time!

Ben Houge while recording "Lukou" in 2006

I read your blog post about the trip to Hong Kong, but I’d like to hear more on the reflective side. What do you think of the place culturally, compared with Shanghai? How do you see the opportunities for artistic work here, especially in terms of music, sound and so on? Infrastructural comments?

OK, I probably let this question sit too long, since it’s now been quite a while since my Hong Kong whirlwind. At this point, here are the general observations that stick with me, and these are pretty gross generalizations, and I’m really not prepared to back them up.

Institutional support: It seems like there are more institutions in place providing support for the arts. There are more “art centers,” in addition to galleries, places like Videotage, the Asia Art Archive, Sound Pocket, and the Goethe Institut (whose Nairobi branch, incidentally, is super active in the cultural life here; I’m a big fan). I assume this means there’s either more government funding for the arts, or more of a culture of philanthropy, or both. I feel like (and I can’t completely remember why, but I think there were some events for the National Holiday) there’s more public art, in terms of sculpture as well as performing arts, officially sanctioned things. (Of course there’s plenty of public art in Shanghai, I guess, but it’s uniformly atrocious.) There was that “architecture is discourse with music” series happening at a high profile venue and some active “underground” artists; I can’t really imagine that same kind of thing happening in Shanghai.

Community art: I don’t recall ever hearing this topic come up in Shanghai, but it seemed to be an issue on lots of peoples’ lips in Hong Kong. Perhaps it made such a big impression since I spent an afternoon hearing it debated at the Shanghai Street ArtSpace re-opening (do you know how that place is doing?). I guess I like the idea of community art, but practically it really seems to conjure up a bunch of amateur garbage. I’d say all art should be community art; and community centers should focus on educating people to appreciate what’s going on in a broader context, rather than segregating it to community art centers. Or perhaps I’m completely missing the point; the conversation was, after all, in Cantonese.

Academic connectedness: There seem to be a bunch of universities in HK cranking out media-savvy artists. The general level of understanding of the kinds of stuff I’m doing in Max/MSP/Jitter seems higher than in mainland China, where I’m always explaining stuff. Artists like Samson Young, Joao Vasco, Aenon Loo, and Cedric Maridet all seem to be products of that system, and they’re engaging this nebulous “new media” area much more than anywhere I’ve seen on the mainland. In general, there’s a higher level of polish in most of the music/sound art that I heard in Hong Kong. The sound art/noise scene in mainland China is defiantly lo-fi. Yan Jun goes to great lengths to say he’s not a musician (which I don’t feel is such an important distinction).

Maybe this results in a kind of snobbishness. I was chastised at one point when I criticized Aenon Loo’s contribution to the architecture/discourse/music show as being “kind of slight” (actually not such a severe criticism in my book, although it may seem that way to some people; I’ve done plenty of slight stuff) by having it pointed out to me that he went to Columbia, which of course, doesn’t prove anything; the piece was still kind of slight. And I suppose this can also result in some kind of vacuous navel gazing; in fact the architecture/music show did nothing to connect the two; maybe it looked better in a project proposal. I had a long conversation with the head of one Hong Kong arts organization about the ideal structure for an artist residency program, and my perspective was very practical: artists just need the means to focus on their work. Maybe that’s more of a mainland China perspective.

Oh, another thing I notice in the mainland is this kind of infatuation with the idea of creativity, of unbridled expression, which I guess is still a relatively new thing. A girl in one of my installations once commented how great it would be to give everyone who comes in a pencil and pad of paper, so they could just draw whatever they felt like, and I thought, “That’s a surefire way to get a bunch of really bad drawings!” I roll my eyes at that kind idea of just vomiting up pure inspiration without craft, technique, etc. I didn’t observe the same rampant naivety in this regard in Hong Kong.

You made a comment previously about the Beijing scene involving artists sitting around and waiting for government handouts. I never saw that in Beijing, but that’s how I feel about much of the Hong Kong scene. The Arts Development Council provides misguided support to groups of Sunday painters, encouraging a culture that is far from entrepreneurial and often insists on these bizarre imaginations of the artist as voluntary social outcast, and so on, while their work is often immature. How did that system play out while you were here?

I guess I want the best of both worlds: artists who are driven to pursue a vision, with government support to help them realize their goals. Without support, it’s hard for individual artists to grow. I wonder what some kind of serious digital media training center might do for the mainland’s noise scene, or support with PR or securing better venues. At the same time, I can see how too much support can make artists dependent on handouts. I can’t say I really observed this in my short time in Hong Kong.

But yeah, I hate these tired tropes of artists as voluntary outcasts, visionary specters, prophets, translating eternal truth from a higher plane, or a free-wheeling bohemian exempted from social mores. I once heard a guy (an expat) justify his infidelity to his fiancée by saying he was an artist (and he wasn’t much of an artist) who had to follow his passion. Made me wanna barf.

There’s a whole culture of grand applications and residencies (mostly Western institutions) that was largely foreign to me while I was working in games full time. Seems to be an additional skill set required for the full-time, independent artist.

Ben Houge, "Shanghai Traces," 2009

Previously you insisted that people working with a specific scene or medium should really explore what they’re doing: i.e., an artist working with video games should know more about the design process rather than just the aesthetics, and so on. On the contrary, I’d argue that the artist must be a dilettante, because once she understands the mind of an engineer she’s no longer working critically with the medium. And I’d call you out a little on this, because I think your artwork is so rich precisely because you come at it from composition and game design angles; it’s a question of diverse and critically situated voices.Your work is not art-historical in the dry way that I think your theory calls for. Care to defend yourself against my accusation?

I’ve had this discussion with a lot of people in recent months. A good friend of mine, and an artist from Seattle whom I respect a great deal, responded to my “you gotta known your materials” line by saying he didn’t agree at all, which has caused me to reconsider a bit.

One of my touchstones on this topic is Ravel, not only a master composer, but a master orchestrator. There’s a bit in Bolero where he doubles a piccolo with, if memory serves, a horn at an interval of an octave or two plus a fifth. It’s a really clever trick, showing an awareness of musical physics, since the piccolo reinforces the upper partials of the horn to change the timbre; it doesn’t sound like parallel fifths, but as a new, fused instrument. I think he arrived at this innovation because of his longstanding engagement with the orchestral medium, and he was able to apply his compositional insight to every parameter of the piece, including timbre (orchestration). On the other hand, it’s common practice for film composers to outsource the orchestration of their scores to someone else. Of course there are practical reasons for this, the composer being almost the last stage in the film production pipeline with a tight deadline, but this nonetheless abdicates responsibility of an important compositional parameter. Ravel’s music wouldn’t be the same—he wouldn’t have made the breakthroughs in orchestration that he made—if he had hired someone else to do it. I think the same thing is true of electronic music. You can write a piece and hire someone else to do the technical part, but in doing so, you miss a chance to integrate the electronic realization into the composition itself (as Stockhausen said, “In everything, I want to integrate more and more”).

So as precedent for my argument, I cite Ravel and [early] Stockhausen; you simply have to control everything to achieve that kind of integration, which leads to innovation.

But of course, there’s only one way to get to know your materials, and that’s to start from zero and learn them. An artist working in another medium may have a leg up on learning a new one, but she or he still has to do the work. I think a good example of this is John Cage; his visual pieces perfectly embody his aesthetic in a different medium (ok, I’ll admit that his guru-status kind of precludes him from wrongdoing in this regard). As a bad example, I often come back to this horrendous Tan Dun installation I saw at Shanghai Gallery of Art a few years back. He had disassembled a bunch of pianos and made some very amateur videos and managed to fill up a room with this junk. It betrayed a kind of complacency that suggested he didn’t need to come to terms with a new medium, since he was a recognized master in another.

One key to this discussion comes from a conversation I had with a teacher while working on my master’s degree. I made some kind of comment (probably some kind of justification) about a piece being “experimental,” and he responded, “Ok, but what kind of experiment is it? Is it a junior high school science experiment that is done primarily for the benefit of the student, or is it something that actually contributes something of value to a greater community?” I’ve been very conscious of this question as I’ve been branching out from sound into image-making and video. You save your early experiments for your own edification and build on them, and then only when you’ve done as much as you can on your own, you share with a wider audience, at which point you can benefit from the audience’s feedback.

The same professor pointed out that composition and programming were kind of the same thing. It’s not like you write the music, and then add the tech part. Programming, like composition, is about structure. Knowing programming allows you to explore new kinds of organizational (i.e., compositional) structures in a way that you can’t really do if you can’t code, if you’re a traditional composer working with a technical assistant. (Folks at UW tended to critical of the IRCAM approach, which sets up just this kind of composer/technician pairing.)

I do have a tendency to want to do everything myself to ensure control over ever aspect of a piece. But I do acknowledge the importance of creative collaboration, especially as pieces get big and complex. It has been said that the composer who writes his own libretto has a fool for a client, but that didn’t stop Wagner and others. I’ve had successful collaborations when working on complex systems in videogames. I know Max/MSP pretty well, but Max code can’t be directly incorporated into game code, which is typically written in C++. So instead I would often develop prototypes in Max, to work out the problem as best I could on my own, and then present it in detail to a C++ programmer who can basically duplicate the behavior in the game engine, and then we work together to iterate on the behavior and tweak it to get it working right. So even in collaboration with other programmers, you need the ability to think programmatically, to understand what you’re asking them to do.

I can see why someone might say that it’s better to come at a problem free from the burden of history, without someone telling you how to solve it. It’s possible you’ll be able to think of some fresh angle or insight that might evade others who are mired in the traditional dialectics associated with the problem. But I think that’s rare. More often you’re going to waste time learning for yourself the same things that others have learned, time that you might have saved by boning up a bit on the subject in advance. I remember talking to a guy at a party in Shanghai a few years ago. He said he was starting a game company, and I asked him what his experience was, and he said that they actually didn’t have any experience, but they had two guys back in Canada who were learning C++ at that very moment, and that they thought their inexperience would allow them to think outside the box to come up with new, creative ideas, which is about the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard. Learn from history or repeat its mistakes, as they say, and starting a game company is a particularly mistake-prone venture. I suppose the more complex a venture is, the greater the possibility of mistakes/failure. Failing, or going through the process from scratch to arrive at a solution, working it out on your own, is of course a good way (the best way, probably) to learn; you’ve got to internalize the process, but that doesn’t preclude learning from others’ experience.

Another example, from the same party, in fact. Some girl asked me about my job, and I started saying why I think videogames are an interesting place to be, since the grammar is still being developed, the terrain is still being charted, how it’s less calcified than the filmmaking process, etc. I brought up the most common challenge for sound, the problem of making something continue indefinitely, until some game state or user input necessitates a change; this is something you can’t know this in advance, as games are an inherently indeterminate medium. Her response was, “Just loop it,” which is everyone’s first reaction when they don’t understand the medium. In a way, I’ve been fighting against that lowest common denominator, cocktail party response ever since. It’s the dumbest response to a very interesting question.

I think I’ve offended people in the past by stating this point too directly, which is not my intent. I don’t mean to suggest that an artist shouldn’t venture into a new medium; of course they should, and I’m doing exactly that with my recent video pieces. I think because I’ve been branching out into visual images, I’m particularly sensitive to this point. You’ve got to do your homework and know when you’re at a point where your work is ready for a wider audience.

As I’ve thought about this more recently, I think the prerequisite isn’t just a knowledge of a medium, but a mindset that allows an artist to apply expertise in one area to another medium or set of challenges. A good educational background allows you to learn from history while still being critical of it, which strikes me as the ideal stance. It’s about knowing how to tackle a new challenge and apply what’s relevant from past experience, learning how to learn. I mean, I guess that’s life, ideally, of which art is a microcosm.

Ben Houge performing "Mobile 3" at NOIShanghai VI

You say you come to art with “few prerequisites,” but imply that you know your medium well. Tell me about your definitions here. To my mind, art is a constellation of practices, conceptual moves, and so on, with an inherited history and theory, that spans a range of media–i.e., painting (which includes watercolor, oil, etc.) or gaming (which might include machinima, serious games, digital stills, and so on…). Do you see art as a medium, or do you see media as a component of art?

Yes, I guess that sounds contradictory. What I mean is that I come to other peoples’ art with few prerequisites for what it should be, with few expectations, that I try to appreciate everything on its own terms, to try to judge it against what it set out to do. Shortly out of college, I had a colleague who was dumbfounded that I enjoyed listening to Pierre Boulez as well as Erasure, but I think that while what they’re trying to do is very different, they both succeed on their own terms. I hope this doesn’t come off as some kind of cultural relativism. As Ted Hughes said about Sylvia Plath, if she couldn’t make a table out of something, at least she could make a sturdy stool. To me the measure of a good artwork is how well it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

So I try not to approach something new with a set of expectations about what it should be. For example, people often say things like “music is about emotion,” but I don’t think it has to be. I think the only thing music has to be about is expression of an idea, and it could be any idea (maybe not even a clearly articulated one). So I try not to get caught up in discussions of what’s music or what’s sound or what’s art. If you say it’s art, sure, why not? I’ll give it a go. Then what follows is the much more fruitful discussion of what’s good art and what’s bad art.

So anyway, I’d definitely say I see media as a component of art. Art is the idea, and the medium is the means by which it is transmitted. Art is about expressing an idea (maybe not even communicating, I suppose; this gets to the question of audience and context; it is possible to define an artwork whose only audience is the artist).

For me, increasingly, my personal practice of art is about structure, and structure, more readily than any other parameter of music, can be media-independent. And as I’ve been involved in non-linear structure, these questions have come to the fore, and I think it’s natural for me to try my ideas out in different media. (For example, see the “Study for Insomnia” video that I recently posted to my blog!)

The parenthetical definition of “gaming” above brings up some other questions for me, which I’ll try to address in the “new media” question below…

I would give art labeled as new media a little more wiggle room here, because I believe this category should be about interrogating the medium itself. Artists should understand more than the “sheen” or “nostalgia,” but I have no problem with them starting from these points and moving more deeply into gaming cultures. Perfect example: Cory Arcangel’s clouds.

I use “new media” as a term of necessity. I used it when touring the [now not so] recent eArts exhibit at the Oriental Pearl Tower with a visiting French curator, and she started to take me to task for using it. When I use it as a term of convenience, I basically mean “we’ll think of a better word for this later,” since all media was new at some point.

Shouldn’t part of working in any medium be about interrogating the medium? It seems to me that should be an intrinsic part of working with any medium, seeing what you can say with it, finding out what it’s good for, and usually that staking out an area of it that’s well suited for the kinds of ideas you’re trying to express (and I acknowledge that I’ve staked out a relatively small subsection of the digital landscape to explore in depth). Isn’t that happening with sculpture? I can’t say I have my finger on the pulse of sculpture, but when I see collections of recent sculptural work, it seems the medium is constantly being interrogated, as people are asking what is sculpture, what is its relevance today, and pushing the medium to expand to encompass increasingly large scale installation work (at least from some recent surveys I’ve seen).

But I suppose there’s maybe more of an emphasis on this in “new media,” as people are still coming to terms with the medium, and I guess that’s why I’m attracted to games, and digital art in general. It’s unstable in a way, more generally unknown. The grammar is still being figured out.

Your question seems to presuppose a certain relationship between art and culture, like artists are exploring “gaming culture” from the outside. I’m a little sensitive on this point, having heard lots of artist refer to “game art,” as though the artists were coming to games as the saviors who would elevate the medium to art, which strikes me as kind of condescending, especially when a lot of the people who like to talk about “game art” don’t seem interested in playing games (which I would consider the first step in interrogating the medium). To refer to “game art” suggests that games qua games are not capable of art. To me this is as silly as saying “film art” or “photography art.” Sorry if I’m being defensive!

I think there’s a useful distinction to make between art that uses the gaming medium and art that is about the gaming subculture. I’m squarely interested in the former, and I think that’s of primary interest to anyone actually working in the medium (as a game developer or a “game artist”). That’s where these questions of non-linear structure, interactivity, etc., (the interesting questions, to me) are being explored, and these are the questions that differentiate games from other media. Art about gaming culture (typically nostalgic, including the glut of 8bit-inspired art) can be made in any medium. It could be a nice film or print or whatever, but it likely contributes little to our understanding of the inherent qualities of the gaming medium. It’s more of a sociological concern, just like art that explores S&M culture or whatever. It’s the distinction between medium and content.

I see this same confusion being perpetrated from the other side in these ridiculous “Video Games Live” concerts, as recently featured in the NY Times. It’s celebrating the culture of games, but it’s doing nothing to cement their cultural standing. In fact, it’s keeping gaming culture in the cultural ghetto of people who dress up in elf costumes, skirting all the interesting issues of the medium. This gets back to interrogating the medium, which is something that I think I’ve been doing at significant depth for years. These concerts ignore the interesting structural questions that set the videogame medium apart from film, concert music, etc. in favor of smoke machines and orchestral transcriptions of the Super Mario Bros. theme.

(Much more relevant would be the symphony project I have planned, in which the music is literally generated in real-time for acoustic musicians to deploy; don’t know when I’m going to get around to that, though. First step is my “Zhujiajiao Drinking Game,” which is a crude real time score for beer bottles, percussion, and audience that I need to find some time to revise one of these days.)

In fact, for people working in games, the notion of 8 bit is more of an annoyance than anything, a memory of a frustrating technical limitation. (Although I suppose there may be some interesting math/puzzle solving that’s easier to grok in 8bits, so it might retain some interest for that quality, the way you might do a crossword puzzle; I’ll grant that lower bit resolution makes information easier for humans to parse and play with). What would it be like…maybe talking to painters about the time before acrylic paint? That’s why I don’t really like most 8 bit art, including Cory Arcangel’s clouds. For artists like me who have been grappling with and interrogating the medium for a long time, 8 bit is a frustrating, obsolete limitation.

I’ve talked to a lot of art-savvy folks who view gaming this way (often condescendingly or nostalgically), not realizing that they’re looking at only an early foretaste of what games are well on their way to becoming. People think of it as a cultural curiosity, like skateboarding or parcour or whatever. But in 20 years (probably much less) the idea of someone not playing games will be like talking to someone who doesn’t like films or listen to music. It’s not because these people are going to start liking complex joypads and elves and aliens or whatever; rather the medium will have grown to encompass the issues/genres/settings/dialectics that already interest them.

Ben Houge, "29 Giraffes," 2009

I think it’s important to retain the vocabulary that keeps all these things distinct. Certainly games can be an art form, but I wouldn’t collapse that with either “art games” or “game art,” which both have their own traditions within the contemporary art scene. It is still a meaningful distinction to refer to “film art,” which is distinct from film in cinema, which is again distinct from the art film. And “photography art” remains different from what they still call “fine art photography.” The use of a particular medium does not imply that same medium as a conceptual theme, and vice versa.

Additionally, I’d like to point out that your critique of the fascination with 8bit in art implies a certain linear progress, and I don’t think that necessarily holds. Similarly, early film still makes a fascinating reference point for both scholars and artists, evaluating a moment at which the development and use of the medium could have moved in a number of different directions. New media art should never be about simply utilizing the latest and greatest technological marvels; at its best, it questions the cultural basis that informs this continued development, often through outdated technologies or media.

But let’s move on to chat about Zhou Risheng, just because I know he’s another point of disagreement. You said previously any work should have a visceral element of attraction and a cognitive element. Tell me where you see Zhou failing here–and because I’m not totally up on the technical side, please be specific about how you see his process, and what makes it boring.

Let me first say that my observations here are based on a fading memory of the one time I’ve seen him perform, so I don’t want to come across as completely anti-Zhou Risheng; I’m sure he’s a great guy. But the performance I saw struck me as pretty weak. It’s hard for me to pinpoint all the issues, so I’ll have to talk around them a bit, I think.

I actually don’t remember saying that about visceral element and cognitive element; I’d say that a piece has to work on at least one of those levels. Some non-visceral stuff is worth digging for. Actually, if it’s visceral only, I’m not sure that’s enough. I think I usually try to evaluate pieces based on how well they accomplish what they set out to do. [Actually, I just reread that part of the discussion in the first set of questions, so disregard this; I’ll stick with the “firing on all cylinders” argument, in addition to the “accomplishing what you set out to” do bit.]

But this show I saw had no visceral attraction to me at all; it was a mass of undifferentiated broadband noise, loud, static, and ugly. None of those qualities are necessarily negative, but here they didn’t seem to have a reason. If something is really loud and monolithic and unchanging noise, it could be working on a conceptual or symbolic level, or it could serve as a counterpoint in a larger sonic structure, or it could be focusing attention on minute, subtly shifting details…there are lots of reasons you might want to do this, but I couldn’t find one at this show.

Torturing Nurse has done some stuff that could be described the same way, but their lo-fi approach means that their noise maintains a relationship to human gesture, that the phrasings are based (often) on the length of a human breath or the movement of hands on a guitar or the pounding of fists thwacking on sheet metal or whatever. In general, their stuff maintains a gestural connection to physical activity, which imbues the sound with small fluctuations that maintain sonic interest, while at the same time keeping your attention with the kind of angsty vestiges of rock band performance practice. It’s probably true that I’m easier on Torturing Nurse than on Zhou Risheng, since I know them, I know what they’re doing, I respect their community building/concert promotion efforts, and I think they’re good guys. I also have the benefit of a long term perspective on their stuff, and I see how they try out different materials and have gone through different phases, including personnel changes, so I can place things in a larger context. I think the biggest danger for them is when their stuff borders on the theatrical, and that expectation isn’t explored. They sometimes have the same kind of problem that affects Sulumi or iLoop, which is that sometimes the big sounds being produced don’t have visual corollary, so they compensate with exaggerated body movement, as if to prove they’re really emoting.

This also touches on the idea of sympathy; you’ve got to give people a reason to pay attention. TN accomplishes this in the short term with the energy and spectacle of their live shows, but also in the long term, through their concert promotion and community building.

Anyway, back to Zhou Risheng. I actually managed to dig up the notebook into which I scribbled some observations during the show I caught, must have been October 2008, Waterland Kwanyin at 2 Kolegas. At the time I was rehearsing with Yan Jun and Bruce Gremo for our show at last year’s eArts, and due to the nature of the piece we were doing (Christian Marclay’s “Screenplay”), we were talking a lot about how to map images and sound. Zhou Risheng’s performance was kind of doing something similar, but in a very unsophisticated and, I’d say, unsuccessful way.

His Jitter patch was projected on the wall of 2 Kolegas, so everyone could see what he was doing. It looked to me like had basically taken some Jitter demo patches (Max/MSP/Jitter comes with lots of excellent demo patches and tutorials) and minimally tweaked them to make a lot of noise. It seemed to be largely based on a Jitter demo patch called “jit.forbidden-planet” (the name was visible on the screen), and it seemed pretty clear that the tidy, well-organized bits of the patch were from the original file, with just a few messy bits to show his modifications.

I don’t remember very clearly, but I wrote down that he had 3 panes open, and he was drawing or writing in them, and the information from these windows was going to the output. I didn’t know Jitter as well then as I do now (which is still not that well), but my impression at the time was that he was taking something that was not designed as an audio signal and sending it to the audio output. In any event, there was no meaningful connection between what he was drawing and what was coming out of the speakers. It also seemed like even though he was projecting this on a wall, suggesting its worthy of the audience’s attention, he hadn’t done much to make it interesting to look at, and he was switching back and forth between screens, hiding what he was writing, and the menu bar was always visible. So it failed on a visual as well as aural level.

I guess you could say that this is just the spirit of hacking, but I think most hackers would take offense at this allegation. To me, the pride of a hacker is in taking something designed for one purpose, figuring it out, and then cleverly subverting it to do something else. It seemed to me that he hadn’t taken that first step of figuring out what the original system was doing, just doing a little copying and pasting to make a big, ugly noise for a long time. He didn’t seem to have come to terms with the medium, either the nature of digital sound or the specific Max environment (he kept awkwardly switching back and forth between screens). Especially coming from working on this Christian Marclay piece (a video score, where the performers’ job is to represent images as sound), Zhou Risheng’s show struck me as an unsuccessful, poorly thought out attempt at mapping visual information to sound, like putting a wave header on a text file of, I dunno, War and Peace and playing it as a wave file.

Interesting how these community dynamics break down. Last year at Sally Can’t Dance Zhou Pei did a set and started verbally abusing and physically dragging around audience members, which made a lot of people uncomfortable–the scene there isn’t really used to that kind of participation. At one point he tried to drag a musician onto the stage–I forget who know–and immediately got himself into a fistfight with a good portion of the Tongzhou noise crowd. He disappeared in the middle of the set and never materialized again for the remainder of the weekend. The general attitude towards him in Beijing is not overwhelmingly positive. He’s included in the festivals, record stores, and so on, but there’s a distinct personal barrier.

I also think his music isn’t quite accepted into the same canon precisely for the reasons you prefer it over Zhou Risheng. Torturing Nurse is always physical, violent, very human, very embodied. Chinese experimental art, specifically in the Hangzhou and Beijing academic lineages, tends to be markedly anti-humanist, and I think that spills over into noise considerably. This stems from the rejection of socialist realism and the political ethics it spawned after the 85 New Wave movement, and was largely a reaction against what was then perceived as a crude operation of biopower. Back to noise, there’s this idea that it should be cold, impersonal, clean, impenetrable–although there are outliers like Yan Jun’s field recordings, much of the Beijing scene tends to be very mechanical. Think Hong Qile, Feng Hao, Wang Fan, and so on. Ultimately Zhou Risheng fits within this rubric as well, but what interests me about his work is the interplay between machinic elements and human error.

The anti-humanist element lies in the the use of a non-sound component turned into audio, but this aural noise comes from patterned human input. Sometimes his visual input is simply his name, the date, or nonsense, but at other times he writes brief poems and draws images. Western culture generally privileges the visual (i.e., the Metaphysics), so we have this tension here of the visual as controller that emits harsh and irrational noise, but on the other hand, the visual input is Chinese characters, which adds another level to this diagram of the arbitrary sign.

The noise here functions as excess, and overwhelms both its controller, erasing the primacy of the visual, and the language that emerges from the process of control. The characters literally disappear from the screen as they are translated into noise. This may not require much skill in the use of the software, but I think the conceptual element really lines up with the physical experience of standing there and watching the visual patterns scratched out by mouse being sucked through the speakers.

On to mapping, which you mentioned earlier: What kind of work have you seen/heard that uses this technique in the definition you gave before? What do you think of Frederic Jameson and “cognitive mapping”? He was one of the big postmodern theorists, of course, but lately–especially amongst new media critics–theres has been a backlash against this kind of work. The argument goes that cognitive mapping would involve the ultimate surrender of privacy, leading to a totalitarian transparency more dangerous than the hierarchical networks of power it supports. What role do concepts like the liminal, the hidden, the hacked, the parasitic mean to your conception of mapping? Do they fit within this figuration?

I think I need more information about Frederic Jameson and his critics to fully address this question. I think we’re probably talking about different things.

What I mean by mapping is more practical, or should I say, mechanical, although I can see how it by extension or metaphor might also apply to some of the theoretical topics you’ve brought up. I’m not sure where I first encountered the term, perhaps in grad school, perhaps at an Xbox development conference, but generally people doing similar kinds of work to what I’m doing recognize it as an important component of what they’re doing as well. From chatting with an architect friend of mine recently, it seems the hip term for this (at least in architecture circles) is parametric design.

What I mean by mapping is basically defining a relationship between two different sets of values, or dimensions. For a simple example (which was probably my point of departure for thinking along these lines), think of a MIDI keyboard controller with a pitch bend wheel controlling a synthesizer. The pitch bend wheel sends out a range of MIDI values that the synthesizer can interpret to modify the pitch being played on the keys. There’s no intrinsic relationship between these sets of data; it’s usually preset by the synthesizer programmers and modifiable by the synthesizer player. You could easily edit a menu to reconfigure it so that pushing the pitch wheel to the maximum value causes the pitch to rise by a major second or an octave (to cite the two most common cases), or it could be a minor second or a tritone or any other interval you might want. Since there’s no intrinsic relationship between the value of the pitch wheel and the resultant pitch modification, it becomes a question for the artist to decide. Or with just a little more work, you could set the pitch bend wheel to adjust a filter cutoff, or some other synthesis parameter. These cases are obviously quite simple, but in more complex systems, the act of mapping between data types can become an artistic exercise in and of itself.

A more complicated case that arises frequently in digital installation art is connecting a camera to a computer. There’s a ton of information coming in from the camera, and you need to define a system for taking information from the camera and applying to whatever it’s meant to do, to use it for motion tracking, sound/video synthesis, or whatever. Whereas the pitch of the synthesizer and the values of the pitch bend wheel are pretty easy linear values to link up, the data from a camera is much more complex, comprising RGB components grouped into grids of pixels, presented frame by frame. If you want it to be anything other than noise, you have to recognize the format of this data and which parts of the data are of most use for the tasks you’re trying to accomplish. Again, you can check out my simple “Study for Insomnia” video demo on my blog for an example: I’m using the value of the R, G, and B planes averaged across each frame to control the pitch offset of the filters I’m using on the sound.

Mapping visual information to sound is tricky because the data is so different, but it’s an interesting question with lots of possible solutions. So to restate (hopefully not overstate) my objection to Zhou Risheng’s performance, he ignored the question completely, or I would guess he didn’t understand the question in the first place.

So there are all kinds of ways to connect two different sets of data, once you know the types of data you’re dealing with. It can be a whole sequence of conversions, filters, transpositions, etc., and they don’t have to be linear relationships, and they can draw on other data along the way, like a lookup table. One input can be mapped to multiple outputs, or the other way around. Defining these structures becomes an aesthetic exercise of its own. In fact this is the area where a lot of my art resides, and this is the kind of thing that I think really only happens in digital media, to get back to the question of interrogating the medium.

Another way to think of mapping is that it represents the point of convergence between two or more systems. I wrote an essay on this a while ago that I can send you if you want (rejected by Organized Sound for being too lowbrow, rejected by Game Developer Magazine for being too highbrow: story of my life). You can think of any multimedia spectacle this way, not just digital media, but opera, ballet, film, etc. Sometimes the music and dance may go their separate ways, but sometimes they move together, and you can characterize different multimedia artworks by the frequency and nature of these points of convergence, the difference between Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris, for example.

(Perhaps this is an easy concept for classical musician like me to grok, someone who has studied serial music of the mid 20th century, in which the parameters of music are often pulled apart and manipulated independently, particularly in total serial works such as those of Milton Babbitt.)

This is an important issue in videogames, as well. The Microsoft Xbox audio creation tool exposes what they call (as I recall) “parametric sliders,” which you can use to connect some parameter coming from somewhere else in the game engine to some aspect of your sound data. Maybe a programmer uses this to tell you the health of your player, or the number of enemies attacking you, or the speed of your vehicle, or whatever, and then you as an audio designer can use this tool to define that this range of values should be linked to, say, a certain tempo range in your music soundtrack, or a certain pitch and volume range of your car engine sound. Mapping game parameters to audio parameters is an important part of the game audio designer’s job.

As far as the liminal, hidden, hacked… I’m not sure if it doesn’t figure in, or if that’s maybe all I’m talking about. These mapping operations I’m talking about happen at the borders of perceptual phenomena, windows from one into the other; it’s actually related to the hinges of the Calder mobile I mentioned elsewhere. Maybe you could call that hacking, but I guess it’s definitely hidden. But there’s probably a totally seperate question of transgression that is really not something I’m dealing with, copyright law, ownership, etc.

I see we were using the term “mapping” in different sense, you in terms of creating analogical correspondences and I in terms of cartographic practices. However, I think this slippage could be interesting in and of itself. Where do the concepts of representing a territory and building correspondences coincide? This could be an interesting area for further research, perhaps bringing the tradition of cartographic analysis in poststructuralist theory to bear on the specific practice you’re discussing here.

Ben Houge performing at NOIShanghai

At the end of our first discussion you brought up interactivity, criticizing it as it is commonly used in big media art exhibitions. Can you provide a definition of “deep interactivity”? What kind of work would fit this rubric, and would it be any different from participatory? I’m curious especially about the role of duration, whether continued interactivity is automatically better than refrigerator door art. Or is it more a question of affect, about the nature of audience response?

I think someone coming from a background in videogames has a particularly deep understanding of what interactivity can be, much deeper than what is commonly seen in interactive art installations. As one indicator, simply look at the interface mechanism for an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3: it’s a huge joypad covered with knobs and buttons and levers, quite intimidating to the uninitiated (which is why Nintendo was able to conquer new demographics by dramatically streamlining the Wii interface). The Wii and PlayStation 3 controllers, as well as the iPhone, also track gestural input, and camera interfaces are available for all of the current consoles, I believe.

In addition to simply having all of these avenues of input into the game system, game designers have a few decades of experience by this point of mapping (see above) all of this user input into meaningful actions or behaviors within the game system. At a basic level, this is how we define different game genres, whether the right trigger is mapped to an accelerator on a virtual car or a firing mechanism on a virtual gun, for example. To a large extent, this mapping of input to behavior is what defines a game, and this is something that is considered anew for each game, though of course there are genre conventions.

So I would say that a modern videogame represents about the richest interactive experience around. Now contrast this with what you typically see in an interactive art installation. Cameras or motion detectors that do something flashy when you wave your hand. A video path that leaves butterflies in your shadow as you walk on it. Plastic figures that make noise if you hit them. All of this stuff is so basic. There’s a one-to-one correspondence of input to output, with none of the sophisticated mapping techniques or creative system defining strategies that to me constitute the fascinating guts of digital art.

(If you wanted to quantify it, you could return to the “points of convergence” idea above; an Xbox controller provides multiple points of convergence between the behavior of a user sitting on a couch and a sophisticated game system, which means a closer link, which you could define as “deeper interactivity,” providing more control to the player over the experience.)

I’ll illustrate my point with an example. I showed one self-styled media art broker my piece “Radiospace,” and her reaction was, “Hey, you know, you could make this interactive, with a motion detector to turn it on and off when people approach it!” And I had to really bite my tongue.

First of all, that’s hardly interactive at all. It’s flipping a switch. It’s not even a neat technological trick anymore, like it might have been in the 80’s when people started installing motion detecting lights on their garages. Interactivity isn’t a binary question (like linearity and all the things I listed in the previous discussion that got me thinking about interactivity in the first place); it’s a continuum, and pieces can be very interactive or hardly interactive or anywhere in between. Here there’s exactly one point of convergence between two totally independent systems (the viewer and the piece). By that definition, what isn’t interactive?

The other important issue to me, of course, is that “Radiospace” is an environment. I don’t want it to turn on and off, anymore than people can turn a mountain or a sunset on or off. That’s more a unique consideration for the kind of art I’m doing in particular. It was a bit frustrating to find such an immature understanding of interactive art even at that space.

One reason you see so much junk in this arena is actually the flip side of a positive development, which is that the barrier to entry for interactive art has become pretty low. You can buy Max/MSP/Jitter for less than $500 USD, and if you hook it up to a web cam, projector, and some speakers, you’re ready to go. I hope that this means soon more people will get over the “ooh, look what I can do” phase and start probing a little bit deeper. It would be great if these issues were to penetrate more deeply into popular consciousness. Time will tell. The continuing proliferation of videogames also bodes well.

Your question of duration gets to one of the big issues of digital art for me: ambiguity. This goes beyond simply the amount of time that someone stands in a room playing with an installation. Ambiguity allows a piece to function on the super long term, the way people can have a lifelong relationship with an artwork like “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” If something is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, it engages the viewer/user more deeply, requiring him/her to complete the piece in his/her head, to take it with them and continue to think about it, and come back to it. This is why something like Mahler’s 6th symphony is so endlessly rewarding to revisit, because it yields new insights with each performance. Ambiguity is an important factor in all art, but it’s extremely rare in digital art (think again of the extremely simple one-to-one mapping of the butterfly path example above; this is why these types of things are cropping up in escapist meccas like malls, where you’re not meant to be troubled with anything but shopping). And in this regard games aren’t much more sophisticated, still relying on extremely blunt realism and good guy/bad guy dialectics, although there are signs of progress.

I can’t say I’ve seen much in the way of real-time digital art installation that gives me this sense of wanting to come back and dig for fresh insights. The vast majority of the time, you play with a piece until you figure out how a it works, and then you forget it and move on. I’ve read about intriguing examples, works by pioneers like Char Davies and David Rokeby, but I haven’t experienced their interactive work live (though I saw a cool, non-interactive Rokeby piece at eArts last year). Olafur Eliasson’s also on the right track, although the digital aspect of his work is more behind the scenes.

In fact, I could probably say that I’ve made ambiguity the focus of much of my work. This is why I want to create virtual environments, places for people to come back to. A lot of people ask me (perhaps this gets back to your Hong Kong vs. Shanghai question at the top) what my installation pieces are specifically about (I think people are used to having a very clear, often blunt, message or idea), and of course I can’t say; they’re more about mood and atmosphere, I guess. I think this is particularly at the fore in a new video piece I hope to finish up this week, something I’m calling a self-portrait, which I will share with you as soon as it’s done.

This is probably also why I’ve avoided the issue of interactivity in my non-game work to date. I don’t want to tackle it until I feel like I can do something significant with it; a lot of times one blunt, interactive feature can cheapen a piece.

There are all kinds of interesting ways to go. Most games involve some element of role-playing (usually a form of escapism, but doesn’t have to be). Or you can use an interactive game environment to implicate an audience in some event or situation; I saw this done in a very simple but effective way in a piece by Peterson Kamwathi at Kuona Trust, in a completely non-digital mini-golf game that had key phrases from recent government scandals inscribed on the golf balls. Personally, I’m most interested in using interactivity to create more responsive environments, places that feel alive. Or you can use interactivity to provide an alternate window on a known phenomenon, some kind of sonification or visualization. It’s wide open, but so little of the interactive art I’ve seen is pushing the boundary in this direction.