Interactive Matter in the Arts and Humanities

Digital Arts and Digital Humanities at first glance
seem different, but do we know how they are
different? One way to explore the intersections of the digital arts and humanities is to identify the location of differences and similarity, especially in research/creation practices, dissemination, and projects.
This paper will tackle three issues around the differences between digital arts and humanities:
1. Practices or Methods. The practices of digital
artists and digital humanists are evolving towards a common craft of interactive matter. The project cycles, funding issues and types of tools developed for interpretative purposes and aesthetic purposes have more in common than the practices of digital humanists have with their traditional colleagues. It is common in both the digital arts and humanities to involve students in apprentice-like opportunities on projects and train them that way.
Further, there are emerging similarities in the types of computing processes used in web projects in the arts and humanities. In this paper there will be demonstration of examples of digital art works and text visualization works to show the similarity and overlap. This overlap raises
questions about the differences between an interpretative
relationship with matter and a aesthetic relationship.
Once we consider digital data as a form of material
(McCullough, 2003) that is formed by the artist/craftsperson
or by the humanist interpreter, we discover that the
formative practices are similar even if the aims are not. It is instructive to imagine a topology of formative practices
that might be common.
2. Research and Creation Dissemination. An
arguable difference between the arts and humanities is the context of dissemination. The research of the humanities
is typically disseminated through journals and
monographs as part of a larger textual dialogue. Even if that which is studied is not itself textual, the community of researchers exchange information and disseminate their research through writings (and to a lesser extent through presented “papers”.) By contrast the research/creation of artists is disseminated through exhibits in galleries or museums, and it is typically disseminated in non-linguistic (or textual) form. If we ignore, for a
moment, the textual ephemera of art dissemination
(artist’s statements, biographies, and curatorial documents),
and also ignore all the textuality of art, the context and form of dissemination is different.
But will it always be so? The web as venue for dissemination
is being used by both humanists and artists. The interactive web site as a form of dissemination is common to both
digital artists and computing humanists. In certain
interesting cases, like “TextArc” (www.textarc.org) it is not clear if the interactive site is art or academic work. For example, Matthew Mirapaul, Arts Columnist of the _New York Times_ is quoted on the “TextArc” site as writing, “TextArc evolves from an academic tool into a full-fledged work of digital art. ... This is the reading
process made visible.” (www.textarc.org/Reactions.html)
It is easy to say that such examples are the exceptions
that make the rule of difference between academic
interpretation and digital art. Given the importance of interface design to the field of computing, especially
networked computing, it is harder to maintain this
distinction in humanities computing projects. All digital humanities projects that aim to develop interactive works
have to engage issues of design, though one could still
argue that there is a difference between design and art that is based on a relationship between aesthetics
and function. This paper will argue that there is a
convergence through issues of usability and interface
design between interactive art and humanities and that the site of this convergence is a common practical concept of interactive matter which has both form and content. This should not surprise us as one of the major achievements of humanities computing is the development of a mature
discourse around the relationship between (logical) form and content for electronic texts that evolved out of
discussions around markup and the Text Encoding
Initiative. Recent work by McGann and Buzzetti
problematizes the distinction between markup (structure) and text (content) re-proposing that markup is diacritical
and that “Books are simulation machines as well, of course.”
(Buzzetti and McGann) In both the digital arts and
humanities we are moving to working with concepts like interface, interactivity, networks, simulation, and design, that have both form and content.
3. Interactive Matters. We are, if you will, returning
to an older idea of the humanities as an alternative to
scholasticism and disciplinary specialization. The
Italian humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries like Bruni,
Alberti, Valla, and Ficino resurrected a Ciceronian ideal of interdisciplinary exchange and textual criticism that crossed then formal scholarly boundaries. They imagined
a new culture of knowledge around the symposium or _convito_ that would bring together people interested in new types of questions. Likewise the emergence of
interactive multimedia, from the hypertext, computer game, to interactive art, poses a challenge to disciplinary distinctions. Who should study the computer game? What sort of training does one need to create an interactive
installation? What matters about interactivity? This presentation will conclude by presenting the results of an interdisciplinary consultation (funded by SSHRC) that developed a concept paper around Interactive Matter. The iMatter project consulted widely to see if the case could be made for a strategic research creation cluster across media arts, digital humanities and game studies. One conclusion of the consultation was that our generation of “professors” are “digital immigrants” who were trained traditionally
and only later crossed to digital research, while youth
today are “digital natives” comfortable with digital practices
as part of study across the arts and humanities. The
differences encoded in disciplinary distinctions that are
obvious to us are not to a generation interested in interactive
media as a site for creative and playful expression. One of the things that matters, therefore, in the study of interactive works is our encounter through teaching and research with a generation for whom digital practices are not the site of interdisciplinary boundary-crossing and conflict. What can we learn about what we could be from those for whom interactivity matters?
References
Buzzetti, Dino and McGann, Jerome. “Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon” in _Electronic Textual Editing_ will be published by the MLA in 2006. I have quoted
the preview version from http://www.tei-c.org/
Activities/ETE/Preview/mcgann.xml .
McCullough, Malcolm. _Abstracting Craft; The Practiced Digital Hand_, MIT Press, 2003.