If Krueger's entire career seems dedicated to exposing nothing more or less than this primacy of embodied enaction, the latter—as he points out—ushers in an important, and enabling, margin of indetermination: "The logical consequence of this thought process [yielding the conception of the ultimate interface] was the concept of an artificial reality in which the laws of cause and effect were designed to facilitate the functions that interested the user" (148). It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that this margin of indetermination—one directly tied to technics—comprises the operative principle of Krueger's embodied aesthetics of new media. The new technical environments afford nothing less than an opportunity to suspend habitual causal patterns and, subsequently, to forge new patterns through the medium of embodiment—that is, by tapping into the flexibility (or potentiality) that characterizes humans as fundamentally embodied creatures.
That this principle comprises the explicit focus of Krueger's first, predigital responsive environment amply attests to its centrality in his aesthetics. Glowflow (1969) is a light-sound environment—a room with four horizontal light tubes running along its walls—that deploys visual and auditory means to disturb the visitor's habitual mode of perceiving space (see Figure 1.1). The room is entirely dark except for the multicolored phosphorescent light tubes which form the only visual point of reference for the visitor. Movement within the darkened space inevitably causes the visitor to step on floor sensors that release into the tubes light and sound elements from one of four enclosed light columns (one per tube). Outside of this element of interactivity, the pigments running through the tubes remain arbitrarily determined.
What proved compelling about the environment and most captivated Krueger's aesthetic interest was the way that viewers inevitably, one might even want to say “naturally," attempted to make sense of the environment by coupling intentional gestures (e.g., speaking or moving) with the (mostly arbitrary) patterns of light in the tubes. As Krueger recounts in Artificial Reality 2,
If a tube started glowing after [the visitors] spoke, they would assume that their speech had turned it on. If a sound occurred after they hit the wall, they would assume that striking the wall would elicit more sounds. Often, they would persist in the behavior long after the result should have convinced them that their hypotheses were incorrect.4
BODIES IN CODE
29