This emergent and unexpected phenomenon alerted Krueger to the possibility and value of exploiting the margin of indetermination afforded by experience with new technologies and media environments.i As Söke Dinkla has observed,
The behavior of the visitor comprised efforts to figure out the rule system of Glowflow. The process of rational clarification of cause and effect proceeded precisely opposite to its normal pattern: an effect would dictate its cause and not the reverse [Einer Wirkung wurde eine Ursache zugeschrieben und nicht umgekehrt]. Such exploratory behavior is typical when it is a question of accommodating oneself to foreign surroundings whose rules are unknown. (67)
In one way or another, all of Krueger's environments exploit this technique of disturbing habitual cause and effect couplings to domesticate novel experiential domains through the primary medium of embodiment.
With his subsequent (and properly digital) environments, however, Krueger added a crucial element to this technique of domestication: the calculated feedback of new sensory experiences into embodied enaction for the express purpose of expanding the latter's agency (together with the scope of its coupling with the environment).' What made this possible and served to distinguish Krueger's environments from the majority of art environments from the 1960s was Krueger's insistence on clarifying for the visitor precisely how his or her actions called forth reactions from the environment. Because this insistence is due, in part at least, to the analytical precision afforded by the computer as a material support for the interactive environment, it yields a specific, technical (but not technicist) conception of interactivity: “dealings [einen Umgang] with the computer in which the receiver/user is able clearly to correlate her actions with the reactions of the system" (Dinkla, 70). Such correlation, affirms artist Simon Penny, comprises “the first and fundamental law of the aesthetics of interactive installation" (Simon Penny, email to the author, January 3, 2006).
BODIES IN CODE
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