On this conception, interactivity can be distinguished from prevailing notions of the period and from more contemporary technicist visions. It is at once more codified than the radically open-ended environments of process art and happenings and yet more open and flexible than the preprogrammed response repertoires that one finds in socalled interactive cinema and hypertext. What is crucial in Krueger's conception of interactivity, as in his humanist conception of artificial reality more generally, is the privilege accorded embodied (human) agents. Differences notwithstanding, the point of all of his environments is to facilitate new kinds of world-construction and intersubjective communication. If these environments do still serve as interfaces to the computer, they do not do so, as do all technicist conceptions of the "Human-Computer Interface" (including the mouse and the graphicaluser interface), by instrumentalizing—and thus reducing—embodied enaction; here, rather, it is the technology that remains instrumentalized and human action that gets privileged.
From 1970 to 1984 (when he ceased development of his interactive platform, Videoplace), Krueger devoted himself to the task of producing an environment that would realize the potential of the computer to expand human capacities for embodied enaction and communication. Not surprisingly, this realization—accomplished in Videoplace—proceeded through several discrete stages, each of which marks an important advance in the transfer of agency from the computer to embodiment in open-ended feedback with itself.
Metaplay (1970) combined closed-circuit (video) technology with the computer to explore the conditions for the correlation by the visitor of her actions and the system's reactions. This environment established a real-time communication circuit between participants in a gallery, who encounter a projected two-dimensional image of their bodies, and the artist who, located in a separate space, employs a data-tablet and pen to draw directly on the projection screen, thereby provoking responses from and stimulating further interaction with the visitors (see Figure 1.2). As Andy Cameron has recently pointed out, Metaplay offered Krueger an opportunity to “explore the kinds of interactions which he had been unable to explore in Glowflow--an interaction which is explicit and which is capable of engaging people within a new kind of aesthetic experience."5
BODIES IN CODE
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