What the environment gains from this sacrifice is the creativity of indirection, here instantiated in the margin of indeterminacy emerging in the space between Krueger's doodlings and the visitor's responses. Because the action-response circuit involves something beyond what can be contained in or determined by any technological interface— something unpredictable from the system's perspective—it privileges creativity over technicity. As Cameron suggests, this achievement-generating a working prototype of a new kind of communication with the paltriest of resources—is Krueger's most impressive: "By prototyping the experience, rather than the technology, ... Krueger was able to explore the aesthetic space of an interactive installation before the technology existed" (Cameron, 18).
When the source of indirection is subsequently integrated into the technical circuit, as it is in Psychic Space (1971), it simply cannot betoken any kind of break with Krueger's thoroughgoing privileging of the aesthetic over the technical. Rather, what is at stake here is a (partial) restoration of autonomy to the responsive environment, a restoration accomplished through the incorporation of feedback—and with it, of the element of unpredictability—as an internal aspect of the installation's solicitation and process-based generation of experience (see Figure 1.3). In this sense, Psychic Space marks a monumental accomplishment: the extrinsic source of creative indirection—Krueger's doodlings—is replaced by an intrinsic and ineliminable source—the embodied viewer's self-movement.
BODIES IN CODE
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