On account of the synchronicity [of the movement of the video image] with the movement of the [visitor's] body, it is no longer a question of distinguishing between the activity of the system and the activity of the visitor. The computer system's role as interaction partner fades into the background, and it now makes itself available as an instrument [Instrumentarium] for the visitor to use. (Dinkla, 82)
The accomplishment of synchronicity is accompanied by a displacement of the artist as programmer and a wholesale inversion of the problematic of simulation. With the shift away from the visitor-system correlation to the action of a now unified single enactive “system-agent," the function of programming undergoes profound transformation from a closelooped technical element to an open-ended social capability. As Dinkla argues, the environments supported by Videoplace are designed “to learn from the visitors." Krueger's goal, she continues, was “to delegate his role as programmer to the public” (78).
With this shift in aesthetic emphasis comes an equally profound shift in technical emphasis that is definitive for the entire trajectory of media art that I am attempting to sketch here. Rather than calling on the user to adapt to the computer and to learn its language (as is the case with most HCI systems), here the computer is called upon to “learn to understand the natural means of communication" employed by embodied humans: in this case, gestures (Dinkla, 78). It should be clear by now that such "understanding" is the technical and aesthetic precondition for the synchronicity of system and visitor action. Without it, the visitor-system correlation could never move beyond the stage of clarifying exploration; it could never be directed to the world of action and could never become creative in the proper sense.
Thus, Videoplace ultimately achieves nothing short of a wholesale humanistic dissolution of the infamous—and for many, highly problematic—Turing test (together with Turing's abstract conception of a general-purpose computing machine). Far from maintaining an emphasis on the behavioral indiscernibility of human and computer and on the general problem of simulation, Videoplace seeks to engineer a human-computer cooperation so seamless that functional synchronicity becomes possible in practice. Put another way, Videoplace replaces the observation of behavioral output central to the Turing paradigm of simulation with a functional criterion: the operational "congruence of actions of the user and reactions of the system" (Dinkla, 83). Its purpose is neither epistemological nor ontological—to fool a human observer— but purely functional: to integrate the computer as seamlessly as possible into the motor activity of embodied human agents.
BODIES IN CODE
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