Behind the Screen: Installations from the Interactive Future
Ted Hiebert
We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of continuity and networks. All our machines are screens, and the interactivity of humans has been replaced by the interactivity of screens.
-- Jean Baudrillard, "Xerox and Infinity."
The future is interactive... at least that is the theory. And while the theory itself is not new, the screen through which it is rendered most certainly is. The new screen... one among possible many, and yet despite the many it is the impossible one upon which the interactive future will manifest.
But there are other new theories as well, other speculative fantasies of constituted reality, which is also to say of an imaginary so implausible that it remains, by necessity, forever un-provable... and forever un-disprovable too. This is the imaginary gone technological, the ghost in the machine is also behind the screen, waiting and watching for moments of reality interrupted. For it is within the interventions of technology that the interactive imaginary waits to be discovered.
"Behind the Screen" is, in this spirit, an exploration of the consequences of imaginative technological use, with an emphasis on the ways in which artistic mobilization of screen technology impacts on the interactivity of contemporary living. Drawing on the installation series of the 2007 Interactive Futures symposium, this paper is an attempt to engage the imaginary possibilities offered by artistic technological use -- a theoretical exploration of the critical imaginary potential of new media artwork. Loosely brought together under the theme of "The New Screen," the Interactive Futures symposium featured works by artists, performers, programmers and academics from around the world, brought together for the critical, aesthetic and intellectual exploration of the technological future.
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