While the work of the Vasulkas has long been a seminal influence upon video art, they have maintained an aloofness to the fashions that have recently compelled that genre. Perhaps because their work began within the cultural climate of the 1960s, it has consistently investigated electronic technology and media as a cultural environment that, for good or bad, not only carries with it a new visual ontology but more essentially a potential for perceptual exploration. All of their work is in some way connected to a fundamental agenda: to interrogate the intrinsic properties of the machine as cultural code and the latent or overt perceptual changes that emerge.

As the retrospective of early video art and technology that they curated amply demonstrated (Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt, Ars Electronica 1992), the co-emergence of video art and solid-state electronics during the late 1960s represented a unique historical window: the artist and engineer were inseparable, participating in a collaborative dialogue from which the systemic identities of the machine and art product met in an unprecedented mutuality of form and function. In retrospect it has become evident that this opportunity for artistic influence of technological innovation occupied a very narrow slice of time. Within less than a decade, commercial forces had displaced the artist/engineer with the mainstream cultural agenda, redirecting artistic innovation towards satiating the needs of the popular film and broadcast industries. This situation has only become more acute as the structure of media tools has moved into a predominantly digital domain. Technical innovation is now synonymous with commercially motivated improvement in the production of mostly cliched and traditional image making while the innovative artist unsuccessfully plots ways to influence the design of its digital code.

It is this shift from primary to secondary levels of artistic participation in the design of media tools that now concerns Woody Vasulka. Is aesthetic research of the kind that occupied him for over two decades still possible or even relevant? In many ways the current installations are an attempt to address this question and more specifically to explore it in the context of both the contemporary and recent historical arenas of the machine as cultural code. In his earlier work Woody could explore the electronic reconstruction of archaic perception with a naive enthusiasm reinforced by the immediate cultural context: the belief in the expansion of human perception through a technological stratagem. In his current work a deeper set of references emerge. The didactic purity of machine as generative source is displaced by the machine as an environment of problematic semiotic codes that intrinsically project a self-critique into their sensory enfolding.

In the two installations to be exhibited, a radical philosophical issue forms the ideological structure that houses a set of often contradictory references. In The Theater of Hybrid Automata the core issue is that of physical being in the light of its virtual representation. Neither in a Platonic world of Ideal Form where sensation floats free of matter, pure signification written in numeric code without body, nor in an Aristotelian ground where language only projects and reflects its desires upon an imperfect universe, the robot eye navigates a purgatory of numerical coordinates to sustain an environment of control systems: a tautology of self-reference vaguely aware of the intruding spectator. Rather than an exposition of an electronic theater, it is a dream of an electronic theater that parodies the dark side of a cybernetically-controlled environment. With the eerie efficiency of a high-tech office building after the workers have left, it rotates through its automatic behaviors, devoid of human presence yet awaiting the birth of an unknown form of dramatic action as absolution.

The Brotherhood further explores this conflict between matter and its representation within a historical frame: the link between male violence and technology. While this subject is overt in the choice of the sculptural frame material that forms the armature within and upon which the media action unfolds (Case and Rack Assembly Bomb Navigational Surplus from Los Alamos National Laboratories), it is also present as embedded content: phallic pneumatic pistons that control the revelation of circuitry designs related to nuclear weapons fabrication, sounds of industrial process as ritual sacrifice, radio transmissions of "friendly fire" death verifications in warfare, and silent explosions in animated space as targets for virtual projectiles. All of these references intersect to form a larger revelation of the male idea of the machine's destructive potential and reveal the underlying archetypal psyche without overt horror or celebration. It is an evocation of an invisible intention as if this rack was a power object around which hovers the ghosts of its generative mentalities.

In both of these installations, the role of the viewer only hints at the current fashion of interactivity. The audience is not readily invited to control the action like a video game and therefore enact a preconceived ritual of pseudo-interactivity. These environments remain autonomous with only a potential for perturbation by an intruder into their drama and therefore assert a specific kind of interaction: these are autonomous worlds that define their closure through their emergent language, forcing the spectator to swim in the intrinsic cultural code of the machine.

WV: I've incorporated vast amounts of military equipment into this piece. If you read the label on this table it's called: "Case and Rack Assembly Bomb Navigational Control." It's crazy that these things come to my house so I took this and incorporated it into my targeting system because this is what it really is. It was designed to navigate bombs so I'm using it to navigate my pictorial corridors which are basically trajectories of invisible projectiles.

DD: So that's an overt connection to this idea of Brotherhood and the machinery of war.

WV: I don't hesitate to speak about it because while I have always been intellectually opposed to it, in fact I've surrounded myself with these war machines and have adopted them. In fact the RPT robotic head in The Theater of Hybrid Automata is made from a celestial navigation unit that navigated the bombers for the Strategic Air Command. When I brought it to Europe and showed it to one of my colleagues in Brno, he looked at it and said: "now I know what you are doing because I was an adviser to the Egyptian military about missile navigation systems." He not only recognized the Brotherhood but became a "brother" of the Brotherhood.

DD: So, in your mind, this is becoming explicit as content. For years you have been working with surplus from Los Alamos but it was media related as appropriated materials for your studio.

WV: Now its become very naked as the content itself.

DD: It's certainly upfront in terms of this surplus material being the detritus of that culture of war. Artists here have been raiding the Los Alamos scrap yards in order to make these metaphoric expressions as a kind of critique of the nexus of science and military cultures. But what you are doing is taking very specific cast-off materials and, rather than refashioning them into a sculptural expression, resuscitating the structural intentions of these devices as a kind of pure articulation of their generative ideology.

WV: It has exactly the same purpose, to amplify the mind of its creator: the male idea of the machine's destructive power. This thing, a vestigial bombing rack, carries the inspiration with it. When I saw it for the first time, I knew exactly that this was a piece of that soul. I didn't even know what it was until I read it later but I understood it intuitively. When I opened the box, there was a table with four legs and these racks which I later read were part of these bombing computers. I envisioned these guys sitting in the jungle, just before they went to Cambodia, programming these computers. They were probably dressed in fatigues, drinking beer, punching the code into computers mounted on these racks. So I'm trying to replicate exactly the spirit contained within this piece of metal. It is probably subconscious but very authentic: these were the machines for automatic bombing so that no one had to have the consciousness or responsibility of inflicting death. These codes are hidden to the general art strategies unless one descends to this level of intimacy where you recognize by strange instinct the role of these objects. I think it transfers subconsciously to the mind of the observer. It is this third level of involvement that really interests me rather than the obvious one.

The concept of interactivity in computer science has generally referred to issues concerning user interface in the sense of those parameters of system control over which the user can exert influence. It is the intention of this proposal to expand upon this concept of interactivity to address its broader implications from a philosophical perspective with regard to the intrinsic properties of what we refer to as digital space and with specific interest in how such ideas impact the evolution of art through the existence of a new technologically derived perceptual environment for humanity at large. Additionally we hope to outline a preliminary research plan for the exploration of this perceptual environment which emphasizes the articulation and design of syntactical principles essential to this exploration. While our primary focus is upon the creation of works of art which would concretize these principles in the form of aesthetic research, it is our hope that the articulation of such syntactical principles will also be influential beyond the artistic domain and have direct application in such fields as scientific visualization and virtual reality research.

Interactivity and the Arts

While concepts of computer interactivity have been fueled and influenced by the creativity and philosophical visions of artists in the form of science fiction, actual developments have been dominated by the scientific assumptions of artificial intelligence research. While the ideal has been to optimally approach some sort of autonomous coupling between human and machine through the simulation of human intelligence and behavioral complexity within the technology, instances of this goal have not been particularly numerous. Actual implementation has often only addressed the expansion of user options within the confines of traditional concepts of system control. It is our contention that artists need to participate at the most fundamental level of system's design before a further advance in the concept of computer interactivity can unfold.

Our rationale for this assertion stems from a recognition that the computer signifies a new perceptual environment (which we refer to as digital space) in the sense of a domain for the unfolding of sensory, linguistic and social communication with new characteristics which impact our cognitive evolution, and that the exploration of this environment cannot substantially progress without human aesthetic fulfillment. While the issue of whether or not intelligence can be successfully simulated through the specification of systemic complexity within the machine remains an interesting and important research question for computer science, it cannot be the determinant of what constitutes the essential criteria of exploration and humanization of digital space. To this end we assert that artists must help to shape what is quickly unfolding as a fundamentally new perceptual environment which is ushering forth profound epistemological changes.

Our interest and insight into this new perceptual environment results from our many years of creative use of digital technology as an aesthetic tool that has often brought us to a direct confrontation with traditional ways of composing images and sounds. This conflict has not only been initiated by our interest in new forms in general but specifically by the profound implications of organizing our materials through a numerical code. What becomes apparent from the structural demands of this technology is that there is an ability and even an affinity for discrete genre to interact through the binary code in ways which transcend linear cause and effect relationships, revealing new compositional concepts with regard to space, perspective and morphology.

The experience of cinema informs us that the compositional decisions of editing are constrained by a syntactic set which results in a concept of narrative negotiable with an audience on the terms of the author. While this process seems fully justified for the pursuit of aesthetic communion within the confines of its medium, the intrinsic processes germane to the potential for interactivity in digital space demand other alternatives. The abandonment of a traditional syntactic set is essential within digital space since its organization is no longer the exclusive domain of the author. Since the narrative vectors can be organized by the biases of an other, new syntactic criteria not only becomes necessary but unavoidable. These new criteria shift the role of the author away from merely describing a world for aesthetic contemplation towards the design of worlds for dynamic exploration. Additionally this necessitates a redefinition of audience away from the time sharing of experience characteristic of cinema and performance to that of an individual who can exert greater free will in the exploration of an elastic perceptual environment.

While the use of computers within the arts has long recognized and taken for granted many of these characteristics, most computer art and music has not addressed them. There has been a general tendency to use the computer as a tool to emulate traditional art genre or extend formal principles of organization and structure. Many of these limitations have been structurally imposed in the sense that hardware limitations have dictated what is possible. With regard to the concept of interactivity this has resulted at the most primitive level in providing the user/perceiver with a sense of choice and/or participatory role in the unfolding of a narrative or structural change. With the dramatic evolution in circuit design, computational speed and memory expansion which have occurred in recent years, new strategies for interactivity have posed the possibility of artists creating worlds of sufficient richness to provide the user/perceiver with a sense of exploring an environment of new sensory relationships rather than a mere description of such a world. It is precisely this creative possibility and what it implies for the perceptual environment of digital space which is of primary significance. Thus the concept of computer interactivity can be understood to not only include the interface to a user/perceiver and the redefinition of authorship which that implies but more fundamentally to include the potential for deep structural interaction between the different sensory modes of human perception. The significance of a serious aesthetic exploration of these aspects of digital space extends beyond the domain of art to proffer an expansion of human imagination through the merger of artistic perception and scientific process.

Aspects of Digital Space

In contemplating the important aspects of digital space as a perceptual environment for aesthetic exploration, a number of essential characteristics become evident. From our perspective as artists the most obvious possibility of the computer as a creative tool is its ability to generate entirely new and unique constructs of sound and image. However this possibility must be understood in the larger context of the more profound reality of the structural biases and potentials of digital space as a perceptual environment.

Perhaps of principal importance are the dual aspects of random access to stored data and the fact that this data can be comprised of information corresponding to different sensory modes of human perception reduced to a common structure in the form of numerical code. This later attribute is especially significant in the sense that our usual experience of the electromagnetic spectrum as divided into discreet domains of sensory perception (i.e. sight and sound) can be coerced into an interactive space. The aesthetic and experiential possibilities which emerge from these characteristics of digital space are those of the non-linear specification of events in the sense of a polychronic and polytopic narrative of image and sound, a non-linear interpenetration between human sensory modes (i.e. sound controlling image and vice versa), and the ability to specify and control (either by the author or the user/perceiver) the characteristics of change between these various behaviors.

What becomes evident is that a kind of digital synaesthesia could emerge from this perceptual environment which can provide an experience of the concept of non-linear complexity which has become so profoundly significant to the sciences at large. It is precisely the perceptual issues and problems which arise in attempting to comprehend this alien domain which we desire to explore. Since it is these same issues which face the scientific community from a different perspective, we understand that such an exploration could have profound consequences as tools for the perception of non-linear complexity in science and education. In fact, our interest is in formulating compositional and syntactical principles which might hybridize concerns and issues relevant to a variety of research fields in the context of the necessity for artists to participate, at the most intrinsic creative level, in the development of these technologies for the sake of cultural evolution and preservation.

As already discussed, the characteristics of digital space which imply new structural possibilities for art are those of random access, interaction between sensory modes within the numerical code, and a redefinition of the author's role towards the specification of a world for potential exploration. Because of the radical nature of these qualities they demand the articulation of intrinsic organizational principles which do not simply borrow from old forms. Since such principles could constitute what we have referred to as a syntactical set for digital space in the sense that tonality constituted a deep structural principle for 18th century music or perspective for Renaissance painting, it could be argued that the emergence of such principles might be better left to the self-organizing capacities of individual creative necessity. It is not our intention to specify dogmatic rules for the manipulation of digital space but rather to help set an exploration in motion which will undoubtedly be transcended by subsequent explorers.

Operations: the attached valve implement allows her to fill hollows in response to changes in size and body-weight. Gas-charged stabilizers offer an advance in performance by encouraging quasi-consistent reactions to mood irregularities. With steady-state priming, an extra-dense cone apex, a long straight nose carved in facts that catch the light, she makes use of non-zero cushioning to eliminate fade and prevent bottoming. The fins may later be removed and placed in a vault; her attraction henceforth based on cruelty and grand austere lines.

Coil springs and absorbers are positioned between her frame and her arms. Springs relieve the hysteretic effects and absorbers dampen the springs - for increased control capacities. Ball joints placed between the steering knuckles and the control arms support her weight, restricting wobble. Incorrect camber results, at times, in excessive wear on one side. Negative camber can be hardened using the standard-supply hardening tool. Torque is distributed to the rear through her elemental half-shafts and constant velocity receivers. Since the inhibition curve cross-sections huge concussing tempus-fugit tubes, it will not be feasible to establish the quantitative character of her world trade centers at this time. Anomalous curves must be judged on the basis of physical uncertainties. Any design that incorporates clouds of indifference, as well as some form of rear arch, will overcome existing limitations, allowing her to smirk and refrigerate disease.

Error Handling: With this new construction, high-pressure throttle membranes successfully contain all poaching fluids in place. However, if turbulence is advanced, a rupture in her cups results when the scored solids normally carried away by the vertically-rising stream are returned to the fuel tray through a classifier arrangement. With a drop in core permeability, pencil factories are eliminated. It is permissible then to add in additional glass, grease, gears, and wind. When her middle begins to bulge, inaugurate the tripod-widow selenium wisdom clip. Saturation can then be abruptly limited, in accord with the manner in which her saturation curves were originally drawn. From a practical standpoint, unwilled states of being, with ambiguous emotion, result as a break-over from the funicular to the pendular. It would be a relatively simple matter to inhibit the pendular if her fluid reservoir boundaries were known. As is, the clicker device, attached by isomorphic shafts to the steering knuckles at their edges, sheds light on disappearing shipments, making sure she goes nofarther than too far.

During the early wetting phase, events occur as afterimages of precise intentions. Absolute thickness is determined by blind geometry. The horizontal return-tubular - HRT as represented in the diagrams - is one of the oldest fin-type tubes used in her configuration. Its performance can be improved with the addition of small-diameter rack compressors and habitual-pattern diffuser attachments, which offer the broadest application for ongoing stability (currently offering thirty-five levels of undo). Since recovery is always accompanied by an expenditure, permissible loss should be charted ahead of time.

History: At the center of her configuration, we find a crude rendition of creative thought. A device reads the terrain following the operating principles of closed-system dynamics. Utilizing a physicality plotted as a solid in dimensionless form, she contrives a source of pleasure at the edges of her boundaries, providing someone hasn't told her she is only a girl. Everything at first is dark, fluid, pneumatic, in motion, facilitating a metaphysical flood in an ethics of privacy.

As her drama progresses, it relates only to itself, mapping its own indigenous autistic information system. Ensconced in a philosophically astute mechanism, with sensuous teacups infinitely repeated, she soon is able to guide her own doom. Cognizant instruments firmly in operation provide a calendar of her sex life, as she navigates various medical flesh uniforms. Information distributed widely to individual receivers accumulates as volume, pooling into assumptions about what is person al to her. Each image-making apparatus presupposes its own image contains themost significant information. She locates herself as the center of the configuration, rushing forward or holding back to engage the incongruous and to permit multiple occurances of the ultimate driver.

Deployment: She must maintain a lubrication schedule, periodically check that the flip/flop gate in her discharge spout is free, make certain that the seals on her roller journals ride firmly in their saddles, keep accurate records of the tons she has pulverized. If capacity drops, you will need to manually readjust the clearance between her rings and her rollers. At such time, it may be desirable to improve her image with lacquer or lamination. If necessary, the factor placing a limit on surface interface can be kluged as a source of exit contemplation.

Her acute rhetorical telos system continually targets the cardinal points, emphasizing a notable decrease in verbal acumen as humanity sinks to its lofty plateau. Her framing mechanism closes in on a vast proscenium that lets in the last American. Her normal shutdown sequence reverses the start-up sequence: a container de-hallucinating barriers in conversation with fields of time. Between successive disconnects, a lag must be employed to insure complete clearing of all displays. Determine by experimental operation the correct bed thickness, one that conforms to primordial patterns of operation. In her final moments, one new word can be gained in exchange for the entirety of history. However, her gestures will then become too large or too slow, with the resulting collapse of long, loose columns of snow.

One More Thing: Always reserve a margin for emergency shutdown. In the event that emergency shutdown fails, sacs of condensed explosives, with carbon sensors sewn in, will erupt from her reconstituted fins for a massive triggering of prolix outcomes. Without stripes or fears, with no visible signs of aging, her blindness to the double-bind she's in metastasizes into a mission of destruction more bitter and sincere than caves of empathy visited once in a lifetime at an elevated, skeletal location. Inoperable venom replaces her impassive beauty, while her latent states make a virtue of toying with dismemberment.

To implode super-loaded male fantasies, the maiden-in-flight emerges from the other end of the tube dressed in the stink of decay. From sperm to worm inside an hour, her cellar fills with animal pelts, blood rains down on the threshing floor, and her flower bursts its atomic core. Here, the maiden cashes in her chips: she condemns the carbonaceous allotropes she has engendered; she gives in to her jaded, uncomely jailer; she allows the frozen ground to flail her, as fingers of carcinogens strip off in ribbons what remains of her soft skin.

[The text of The Maiden, was adapted by Sumner Carnahan for the Brotherhood in 1998, from the original text titled One More Thing, commissioned by Laetitia Sonami for live performance.]