The WorkFifty years before the first stone was laid the art of architecture, and especially that of masonry, had been proclaimed as the most important branch of knowledge throughout the whole area of China that was to be walled round, and all other arts gained recognition only in so far as they had reference to it.Go directly to Biggs's The Great Wall of China--not the intro page but http://www.easynet.co.uk/ simonbiggs/greatwall1.htm--and you will be surprised. No clicking! No way to "interact." An apparent jumble of text jumps around the screen.
I.What's this? The text moves. The chapter changes.
VII.Ok, move the cursor, the text changes. Move it some more, it stops. The picture changes, the ideograms change. Look, no clicking!
IXBut changes to what? From what? What's the story here?
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The main interface is absolutely creepy and wonderfully obscure and the Shockwave interactions are really evocative on the matter of hypertext, navigation, relationship to the body, etc. My only problem with this piece is that the shockwave interactions would be identical in experience via CD-ROM -- it doesn't gain anything on the web that I can tell. Yet, it's definitely a "new genre" artwork, fundamentally electronic, and perhaps the web art vs. interactive art distinction is too fine. --pv
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The reader does not navigate The Great Wall of China. Rather, they interact with various textual elements (like individual stones in a motile rather than a fixed wall) which are "aware" of the readers behaviour. | ||
At first glance (and after adjusting to a non-click GUI), Biggs's The Great Wall of China appears to be of the hypertext genre, like Grammatron or My Boyfried Came Back from the War. In fact, "it was the artist's desire to avoid having any form of 'story-telling' model in the system," and in his accompanying mini-essay, "On Navigation and Interactivity," Biggs draws an explicit distinction between a navigable work (branching but among fixed paths) and an interactive work:
The term interactivity can be used to refer to those works which feature some form of responsiveness to the reader, where that responsiveness causes the content of the work to be altered. Such an approach is in marked contrast to the unresponsive character of non-linear navigable work.In this sense, The Great Wall of China is more kin to Paul Vanouse's Persistent Data Confidante, which uses an algorithmic process to generate new and unknown--and unknowable--results. For Biggs, the "content base"--the building blocks from which he builds his text--are the words in Kafka's The Great Wall of China. For Vanouse, it is the secrets that people confess. In either case, despite losing control, so to speak, of the resulting meanings generated, Biggs argues for a broad notion of authorship that treats these meanings as "children" or instantiations of the parent digital object, which he is the author of, just as parents are the "authors" of our children, even when they don't do exactly what we want them to do. If it sounds complicated, it is. But it is worth it too. Realistically, The Great Wall of China is a tri-partite piece. Accompanying the "real time, interactive language machine" is a hypertext "manual," "On Navigation and Interactivity," which is not only as elucidating a short text as you are likely to read on the subject, but it is also an elegant instantiation of a navigable hypertext in its own right. The third aspect of the project is a hypertext version of Kafka's The Great Wall of China, which is as compelling and full of metaphorical possibilities as the self-generating version is, as Biggs writes, "the transmogrification of the linguistic into the abstract and obscure." If you prefer the compositions of John Cage to the scores of Charles Ives, you are more likely to appreciate--that is, to enjoy--The Great Wall of China, but in any case Biggs's (and your) version(s) of Kafka's story, along with the meta-instructions, together comprise one of the more extraordinary efforts on the Net to date.
But to encourage the subordinate supervisors, intellectually so vastly superior to their apparently petty tasks, other measures must be taken. One could not, for instance, expect them to lay one stone on another for months or even years on end, in an uninhabited mountainous region, hundreds of miles from their homes; the hopelessness of such hard toil which yet could not reach completion even in the longest lifetime, would have cast them into despair and above all made them less capable of work. It was for this reason that the system of piecemeal building was decided on.--Steve Dietz |
Both the term "navigation", and the sense in which it used, represents a narrowing of the possibilities for interactive media. The idea of navigation is primarily founded on a very traditional notion of what an artwork might be. Fundamentally, the use of this word implies work which is more or less fixed in its content, and through which the reader can "navigate" in a non-linear fashion. This allows the emergent illusion that the reader is experiencing a dynamic and interactive work. "On Navigation and Interactivity"
Artists expect their audience to be involved in their work, to take on the role of protagonist in the interactive process of interpretation, making problematic the whole process of reading and writing.
One objective of this aspect of The Great wall of China (as distinct from its other media forms on CD-ROM, in book form and as an interactive installation) has been to minimise the bandwidth of the work. The Net is still very slow, so it seemed desirable to make the work very compact. The
various elements are never more than a few kilobytes in size, allowing downloads in seconds, even though they are fully realtime interactive.
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