Martine Corompt's cute machines

What kind of questions are raised by inflicting inane representational violence upon cute and beguiling cartoon faces? Sure, we all wanted the Coyote to eat the Roadrunner and Sylvester to pummel Tweety into a yellow fritter but we had a long and involved narrative relationship with these little animated guys, our loathing nurtured daily in the four o'clock timeslot. In SORRY (1995), Martine Corompt's interactive computer installation, the user is required to inflict punishing push-button 'blows' on a series of generic cute computer icons. Under the force of these repeated blows the characters visibly suffer the impact and bear the wounds of the cartoon genre till under the final blow they expire to the cuckoo call of a novelty death knell only to re-appear seconds later as perky as ever.

One of many artists working in new media, Corompt's work is extraordinary by virtue of the fact that it is fun. 'Fun' is rarely a quality that tops a checklist for artistic endeavour, but in the case of Corompt's interactive computer installations it is a vital part of the audience's engagement with the work.

SORRY forms part of Corompt's project 'The Cute Machine', a work addressing the morphology of cute iconography in popular culture and its application within the user-friendly syndrome that is shaping the evolution of both hardware and software in computer technology. 'The increasing use of icon-based interfaces, character animation, cute melodic tunes and friendly warning messages on personal computers', claims Corompt, is 'causing these inanimate objects to take on the appearance of oversized (and overpriced) infant toys'. In her work she draws parallels between the zoological process of neoteny (the evolutionary process whereby a species retains the infantile or juvenile traits of its predecessors into adulthood) with the logic of 'cute' modes of representation in computer interface design. The cute characteristics of the neotenic form are what we idealise as the ultimate in cute and friendly; in bestowing these characteristics upon new technologies we somehow hope to render them benevolent.

Corompt links the cultural enthusiasm for 'cute' items with what she identifies as our innate desire to anthropomorphise inanimate objects. 'As users', she explains, 'we are being continually asked to suspend our belief [in] the computer's mechanical nature and regard [it] instead with human virtues of intelligence, patience, helpfulness, and even personality'. It is not until things go wrong 'that we remember that they are idiotic, cryptic computing machines'.

In SORRY, she attempts to intensify this paradox by creating an absurdly simple user-friendly environment. However, to relate with this 'friendly beckoning blob', one is required to abuse it. The four control buttons only offer this one possibility. 'And', the artist says, 'like the dumb machine that it is, it must endure the procedure until the user is satisfied-but the 'abuse', of course, is purely subjective and is completely meaningless to a computer. We are suspended between the desire to project life into these cute graphic representations of infant-like characters, and the more objective understanding that it is, in fact, only a machine'.

Unlike most computer interactive work, which offers the unmitigated seduction of beige monitor on a white plinth where the user indulges purely in a conventional mouse/screen relationship, SORRY requires the user to stomp its four control buttons with his/her feet. The effect of this enforced activity is to make the interaction more confronting then mere mouse clicking, giving the simulated blows to the cartoon cuties a poignancy and violence that they otherwise would not have carried.

Corompt claims that her interest in interactive art began at Philip Institute of Technology (PIT), where she was studying a split major in sculpture/sound and animation. Sculpture students at PIT shared a space with the physical education (PE) students and work was exhibited in the joint foyer. While studying she was interested in exploring the codes that are used to define art, and her work was often composed for the benefit of the PE students, presenting them with objects that did not look or behave like art, but rather demanded things from the observer and, in return, gave responses. TOOT, for example, comprised a series of musical plumbing pipes operated by bellows that one was required to jog upon in order to activate the soundscape.

All of Corompt's work now requires the interaction of the audience. Her early stop animation work, such as Animals without backbones, progressed from celluloid into installations dependant on evocative soundscapes and primitive mechanics to suggest animated life. Corompt identifies her interest in multimedia work as evolving out of her early dissatisfaction in working exclusively in any one media coupled with her fascination for the spectacle of the technologies of the arcade game and the shopping mall, which beep, flash, whistle and jiggle to sustain the interest of users. She identifies multimedia as 'a marriage of sound and image in which interaction is required by the user' and does not view it as an essentially high-tech arena.

Two Face (1995) is an example of Corompt's low-tech interactives; with its disturbing split psyche and gender it alternatively emits a half-fearful scream, a half-menacing laugh or the sound of breaking glass when one sticks ones hand in its mouth. The bizarre dynamics of this type of relationship with a work of art in a gallery is a legacy of Corompt's early experiments. It also expresses how toys inform her work with their obfuscation of the mechanics of their working and their tendency to adopt and infantilise objects, 'fetishising' them through generic rounding and use of bright colours.

ACTIVITY STATION, an interactive computer installation forming part of 'The Cute Machine', takes its name from the cognitive developmental toys designed to stimulate babies with a series of knobs and levers that reward the infant with simple sounds and images. ACTIVITY STATION features the animated cute-o-meter, a device for measuring neotenic features. If used correctly, it too will reward the user. Like SORRY, ACTIVITY STATION forces the user to put his/her whole self in-one must straddle a pink vanity stool to manipulate the images housed in the pink vanity. This creates a perverse sexualised relationship with the object and the diligent user will be rewarded with a melodic orgasm, attaining 'Cute Utopia' and being blessed by the sexy kewpie in the clouds.

In her work, Corompt is deliberately setting out to confront what she describes as the 'beige box syndrome'. Her interactive computer installations force users to confront the work with their whole body, addressing the spatial and temporal considerations of showing multimedia work in a gallery environment. Corompt's work is designed with the wisdom of the arcade game and includes the voyeuristic pleasure of watching others work for the pathetic rewards that the user-friendly machine offers.

Unlike the many artists working in multimedia who are engaged in the scramble for the latest product, 'The Cute Machine' projects have been developed on an Amiga 2000, using Deluxe Paint for the graphics and Scala MM for the authoring. Corompt explains her choice of the Amiga as being dictated by economic considerations. However, the simplicity of form and effect that the Amiga has determined provides the work with much of its strength.

There is a sense that Corompt's pieces are very much of their time, that they exist purely as a first generation of interactive computer installation work. They are not heroic in their aspirations as art and once viewed, they will have exhausted the interests of the MTV generation. They do, however, have a clarity about them; a perverse pleasure in the relationships that they expose between man (sic) and machine, relationships that probably won't go away. Let's face it, Tom has never caught Jerry-even when they went to out-of-space-for some scenarios are archetypal.

© Helen Stuckey 1996
Helen Stuckey is a freelance curator and a coordinator of the Basement Gallery, Melbourne.

MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media Arts