Those whose equate 'freedom' with consumer choice may well feel liberated when the hypertext's author yields narrative 'control' to the user/chooser. However, theorists of narrative might observe that while the user is accorded choice over the particular order of narrative unfolding, the programmer/artist retains full control of the totality of story elements.5 Many women artists simply reject the hype about empowerment through point-and-click extraction, sharing the views of Florida-based artist Christine Tamblyn that most computer interactivity 'is not much different from buying a soda from a vending machine' and that 'the potential for computer interactivity is really quite limited and dictated by the programmer'.6 Media theorist Ken Wark has made a similar point: 'Far from giving the user more "choices", multimedia can be seen as empowering the creator and restricting the users' choices.'7

There are various artistic responses to this situation. Patricia Piccinini's The Mutant Genome Project effectively highlights the conjunction between shopping and extractive interactivity by having players point-and-click to select colour, sex and standard (or more expensive optional features) when commissioning their mutant baby. Other artists, such as Linda Dement, revel in their manipulation of audience experience and construct interfaces that are not logical, that move in apparently random directions and that in other ways force the player to submit to, rather than steer, the text.8 In Suzanne Triester's prototype interactive Dying for Your Sins, players who think they're embarking on a standard 'shoot-em up' game find themselves falling into a gothic fantasy world in which they have limited and unpredictable powers of direction. One amusing response to the false friendliness of computers is The User-Unfriendly Interface by Josephine Starrs and Leon Czimelewski, a CD-ROM interactive displayed on a screen set amidst fake metal spikes, and whose play is constantly interrupted by annoying dialogue boxes, some of which say rude things to the user. Quite early in the piece, the user must click on several boxes saying 'Don't click here' in order to further unravel the hypertext. The User-Unfriendly Interface does not submerge its agency under a sexy facade of responsiveness; rather, being overtly bossy, it expects some disobedience.

Other lines of response away from point-and-click interactivity include increasing the scope for random input by visitors (e.g. VNS Matrix's All New Gen game prototype invited players to record a dream or message at the end9) or abandoning the screen/mouse interface altogether. Various kinds of sensors and surveillance devices as well as digital technologies can be used to create 'smart spaces', environments that respond in various programmed or random ways to the presence of visitors.

Whereas extractive interactivity involves one pulling things out of a box, immersive interactivity or physical installations put the audience in the box, perhaps with other things. There are, however, other dimensions to interactivity besides (un)boxing and being boxed, and we can draw on Daniel Stern's theories of interpersonal experience to elucidate some of them. Stern replaces the Freudian model of infantile developmental phases (oral, anal, genital) with a four-part model of different senses of self and domains of relatedness that emerge in early infancy and persist and develop throughout life.

Infants from birth to two months do not have a 'self' in the conventional sense of 'some overarching and integrating schema, concepts or perspective'10 but instead 'have separate, unrelated experiences that have yet to be integrated', as well as a variety of innate or quickly learned capacities to correlate different elements of experience, and assure social interactions (p. 28). The dominant sense of the emergent self is of the 'process of coming into being', of 'networks becoming integrated' (p. 28). Stern argues that the emergent self is vital in creating and appreciating art, for not only is its correlation of experiences 'at the heart of creating and learning' (p. 67), its 'amodal' form of perception is at the core of the aesthetic transmutations between feeling and form (p. 54). 'Amodal perception' is a seemingly 'predesigned' competence that allows even the youngest infants to translate information from one sensory mode to another-visually recognising something they have previous only touched-or to make correlations between patterns of sound and light. Events and relations-whether with humans, objects or environments-are appraised in terms of what Stern (after Suzanne Langer) calls 'vitality affects': the dynamic and kinetic qualities of experience that can be apprehended across sensory modalities and are invoked in terms such as surging, fading away, crescendo, bursting, etc. (p. 54).

From two to six months, a core self emerges whose intersubjective experience is a sense of 'being with', of experiencing oneself as a separate physical unit with its own agency, feelings and continuity in time; a self co-existing with other physical units who have their own feelings and histories. Through repetitions and variations of self-other interactions in which the other regulates the infant's physiological and emotional states (e.g. through feeding, putting to bed, playing, etc.), the infant learns to sort out different configurations of agency (e.g. acting on itself; being acted on by the other). Infants reliably distinguish animate from inanimate objects, they are delighted when adults create 'personified things' by imbuing toys and other objects with vitality affects (e.g. whooshing them around, making noises).

In the period between nine and eighteen months, a more recognisably subjective self forms as infants make the discoveries that 'there are other minds out there' and that self and others are not just physical entities but have intentions that can be inferred and mental states that 'can now be "read", matched, aligned with, or attuned to (or misread, mismatched, misaligned with, or misattuned)' (p. 27). Attuning involves cross-modal representations of vitality affects (e.g. baby banging toy, mother making noises or gestures in sync) and the same subjective state can be analogically or metaphorically expressed in a variety of ways (e.g. vocalisation, gesture, facial display).

Intersubjective relatedness in its turn enables the emergence of a fourth sense of self as inhabiting a domain of verbal relatedness in which each person is seen as a 'storehouse of personal world knowledge and experience' (p. 28) and interacts via symbols that communicate shared or negotiable meanings. Although language gives infants 'entrance into a wider cultural membership' (p. 177) and allows them to share with others their personal experiences of the world, it also 'forces a space between interpersonal experience as it is lived and represented' (p. 182). It is often difficult to verbally articulate personal experiences in the domains of emergent, core and intersubjective relatedness, and one of the reasons we make and need art works is to enable communication about these non-verbal dimensions of intersubjective life.

We might gain some insight into the kind of self addressed and the unique episodic experience produced by installations and interactive art works from psychoanalyst Russell Meares' characterisations of early infantile perceptions of the relations between experience, event, object and space:

'The [infant's] idea that experiences have locations leads to the proposition that experiences create or constitute the spaces in which they occur. [From experiencing reality as a series of comings and goings] a corollary to the original proposition now emerges. Not only do experiences constitute spaces, spaces determine the existence of the experiences and the objects which are part of them. Each object and experience has its own place, and this place identifies it.'11

In partial contrast to those illusional arts that convey feelings by the formal stylisation of vitality affects, contemporary installations and interactive multimedia artworks have the potential to not only represent but also to directly produce experiences of different kinds of self and relational events in space. They may generate or simulate vitality affects in a variety of senses at once; they may involve bodies as cognitive elements in unique experiences of 'being with' other entities and objects; they may dislocate normal senses of agency, coherence and effect associated with the core self; and they may involve the deployment of various kinds of interfaces-including electronic sensors-to produce effects of attunement (or 'misattunement') between visitors or users and the environment.

Let's take an example of this. Nola Farman's and Anna Gibbs' installation Heart of the Matter12 is set up as a softly lit living room where visitors unwittingly alter two fields of ultrasonic radar which control the luminous pulsing of a red thermo-responsive heart resting on an armchair, along with the synchronous emission of low-pitched 'bu-dum bu-dum' sounds from a hidden resonating box. As the visitor moves closer, the heart beats faster, returning to a normal beat when the visitor approaches an empty chair opposite the heart. Sitting there activates a mechanical switch that causes a nearby phone to ring. When picked up, the phone addresses a prerecorded message to the listener, sometimes pleading with him/her not to hang up. This work is a 'smart space' activated by the bodies it encloses. The network of causality and agency involved in the interaction is obscured: most visitors are unaware of the ultrasonic sensors and the electronics concealed in chairs and a lamp base. Whereas extractive interactivity overtly panders to the user's fantasies of command and control while implicitly demanding their obedience to system constraints, this artwork/network engages a seeming passive subject whose body is more agentive than it consciously realises, and whose unpremeditated actions shape the character of the interactive episode. This work involves interactions in all domains of relatedness: the connection between pulsating light and rhythmic sound involves a modal perception (emergent self); there are plays with the core self and the locus of its agency is obscured; and the fact that the heart is attuned to visitor movement creates a sense of intersubjectivity which is further reinforced by the telephone voice (for visitors inevitably find themselves attributing the voice to the heart, and some even talk back).

Ann Hamilton's installation Filament (shown at the Sydney Biennale, 1996) comprises two giant skirts swirling around a room and is an excellent example of an installation that directly produces-rather than represents-the vitality affect of an exhilarating 'whoosh'. Standing amidst this large-scale work powerfully evokes sensory memories of being very small compared to an 'environment-mother' whose skirts could form an enclosing world; it recalls the suburban pleasure of spinning the sheets around on the backyard Hills Hoist. Disturbing aesthetic effects can be created by staging conflicts between vitality affects, as in Nola Farman's installation Elsewhere: The Road Movie, in which the welcoming domestic comfort of armchair and a bowl of nibbles in front of the television is contradicted by the menacing shards of china that fill the snack bowl and entirely cover the chair and most of the gallery floor.

Disturbances in the core self as an agentive locus are part of pleasure-and spookiness-of more extreme versions of cyber-experience. Anna Munster's recent conference paper 'Love Machines'13 analyses how in most virtual reality interfaces, the player's agency is displaced from the felt real hand onto the seen virtual hand, with disjunctions produced between 'proprioception' of one's actual body and the visual information about one's virtual body. A disruption of core self through the redistribution of its physical agency to a broader network is played out in the recent series of Ping performances by the cyber-artist Stelarc, who attaches electronic muscle stimulators to his body and allows people from around the world to activate these-thus producing movement-by issuing commands through the Internet.

The experiments of Jennifer Hall, a Boston-based artist, in 'out of body theatre'14 involve plays with the dispersion of the performer's agency to control and achieve an adjustment to harmony with their own and other bodies. Hall's theatre is a network of devices, including various environmental tracking processors and computer-controlled sound and lighting. Sensors pick up the movements of a live performer and input this information into a computer array with outputs to devices operating the limbs and joints of life-sized marionettes made of plexiglass, or wired-up skeletons. In one version of the marionette theatre, there are two skeletons; one which is directly controlled, and the other which is programmed to move in an 'attuned' response to the first. In a related project, Hall uses meditation techniques, feedback from an electroencephalogram (EEG) and her own natural talent at altering her physiology to learn to control the puppets by modulating her own brainwaves.

I would like to conclude with some speculations as to why installations and interactive works might be of particular interest to feminist and women artists. Various stereotypical experiences of femininity and maternity might inspire women's interest in these media. Years of 'girl talk' (minutely dissecting feelings and relationships) and practice at deciphering and manipulating the actions of pre-verbal infants and inarticulate men are probably excellent preparation for experiments in interactivity. And as homemakers and shoppers, women in consumer culture could be seen as practicing a homely kind of installation art that involves selecting and combining items from arrays of objects and making meanings by arranging and transforming them within domestic confines. Room-sized 3D installations provide an appropriate medium for poetic investigations of domesticity and its unheimlich disturbances. Being treated as housing or furniture (receptive, accommodating) and defined as space (occupiable, pregnable, nurturing) are experiences that could cultivate a woman's sympathy with the secret resonances of objects and an understanding of space as an active agent with which to collude in constructing and transforming the bodies and events within.15 For other women (or grrrls), cyberspace provides an opportunity to escape conventional definitions as 'mere' body and to represent oneself as disembodied text, voice, constructed persona, viewpoint. Feminists may be attracted to practicing art in areas relatively unencumbered by canonical histories of white male masters: video, computer graphics and animation, 3D installations and Internet sites are relatively new fields, fields that women can enter 'at ground level' with a reasonable chance of being exhibited (often under the curatorship of women), getting noticed and influencing the evolving art form. Finally, there might be a philosophical interest in artworks/networks that allows exploration of non-Cartesian forms of subjectivity (i.e. emergent, core and intersubjective selves) in which the old binary distinctions of reason and feeling, body and mind, subject and object are no longer so salient (for example, when visitors find their bodies acting as cognitive agents16 to experience and produce effects independently of their conscious intention). But irrespective of why women might be drawn to these contemporary art forms, the fact is that works are getting made. I hope the brief suggestions made here will encourage others to take more notice of the ways in which women artists are playing within and beyond the narrow confines of extractive interactivity.

© 1996 Zoë Sofoulis
Zoë Sofoulis is a Sydney-based writer, academic and theorist.

References

1 Here I am borrowing terms from the actor-network approach to studying the development of scientific knowledge and technological innovations; see various essays in Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T.H. & Pinch, T. (eds.) The Social Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1987; and in Bijker, W. E. & Law, J. (eds.) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1992, especially Akrich, M., 'The De-scription of Technical Objects' in Bijker & Law. Other useful accounts include Law, J., 'Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity', Systems Practice, vol. 5, no. 4, 1992, pp. 379-393; Latour, B., 'Pragmatogonies' American Behavioural Scientist, 1994, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 791-808; Rachel, J., 'Acting and Passing, Actants and Passants, Action and Passion' American Behavioural Scientist, 1994, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 809-823; and Pickering, A. 'The Mangle of Practice', chapter 1 of his The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, pp. 1-34. (Thanks to Ingrid Richardson for copies of her actor-network articles.)

2 Stern, D., The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, Basic Books, 1985. The significance of Stern's work is that it synthesises the interpretive findings of object-relations psychoanalysis with empirical evidence from psychological research on infants.

3 See Lunenfeld, P., 'Digital Dialectics: A Hybrid Theory of Computer Media', Afterimage, November 1993, pp. 5-7; and Dove, T., 'Theatre without Actors-Immersion and Response in Installation', Leonardo, vol. 27, no. 4, 1994,
pp. 281-87.

4 See Flynn, B., 'Woman-machine relationships: Investigating the body within cyberculture', in Matthews, J.J. & Jacka, E., (eds.) Body's Image, a special issue of Media Information Australia, vol. 72, May, 1994, pp. 11-19. There are images of this work and an interview with the artist in Cohen, J., (dir.) Artists in Cyberculture, Australia, 1993, (Cracked Metal Productions; distrib. Ronin Films).

5 Bordwell, D., 'Principles of Narration', Chapter 4 of Narration in the Fiction Film, Methuen, London, 1985, pp. 48-62.

6 Tamblyn, C., 'She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology, an Interactive CD-ROM', Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 2, 1995, esp. pp. 101, 103; see also Weinbren, G.S., 'Mastery: Computer Games, Intuitive Interfaces, and Interactive Media', Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, p. 408. For a discussion of other points of women artists' dissension from high-tech hype, see Sofia, Z., 'Contested Zones: Futurity and Technological Art', Leonardo, vol. 29, no. 1, 1996, pp. 59-66.

7 Wark, K., 'The New Abstraction', World Art, no. 3, 1995, p. 6; also Sarkis, M., 'Interactivity means interpassivity', Media Information Australia, vol. 69, August 1993, pp. 13-16.

8 Dement, L., interviewed by Nalder, G., in Zurbrugg, N, (ed.), Electronic Arts in Australia, special issue of Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 8, no. 1, 1994, esp. pp. 171-172.

9 For some discussion on users leaving traces in interactive works, see Zevelansky, P., 'Crisscrossing the Interface: The Design, Display and Evaluation of an Interactive Computer Exhibit', Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 2., 1995, p. 142.

10 Stern, D., op. cit., p. 45; subsequent page references included in text.

11 Meares, R., The Metaphor of Play: On Self, The Secret and The Borderline Experience, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 46-47.

12 Gibbs, A., 'On moving and being moved' and 'Thinking Bodies', Writings on Dance 1994/95.

13 Munster, A., 'Love Machines' paper for the second 'Politics of Erotics' conference day, University of New South Wales, 26 July, 1996.

14 Hall, J., 'A Computer-Controlled Marionette for Out of the Body Theatre', Media Information Australia, no. 69, 1993, pp. 38-40.

15 On the connections between women and space see Grosz, E., 'Women, Chora, Dwelling' in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds.), Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Blackwell, Oxford/Cambridge, 1994 (also in Grosz's Space, Time, Perversion); and Best, S., 'Contexualizing Space' in Grosz, E., and Probyn, E., (eds.), Sexy Bodies, Routledge, Lond./NY, 1995.

16 On the body as cognitive agent see Cornwell, R., 'Interactive Art: Touching the "Body in the Mind"' Discourse, vol 1, 4, no. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 203-221.