Art and the Environmental Crisis

Art and the Environmental Crisis
From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics
TIMOTHY W. LUKE

What is the role of art in today's ecological crisis? In many respects it is critical, because the arts have been one of the main engines driving the wasteful ways of modem capitalism. Every year brings a new set of artistically mediated expectations and aesthetically intensified consumer requirements-always predicated upon the waste of more scarce resources, the over consumption of energy, and the misuse of productive talents1. This discussion, then, is an ecological critique of these aesthetic dynamics. It is written not from the perspective of an interventionist artist concerned about ecology, but rather from the vantage of a radical ecologist concerned about art. Telling this story is not easy. It weaves together insights about social ecology, late capitalism, transnational commerce, consumer ideology, and contemporary art in language drawn from critical theory, radical ecology, and art interpretation. Still, hearing the story may be even harder.

To change ecology globally, it is now clear that the inhabitants of each human locality must reconsider the entire range of their ecological interconnections to local, regional, national, and international exchanges of goods and services. Such rethinking immediately raises the issue of the "bioregions" within which all human communities are rooted. As many ecological analyses have suggested, however, modern industrial societies virtually ignore the constraints of bioregion2. Bioregions are the complex sets of social and ecological connections that cultures have to particular lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates. Being more mindful of local environments, histories, and communities ideally should lead to the development of an ecologically sustainable, self-reliant society. Yet for at least a century, the changing ecology of advanced capitalism has become less and less attentive to environmental concerns. Today, advanced corporate capitalism essentially ignores the boundaries of bioregions, effacing their uniqueness and diversity.

The concept of "ecology" should imply concern for the total pattern of all relations between natural organisms and their environment. However, complex modern economies, with their super-exploitation of eons-old stocks of nature's resources in the lifetimes of only two or three human generations, operate at levels beyond and above the natural balance of the biosphere. These established patterns of economic and ecological relations are excessive in extent and wasteful in quality, while generating immense environmental destruction over much of the Earth. Such ecological dynamics in contemporary capitalism, which function over, beyond, or outside of nature's inherent balance, must be seen as an artificial "hyperecology" of an ultimately unsustainable type.

A successful ecological society, tied sensibly to its bioregional context, ultimately should assume the characteristics of a "permaculture." The bioregional basis of any permaculture would be guided by larger social goals, such as the conservation of energy and its allocation in accessible, democratic forms. Its economic processes would not mine nature with unsustainable forms of agriculture, forestry, industry, or fishery. Rather, it would tend to mind nature in the cultivation of sustainable, low-impact methods of producing the food, fiber, energy, shelter, and material means of ecological communities on a localistic, self-reliant basis.

Unlike modern capitalism, permacultures would not consume huge amounts of energy and resources from all over the planet. They would resist the colonization of other bioregions to produce anti-ecological products for the enjoyment of a few core capitalist sites capable of structuring export flows for their advantage.

Such permacultural ways of life presume the entire reconstruction of the forms of contemporary ideal and material culture3. They directly contradict modern capitalism's "ephermaculture," with its dependence on constantly increasing, wasteful mass consumption out of artificially generated "technoregions." These technoregions ignore almost all concrete cultural ties to local land, water, plants, animals, climate, and peoples in order to respecify social space techno-economically, according to the demands of global capitalist exchange. With little regard to place, tradition, or ecosystem, basically similar kinds of urbanized, suburbanized, or ruralized zones of consumption emerge at many different planetary sites by using varying inputs of energy, natural resources, food, water, and population, drawn from all over the Earth through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets. Without the arts, ephermaculture could not endlessly refuel its unrelenting production of newer goods, trendier products, and fresher images, inasmuch as the commercial arts guide each individual's recoding of his or her personal aspirations in terms of scientifically designed and organizationally produced material satisfaction5. The destruction of nature begins with the original human desire to control the environment. Yet once this greed for power and possession develops, the commercialization of art in the design salons and artistic studios of every individual imagination mobilized by the market constantly stimulates individuals always to desire more.

Conventionally, consumption is assumed to be the function of humanity's technological relationship to the environment. People supposedly manipulate the environment to create objects and processed materials that will satisfy innate needs for material goods and services. Today, many believe that capitalist corporations are the most appropriate tool for producing these materials. Questions of social ecology, then, are submerged almost from the beginning in the commercial assumptions of political economy. Entrepreneurial capital, for example, as it historically emerged in the modem bourgeois city, transformed the economic and social relations of agrarian economies. As its markets penetrated the people's living place and working place, the city came to invade the countryside, the market to dominate the farm, the mind worker to control the hand worker, and the capitalist metropole to imperialize the precapitalist periphery. Yet this cycle implied its own inherent limits by tying its survival to pushing commercial exchange into new geographic spaces.

In the 1880s and 1890s capitalist entrepreneurs found fewer and fewer precapitalist bioregions to penetrate commercially. Capitalism could no longer expand extensively. It therefore made a decisive shift to intensive expansion. Since the 1880s marketing and manufacturing, in a sense, have responded by inventing new technoregional sites of exchange. They intensified exchange by colonizing everyday socioeconomic processes
in cultural space, through scientific management, industrial design, and professional development. Conjuring these virgin territories out of culture as the new urban consumer society of modernity was a brilliant but essentially anti-ecological solution to the crisis of extensive production6. The encirclement of nature in the closing of the naturally limited bioregional frontiers opened up artificially unlimited technoregional zones of conquest to the building projects of mass consumption-based industrial capitalism.

The geographic codes of entrepreneurial capital, therefore, gradually rewrote the surface of the planet, extending outward from the original Eurocentric orbit of commercial exchange and capturing the inhabitants of numerous non- European zones of terra incognita until every frontier was closed and all unexplored territories were mapped. Every bioregion from the Antarctic to Africa to the Arctic to Asia to the Antipodes soon was catalogued to its fullest extent for any economic utility or ecological possibility. The closing of this world of nature to an extensive mode of production forced capitalists to open innumerable new artificial worlds for an intensive mode of production. Every craft and science rapidly
projected its technical geographies into the new unexplored worlds opened by the intensive expansion of global exchange.

In the postimperial geography of corporate capitalism, transnational topographies and transcultural territoriese merge from the interactions of international communication, travel, commerce, and transportation7. No longer grounded in one planetary place, one ethnonational location, or one environmental site, these image-driven technoregions, semi-imaginary and semi-real, are the real homelands of modern individuals. Their names are taken and passed as metaphors; yet technoregions are, in fact, the common ground of transnational society. Contemporary workers and modern corporations, for example, no longer set out to prosper in "the new world" or "the colonial world." Instead, they labor to make their marks in various technoregions, ranging from the banking world, the scientific world, the art world, the educational world, or the literary world to the financial world, the fashion world, the business world, the music world, or the advertising world, to name only a few.

To keep growing, capitalist exchange generates new hierarchies of mass consumption by developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and services. Concomitantly, this increasingly homogenized object world is invested artistically with rich,
new heterogeneous symbolic and imaginary differentiations, in order to distinguish the various relative grades within these communities of consumption8. Under late capitalism, consciousness management and design industries spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours on the arts carefully to distinguish objects that are artificially defined and symbolically differentiated but essentially identical, in the marketplace.
In the final analysis, aesthetic means of cultivating passive consumption through the controlled emancipation of personal, self-seeking, and sensual fulfillment serve as the material basis of late capitalism's hyperecological cycles of accumulation and reproduction, while this profligate waste of resources is rapidly destroying the Earth's ecological balance. Meanwhile, such hyperecological benefits are largely still reserved for the enjoyment of only a few hundred million people, mainly in Japan, Europe, and North America, while the Earth's other billions live in comparatively-or extremely- squalid poverty.

The closing of the natural frontiers in the 1880s and 1890s, then, simply saw the displacement of the colonizing impulse into new realms of activity, defined by geographies of economic, technological, and social spaces, rather than physical, military, and strategic ones. Defining, developing, and defending these socioeconomic topologies and cultural
geographies has been the central concern driving the ephemeraculture
of corporate capital for over a century. To get corporate capital to decamp from such zones and then to find the means to reclaim human life from the technoregions will be immensely difficult, if not impossible. The raison d'être of advanced technologies and the economic survival of corporate capital are tied to keeping these artificial territories under their sway. If real change is to be attained, everything developed over the last century-all that is commonly called “civilization”, "modernity," "development," or "progress"-will need to be completely rethought. To survive, some means must be created of scaling back ephemeracultural life in the technoregions of late capitalism to the limits of permacultural living in the bioregions of the now-ravaged biosphere.

The revolutionary development of the commercial arts over the past century parallels in lockstep the emergence of corporate hyperecologies. Commercial art and commercialized artists are simply one of the professional-technical expressions of the aestheticized commerce that rests at the core of late capitalism, and that liberates new wants and
mobilizes fresh desires in order to justify corporate capitalism's wasteful consumption of natural resources. Such desires are late capitalism's only truly renewable resource of any importance. Once produced, the sign values of aestheticized consumption continue affirming and concretizing the hyperecological order of late capitalism in the objects and images of the consumer goods themselves.

On the other hand, these manifest and latent meanings in mass consumption also can afford critical, ecologically concerned artists tremendous opportunities to challenge the symbolic essences of late capitalism, questioning both the media and the messages that the hyperecology of late capitalism uses to integrate individuals and society into its reproduction. There are a few precedents, of course, for this sort of revolutionary turn in art. Although they were not ecologically minded, critical challenges against the consumer codes of mass consumption can be found in some currents of Dadaism and Surrealism in Europe prior to 1945. A few artists working in these movements called into doubt, from both progressive and reactionary political positions, established social codes of appropriation, interpretation, and reception of consumer goods, with their radical recasting of mass-mediated images and mass-circulated consumer codes.

Similarly, the Situationists in the 1960s expressed a radical critique of everyday life and capitalist society's cultivation of spectacle as a mechanism of social integration9. In the United States during the heyday of its Pax Americana, before 1973, many different artists, ranging from Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud to Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Duane Hanson, James Rosenquist, and Robert Bechtle, played with the material and symbolic codes of American consumer society in their work. Some Earth art and Conceptual art, which continued to advance the dematerialization of the art object that started with Minimalism and performance art in the 1960s and the 1970s, invited audiences to rethink artistic praxis. With their work on desert landscapes, artists in these modes broke the museum-bound carapace of market-driven aesthetic interpretation and valorization10.

More recently, we see some contemporary artists attacking the symbolic codes of consumption head on. In different ways and from various perspectives, their work brackets and questions the hyperecologies of waste, ecocide, and global crisis that are built into contemporary corporate capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the installation artists
Judith Bany, Hans Haacke, and Dana Birnbaum employed multimedia presentations effectively to criticize some of the codes of consumer ideology or the managerial mind-set of corporate power. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger work with mass-mediated language and slogan signs and use the political rhetoric of advertising to subvert contemporary consumer codes. Tony Cragg's use of "trash and "household waste"
carries a critical ecological subtext, as he refashions plastic fragments and consumer-goods containers into moments of human identity or political protest. Much of Sue Coe's and Roger Brown's work strikes at late capitalism's abuse of nature, the misuse of resources, and the use of corporate power to contain individuals and society in the many mass-mediated traps of consumer culture. Finally, the ecological gleanings of Dominque Mazeaud, garbage performance art of Mierle Ukeles and trash assemblage installations by Ciel Bergman are critical new attempts to recast aesthetic appreciation in ecologically vigilant practice. Most important, like much of the work just discussed, the performance or interventionist quality of their artwork makes it very difficult to commodify and thereby subsume into the tamed circuits of big-time art markets.

Artists concerned about ecology, especially those working in the highly commercialized art fields of advertising, fashion, interior design, product styling, mass media, and the like, must recognize that their labor often has been essential in the destruction of bioregional permacultures, and is still a material foundation of such destructive activity; it is used to redefine the good life of modern consumption in the technoregions of transnational exchange. Without the aestheticization of commerce, life as we know it in late capitalism would be impossible. Those artists willing to
strike away from the academy and gallery culture of high-art aestheticism and to renounce the mindless trends of consumer design can be important instigators of change in response to the ecological crisis. Artists now have at least two major avenues of attack by which to intervene directly in the circuits of late-capitalist reproduction and to create an ecology aesthetic.

First, those artists working immediately within the industrial design and consciousness-management segments of industry might attack from within the codes of consumption, doubting and disparaging the desires they encode in consumer goods for others to need11. These desires have been and still are the essential artifacts of late-capitalist production, and their perpetual aesthetic intensification is required for this industrial regime to continue. Yet only a radical reconstruction of almost everything manufactured that now exists could begin to create a sustainable permacultural mode of production out of that handful of salvageable techniques and artifacts held within the unsustainable ephemeraculture of late capitalism. To do this as well as keep their jobs and continue at their crafts, artists must embrace new
values consonant with a permacultural, ecological way of life. Rather than stimulating individual desires for the flimsy, the superfluous, and the trendy, artists must identify new, environmentally sensible values-durability, utility, and permanence-in their works and designs. By linking
artistic practices with a general cultural awakening to the critical importance of ecological values and by embracing values of ecological sustainability, artists can help to begin revolutionizing the present system from within their vocations and crafts. From the current realities of technoregions and suppressed memories of bioregions, ecological reformers and environmentally aware artists must identify the humane potentialities of technology and the untapped possibilities of nature. Such ecologically aware artists will be important in working out the radical new ecographics for making human artifacts ecologically useful, practicable, and beautiful, rather than environmentally useless, impracticable, and destructive.

Second, artists working outside of the immediate circuits of commodity design might attack the wastefulness of ephemeraculture more critically from without, reappraising the flawed totality of hyperecological late capitalism by creating new images of ecological change. For example, they might continue to subvert the symbolic codes of this ecological
regime's reproduction, challenging its imagined benefits and satisfactions in showing its actual costs and dissatisfactions. Plainly, if these aesthetic challenges succeed, they will run the danger of being immediately tamed and subsumed by the art markets. Yet by raising ecological concerns
in their artistic work, significant new styles of resistance may develop out of this aesthetic imagining of new ecoregions for cultural development, which may, in turn, recenter everyday life within each human community's bioregional context.

Guided by this imagination, practices of permaculture may move more quickly from the realm of the imagined into the practical sphere of everyday experience. Today, too many artists, ironically, are implicated in both the ongoing constitution of the codes of consumption and the infrequent articulation of critiques directed at these same codes. From this contradictory position they have every incentive not to act against the ephemeraculture; still, they also have one of the last chances to imagine how an ecological permaculture could arise from the hyperecology of late capitalism. –

Notes
This paper originally was presented at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University on March 24, 1990, at the Colloquium of Artists concerned about the Environment. A much different version appeared in Art Papers (January-February 1991).
1. For examples of how artists and art collaborate in the rationalization of capitalist commodity production, see Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York: Pantheon.1986); Bevis Hiller, The Style of the Century, 1900-1980 (New York: E. P. Dutton.1983); Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986); Bryan Holme, Advertising:Reflections of a Century (New York: Viking Press, 1982); Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tasjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1986); and Chester H. Liebs, Mainstreet to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 19851.

2. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land; A Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985); Jonathan Poritt, Seeing Green (London: Blackwell, 1984); and, most important, Thomas Berry, The Dream of Nature (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).

3. See Timothy W. Luke , "Notes for a Deconstructionist Ecology," .Vm Politlcal Science 11(Spring 1983): 21-32.

4. For one comprehensive critical overview of this hyperecological cycle, see Bill McKibhon, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).

5. See Timothy W. Luke, Screens of power: Ideology Domination and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19891, 19-58. Also see Wolfgang F Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising In Capitalist Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

6. See Siegfried Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); and James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960).

7. As Edward W. Soja suggests, modernity always is composed of "both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, In the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity. . . . Spatiality, temporality, and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions whlch together comprise all facets of human existence. More concretely specified, each of the abstract existential dimensions comes to life as a social construct, which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it. Thus, the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that both reflect and configure being in the world. . . . The social order of being-in-the-world can be seen as revolving around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices." Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 25.

8. See Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic, 1988).

9. See Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957-1972 [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

10. See, for a parallel argument, Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986); and Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984).

11. To change contemporary society, they will have to do more, however, than simply advance the interests of green consumerism or tout environmentally aware products as do such publications as Shopping for a Better World, The Green Comumer. The Environmental Shopping Handbook, or 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. At best, these efforts make minor changes at the margins, but do not do anything radically to transform society in more ecologically rational ways.

____________________________________________________
TIMOTHY W. LUKE teaches political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg. His most recent book is Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions (1992).

Wiki: Land Art

Land art

Copied From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_art

Land Art, Earthworks or Earth Art is an art movement which emerged in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather the landscape is the very means of their creation. The works frequently exist in the open, located well away from civilization, left to change and erosion under natural conditions. Many of the first works, created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.

Contents

* 1 History
* 2 Literature
* 3 Contemporary land artists
* 4 Open-air museums and sculpture sites
* 5 External links

History

Land Art is to be understood as a protest against the artificiality, plastic aesthetics and ruthless commercialization of art at the end of the 1960s in America. Exponents of Land Art rejected the museum as the setting of artistic activity and developed monumental landscape projects which were beyond the reach of the commercial art market. Land Art was inspired by Minimal Art and Concept art but also by modern and minimal movements such as De Stijl, Cubism, Minimalism and the work of Constantin Brancusi and Joseph Beuys. Many of the artist associated with "Land Art" had been involved with Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. Isamu Noguchi's 1941 design for Contoured Playground in New York is sometimes interpreted as an important early piece of Land Art even though the artist himself never called his work "Land Art" but simply "sculpture". His influence on contemporary Land Art, landscape architecture and environmental sculpture is evident in many works today.

Alan Sonfist is a pioneer of an alternative approach to working with nature and culture that he began in 1965 by bringing historical nature back into New York City. According to the critic Barbara Rose writing in 'Artforum' in 1969 she herself had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. The sudden appearance of Land Art in 1968 can be located as a response by a generation of artists mostly in their late twenties to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging environmental and women's liberation movements.

The movement was 'launched' in October 1968 by the group exhibition 'Earthworks' at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February, 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the historic "Earth Art" exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca New York. The artists included in the "Earth Art" exhibition were: Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker.

Gordon Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Perhaps the best known artist who worked in this genre was the American Robert Smithson whose 1968 essay "The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of Modernism from social issues as represented by the critic Clement Greenberg. His best known piece, and probably the most famous piece of all land art, is Spiral Jetty (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and algae so as to form a long (1500 feet) spiral-shape jetty protruding into Great Salt Lake in Utah. How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water.

Smithson's Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust (1968) is an example of land art existing in a gallery space rather than in the natural environment. It consists of a pile of gravel by the side of a partially mirrored gallery wall. In its simplicity of form and concentration on the materials themselves, this and other pieces of land art have an affinity with minimalism. There is also a relationship to Arte Povera in the use of materials traditionally considered "unartistic" or "worthless".

Land artists have tended to be American, with other prominent artists in this field including Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Hans Haacke, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Alan Sonfist, and James Turrell. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. Perhaps the most prominent non-American land artists are the British Chris Drury, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. Some projects by the artist Christo (who is famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric) have also been considered land art by some, though the artist himself considers this incorrect, as explained on his web page. Joseph Beuys' concept of 'social sculpture' influenced 'Land art' and his 'Eichen' project of 1972 to plant 7000 Oak trees has many similarities to 'Land art' processes.

Land artists in America relied mostly on wealthy patrons and private foundations to fund their often costly projects. With the sudden economic down turn of the mid 1970s funds from these sources largely dried up. With the death of Robert Smithson in a plane crash in 1973 the movement lost one of its most important figureheads and petered out. James Turrell continues to work on the Roden Crater project. In most respects 'Land Art' has become part of mainstream Public Art and in many cases the term "Land Art" is misused to label any kind of art in nature even though conceptually not related to the avantgarde works by the pioneers of Land Art.

Recently, the Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers is carving out a niche for himself in art history with a series of huge geoglyph, or rock sculptures, that will eventually form a chain around the world. Of the twelve planned environmental artworks, seven have been realized so far, including one in the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland.

Literature

Lawrence Alloway, Wolfgang Becker, Robert Rosenblum et al, Alan Sonfist, Nature: The End of Art, Gli Ori,Dist. Thames & Hudson Florence, Italy,2004 ISBN 0615125336

* Max Andrews (Ed.): Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook. London 2006 ISBN 978-0-901469-57-1

* John Beardsley: Earthworks and Beyond. Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York 1998 ISBN 0-7892-0296-4

* Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. University of California Press 2002. ISBN 0-520-24116-9

Amy Dempsey: Destination Art. Berkeley CA 2006 ISBN 13-978-0-520-25025-3

Michel Draguet, Nils-Udo, Bob Verschueren, Bruseels: Atelier 340, 1992

* Jack Flam (Ed.). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley CA 1996 ISBN 0-520-20385-2

* John K. Grande: New York, London. Balance: Art and Nature, Black Rose Books, 1994, 2003 ISBN 1-55164-234-4

Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg / Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, * Jeffrey Kastner, Brian Wallis: Land and Environmental Art. Boston 1998 ISBN 0-7148-4519-1

* Lucy R Lippard: Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York 1983 ISBN 0-394-54812-8* Udo Weilacher: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ISBN 3-7643-6119-0

* Edward Lucie-Smith (Intro) and John K. Grande: Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists, New York 2004 ISBN 0-7914-6914-7

David Peat & Edward Lucie-Smith (Introduction & forward) Dialogues in Diversity, Italy: Pari Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-88-901960-7-2

* Gilles A. Tiberghien: Land Art. Ed. Carré 1995
* Gilles A. Tiberghien: Land Art, Princeton Architectural Press, 1995

Contemporary land artists

* Betty Beaumont
* Walter de Maria
* Lucien den Arend
* Harvey Fite
* Andy Goldsworthy
* Junichi Kakizaki
* Richard Long
* John K. Melvin
* David Nash
* John Pfahl
* Andrew Rogers
* Alan Sonfist
* James Turrell
* Elisabeth Wierzbicka Wela

Open-air museums and sculpture sites

* FOAM Finnish Open Air Museum - Finland , [1]

* International Museum of the open-air Sculpture, "Europos Parkas", Vilnius, Lithuania, [2], [3]

* Penttilä Open Air Museum POAM - Finland , [4]

* Le vent de forets - France , [5]

* OPAM Open Air Museum, Sculpture Park Drechtbanks - Holland , [6]

* Kemyel Crease Sculpture project, [7]

* Storm King Art Center - Mountainville, NY , [http://www.stormking.org]

External links

* Alan Sonfist Official Website
* Solar Mount / Le Mont Solaire
* file:///Le Land Art (In French - www.le-site-du-jour.com)http///www.sitedujour.com/dossiers/land-art.html
* Artist in Nature International Network
* Art-Public, First european portal on public art
* Green Museum
* Tales of the Unexpected
* LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST
* Land Art - Master in Contemporary Arts. University of Paris VIII - Website In French
* Land & Environmental Artists & Art
* Australian land arts
* Roden Crater by James Turrell

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_art"
Categories: Land art |

Development of the Artist's Book, Peter D. Verheyen

for FIA 610, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, April, 1998

What is a book? An artist's book? A livre d'artiste?

What is a book? Traditionally the book form has been associated with the codex, a textblock of folded signatures, sewn to some kind of support with a cover. Although this structure (with some variations) has existed for over a thousand years other forms have come to be called books as well, including clay tablets, scrolls, petrogylphs and, now, some argue computer files as well. Illustrations have been a part of "books" almost from the beginning being used to illustrate the text and depict events or places or people... within, the Nuremberg Chronicle being an early example of this. The illustrations were not, however, meant to be seen as art. William Blake (1757 -1827) changed that with his artists' books, among them The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence. In these, Blake wrote the text, made the etchings of the text and illustrations, printed, and then hand-colored the pages. The only thing Blake did not do it seems was bind them. Blake was far ahead of his time. The artist's book did not reappeared until this century and was adopted as a format by the Futurists, DADA, and the Constructivists among others. The livre d'artiste which co-existed with the artist's book, was similar yet also very different.
Livre d'artiste vs. artist's book:

What is the difference between an artist's book and a livre d'artiste. Johanna Drucker in her work The Century of Artists' Books draws a very clear distinction. According to her, the livre d'artiste came into being as a publishing enterprise initiated by such figures as the Parisian art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiler who saw a business opportunity in marketing deluxe editions illustrated by recognized or upcoming stars in the fields of visual arts or poetry, among them Chagall, Picasso, Apollonaire, Matisse, Miro, Ernst. This was a distinctly French undertaking with no real parallels in the United Kingdon or Germany.
While deluxe editions were not unusual at the time, the idea of merging them with the fine arts was. These editions were generally released unbound, essentially as a suite of prints or at best very simply bound. The buyer would then take them to their favorite binder designer such as Bonet, Creuzevault, or Legrain. These "collaborations" were nothing short of breathtaking.
To Drucker the livre d'artiste stopped just short of being artist's books by "stopping just at the threshold of conceptual space in which artist's books operate." This is because it is very rare to find a livre d'artiste which "interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities." To Drucker, these livres d'artistes seem to be "embalmed" in excessive production values, with a very stiff relationship between the text and images which seemed forced into an outdated structure or format.
The main distinction between the livres d'artistes and the artist's book is that the former were almost always initiated by the publisher with often little or no relationship between the artist and writer. The binder was only an afterthought, though a significant one as it now turns out. By contrast, the artist's book is understood to be the work of one individual or a collaborative effort. In either case, it is conceived from start to finish as an integrated unit. The motive is also quite different. While the livre d'artiste was created as a financial venture, the artists' motives are more likely to be to make themselves heard or to share a vision. Making money is nice, but not the reason for creating the work. The artist's book is by nature, and for the reasons just mentioned more likely to be non-traditional in format and structure. In fact, it is almost expected that artists deviate as far as they dare from the traditional form entering into the realm of sculpture. Indeed, most of the creators of artist's books are not tied to anyone discipline in particular. Some are primarily printmakers but most are not and bring a very broad background to their "books" (I use that term loosely). As opposed to the livres d'artistes these are more than likely to be unique objects and as such are more closely allied with painting and sculpture. Technically, they are created using a variety of techniques, employing fine printing as easily as xerography.
Another category which falls somewhat between the two is the fine press artist's book. This category is generally more closely allied with the livre d'artiste in that it is an editioned work. While some fine press artist's books are the work of an individual, more often than not working in close collaboration, an author, artist, printer, binder. On a more commercial level the 1920's - '40's saw a number of artist's books released by major publishers. Featured are the work of Lynd Ward who published several novels in woodcuts, John Vassos who took to offset, Rockwell Kent and others. Zines, issued by micro-presses in small or large editions, regularly, or just once, fit in this category, with the difference that the production is often less elaborate and refined, but also more experimental in content and concept. They are a way for the artist to reach a wide audience without great expense, similar in many ways to the Dada publications.
Importance of structure to the artist's book:

In contrast to the livre d'artiste, the artist's book is likely to make the structure of the book an integrated part of its overall design and concept. How the "book" or object is assembled is as important as the contents of the book, if any. It is quite common for "book artists" to create "books" which are no more than finely engineered works of paper, often highly complex, which contain no text and only the faintest hint of "bookness" (a term coined by Philip Smith a British fine binder who came to binding by way of painting). The structure determines how the "book" is read, and influences how the "reader" interacts with it. Pages can open up from both sides and panels can be hinged along different sides making the viewer unfold the structure as they "read" it. Pop-ups can reveal hidden aspects. By slightly changing a series of illustrations animation can be created as the "reader" flips through the pages quickly. Through the use of transparency, an image can evolve and de-evolve as the "pages" are turned. The possibilities are almost endless, and one innovation leads to another. In the process the "reader" becomes increasingly drawn into the object as they interact with it. This idea of the importance of structure is explored in detail in Keith Smith's book Structure of the Visual Book..
Significance of the illustrator to the book:

In the text to the MOMA exhibition catalog A Century of Artists Books, Riva Castleman breaks down the relationships of the parties as: artists with authors; artists as authors; artists for authors; and artists without authors.
Artists with authors represents the livres d'artiste where the artist and author are brought together, the artist's role being to embellish the words of the author, just as it the typesetter and designer's role.
Artists as authors refers to artists who decided that they wanted to express themselves in words as well as images. With Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Duchamp this was very successful and their works helped define their movements (Bauhaus, Constructivism, Dada). Others such as Miro, Leger, and Matisse were more than capable of putting into words the expressiveness of their painting.
Artists for Authors is much like the first category except that the pairing of the two is often more remote. While, as with the first category, the two parties may know each other and exchange ideas, here more often than not the artist was commissioned, or chose to illustrate an earlier text. Artists, however, could also take existing texts and use those as the basis for new works. An example is Tom Philips' treatment of two works. The first, entitled A Humament, was derived from a text (The Human Document) which Philips bought at a flea market for 2 shillings. Through overpainting and other alterations of the text he created a new one. Philips also treated Dante's Inferno as well as translating it.
The final category, artists without authors, this is where, according to Castleman, the origins of the modern artist's book can be found. Grosz's Ecce Homo and El Lissitzky's About Two Squares are examples of this as is Frans Masereel La Ville and some of Lynd Ward's work such as Gods's Man. Edward Ruscha is credited with setting the pattern for the modern artist's book with his 1963 work Twentysix Gas Stations, a work in which he juxtaposed the images of gas stations, chosen for their similarity of appearance and function with a blank facing page.
The Fluxus movement, founded at the same time, was a collaborative international movement which created a large body of work in the form of printed cards, broadsides, booklets, often boxed together in a "neo-Dada" manner. This movement led to the explosive growth of the artist's book movement in the 1970's and '80's which was inclusive rather than exclusive, with easy to acquire works of art.
Future of the artist's book and trends:

What is the future of the artist's book? The past twenty-five years, especially the past fifteen have seen an explosive growth in the number of artists creating "books" and the acceptance of the format along with other more "mainstream" forms of art. Exhibitions are becoming increasingly widespread and "the book" as concept is being taught in a number of art programs. Printmakers are still making prints and many of these will still end up in "book" form. What is being lost is the art of the craft of fine bookbinding. Those who are teaching in the programs do not have the skills to pass on the finer points of binding, and those in private practice can't afford to take on apprentices for the most part. Perhaps the end of this century will see the end of the finely bound book. When one looks at what artists consider "books," it becomes clear that the term is being used to describe sculptures and wall hangings. These may be derived conceptually from "the book," but that does not make them a book, nor does it make them any less a work of art. Likewise a piece of granite, carved and polished to look like a thick sewn signature is not a book. It depicts one, but that does not make it one. Duchamp may have said that "it is art because I say it is," and in his case it may well have been, but it is all to easy to extend to "it is a book because I say it is." While other forms may transmit information, like clay tablets, scrolls, or graffiti on a wall, that does not make them books.
As technology has advanced, bringing with it new means of producing and creating texts, and illustrating the "book," the very concept of the "physical book" is changing. With the advent of the Web and it's ability to hyperlink to other parts of a document or another document altogether, the book need no longer exist as a physical artifact. Janet Maher, a professor of art at Loyola College, created a work entitled ALPHABET which exists only electronically and is composed of a series of animated images which flash a text, depicting the alphabet across the viewer's screen. Is it a book? I'm not so sure, but it is art. As programs grow in versatility and ease of use, we can expect increasing artists to chose this as their medium.
I'd like to close with Philip Smith's statement on "bookness" which sums up, in my mind, the book form. While the boundaries of a form must be explored, a commonly agreed upon vocabulary is important for an understanding of that form as well as any discussion of it.
"Bookness: The qualities which have to do with a book. In its simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include pre-codex carriers of text such as the scroll or the clay tablet, in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV screen, poster or hand-bill.
"Bookness" is however being stretched to include forms which carry a digitalized or electronic text such as a CD, a hard disk or a microchip, or miscellaneous forms such as spirals of paper with continuous text, or pyramids, dodecahedrons and other geometric multiplanar forms (which could also have text inscribed on them). I would not describe all these things as having the quality of bookness or being strictly covered by the definition. A blank book is still a book, but a blank do decahedron or unmarked spiral of paper is not a book, it is a dodecahedron etc. A text is a text and not a book, but any other object one likes to imagine may perhaps be its conveyance. A text can be inscribed on anything but this does not make it a book, or have the quality of bookness, even as a scroll retains its scrollness without any text on it. A teddy bear with text on it is not a book! The book is not the text, although it is traditionally associated with it, and these two elements appear often to be mistaken for the same thing. The book is the hinged multiplanar vehicle or substrate on which texts, verbal, or tactile (the latter would include braille and other relief or embossed effects, found objects, pop-ups) maybe written, drawn, reproduced, printed or assembled.
The large imposed sheets on which texts are printed before folding into quires or signatures are not yet in book form (the qualities of bookness have not yet been imparted to them); nor to microfilm or microfiches by which book texts may be scanned be described as having bookness. They would be considered in the single planar form as on a video monitor (or a painting for example), but when the same text is arranged into book form it then taken on the qualities of bookness. It is questionable whether something becomes a book by being called such. The notion that an artist may call anything he likes a "work of art" or a "book", because he says so, is the extreme of sloppy thinking and contravenes everything we regard as leading to truth, notwithstanding Marcell Duchamp!
In a story by Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, there is a group of people who, in order to save them, memorise books, and are called "walking books"! Other similarly claimed substitutes abound in so-called book-artists' jargon, but the memories of books are not yet in book form, and so cannot be called books or have bookness. One could say however that a pack of Tarot cards does have bookness. It functions as a working group of loose-leaf planar surfaces with related images conveying textual matter in pictorial form. Traditional knowledge has it that the Tarot is in fact a philosophical treatise. The planes of a book have a necessary relationship or they simply become a collection of arbitrary planes for which a book format is not essential for the conveyed meaning. Many arbitrarily devised objects such as chewed or dissolved texts in bottles, etc., may or may not be art objects, but they are not objects with bookness. The book-maker's art should be distinguished from the art-maker's book. The book is generally thought of as a compact, conveniently portable mobile object (although there can be giant books, made of any material). The book, as book, has multiple planes because all the text or material it contains would be too unwieldy in a single planar form. There are book-like objects or appearances and object-like books, but that is a different story."
Bibliography:

The Ardent Image: Book illustration for adults in America, 1920 - 1942. Toledo, OH: Ward M. Canada Center, The University of Toledo, 1995.
The Art of the Book and the Book Arts Press. Upper Arlington, OH: Logan Elm Press & Papermill, 1994.
The Book as Art: Modern illustrated books and fine bindings, part 1. New York: Sotheby's 1995.
The Book Stripped Bare: A survey of books by 20th century artists and writers. Hempstead, NY: The Emily Lowe Gallery and Hofstra University Library, 1973.
Castleman, Riva. A Century of Artists Books. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
Polnische Buchkunst der Gegenwart. Warsaw: Verband der Polnischen Bildenen Künstler, Bezirk Warschau, 1996.
Dressing the Text: The fine press artists' book. Santa Cruz, CA: The Printers' Chappel of Santa Cruz, 1995.
Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995.
The New Bookbinder. London: Journal of Designer Bookbinders. Various issues.
Ray, Kevin. Una Selva Oscura: Tom Philips's Inferno. St. Louis, MO: Special Collections, Washingotn University Libraries, 1997.
Smith, Keith. Structure of the Visual Book, 3rd ed. Rochester, NY: Keith Smith Books, 1994.
Smith, Keith. Text in the Book Format. Fairport, NY: The Sigma Foundation, 1989.
Smith, Philip. Designer Bookbinders Newsletter. London: Summer 1996. Letter to the editor.
Trusky, Tom. Some Zines 2: Alternative & Underground Artists & Eccentric Magazines & Micropresses. Boise, ID: Cold-drill books, Department of English, Boise State University, 1996.
There are also an increasing number of resources relating to this subject on the Web. Links to most of these can be found at

above copied from: http://www.philobiblon.com/DevArtistsBook.shtml

The myth of interactivity on the Internet

The myth of interactivity on the Internet

By Gerry McGovern

Interactivity has become an almost sacred tenet of the Internet. Again and again, we are told that interactivity is what makes the Internet really different. However, interactivity on the Internet is often vastly over-hyped.

Words like 'interactivity' and 'community' have been hugely abused and devalued over the last eight years. Nobody would call a group of people in a nightclub a community. However, to some, all you have to do is set up a discussion forum and you have an online community.

If you turn a page in a magazine or book, that doesn't exactly qualify as interactivity. Yet, if you click a link on the Web, many feel you are participating in an interactive activity. The reality is, of course, that the Web is very often the antithesis of interactivity and community.

If commerce is selling with people, then ecommerce is selling with content. If learning is learning with people, then elearning is learning with content. It is the very removal of people—with the consequent reduction of interactivity and community—that has attracted many businesses to the Web. Remove people, the thinking goes, and you remove costs. (In many situations, there is a lot of logic to this thinking.)

Basic interactivity on the Web very often fails. For example, organizations are notoriously bad at responding to email enquiries. In December 2001, a New York Times journalist sent email messages to 65 US senators. She informed them she was doing a story on email message handling by members of Congress. Amazingly, 31 senators didn't reply at all. 27 replied with automated messages. After two weeks, only 7 out of 65 had sent an actual response. Of those responses was one from Senator Phil Gramm's office, which stated that: "The communication that Sen. Gramm values most certainly does not arrive by wire."

A Jupiter Media Metrix survey of 250 retailer websites, published in January 2002, found interactivity sorely lacking. 30 percent of websites surveyed responded within 6 hours. 18 percent took 6 to 24 hours. 18 percent took 1 to 3 days. 34 percent took longer than 3 days or didn't respond at all.

It is still surprising the amount of people who believe that installing some chat or discussion board software will create an online community for their website. The software is only 1 percent of the job. The real work involves getting people to interact.

Online communities are very often more like clubs, associations or gangs, than genuine communities. Properly focused, they can contribute to social bonding and/or aid in the sharing of knowledge.

However, they often are a monumental waste of time. Many advertisers have shied away from such 'community' environments because they tend to contain people with too much time on their hands and too little money in their pockets.

We need to take a more realistic view of what interactivity and community means on the Web. Interactivity starts with having a policy in relation to how quickly you are going to respond to emails you receive. If you don't have that then your online community has about as much substance as a group of strangers in a nightclub.

The ethic of interactivity

Let’s pull up from the fur-flying fray over WashingtonPost.com pulling down blog comments that attacked rookie ombudser Deborah Howell thanks to her misguided attempt at balancing a scandal (see full coverage and great links on Jay Rosen’s Press Think; see also Umair Haque’s attempt to give big, old media an attitudectomy).
The bigger question is: What is the ethic of interactivity?

Q: Are media required to play host to the opinions and criticism of others?

A: No. But they will be judged by their interactivity.

That’s the real issue here: One-way media are trying to figure out the two-way world and it’s hard, but necessary. If you’re not part of the conversation, you won’t be heard.

Q: Is it better to host comments or link to them?

A: You should do both.

I believe that linking to comments made on blogs (and in other media) will, in the long run, yield more compelling — albeit distributed — conversation. The people who use their own space to comment care enough about the topic to say something and stand by what they say under their own names (or brands). As Glenn Reynolds (not a comment host himself) says: “Given the Post’s addition of Technorati links to many of their stories, they’re in a better position than most to say ‘the blogosphere is our comment section.’ And, you know, it is.” That’s true to a point. But there are also times when I don’t want to use my space to react to a conversation on a blog or around a news story. But I do have something to add. So I want to comment. When I am not given that opportunity on blogs (or other outlets), I suffer media constipation.

Q: Should there be an expectation of civility in interactivity?

A: As much as there is in life.

We see two mistakes in the discussion surrounding the Post blog:

First, too many people judge interactivity by the worst of it, which is rather like refusing to visit New York because you hear there are a few assholes there. This, I think, comes mostly from people who wish they could dismiss interactivity, and the internet and blogs with it. Sorry, but interactivity — and New York — are here to stay.

The second mistake some people make is assuming that the rest of us can’t figure out who the assholes are. With that comes the presumption that we need to be protected from the bozos, that that is media’s (and, in other contexts, government’s) job. People sometimes ask me why I don’t kill stupid comments from various bozos. I reply that I figure most people know they’re bozos and judge them accordingly.

Q: Should you moderate interactivity?

A: If you want to.

But don’t think that you can tidy up comments any better than you can tidy up the world. People are messy and so’s life. Get used to it.

Nonetheless, I do believe that this is my space and I have the right — and sometimes responsibility — to maintain a proper atmosphere for conversation. I rarely kill comments but I choose to sometimes when someone goes overboard.

Q: Shouldn’t technology help with moderation?

A: You wish.

But I wouldn’t count on machines outsmarting people who need their meds. They will outsmart filters and parole officers everytime.

Q: Is interactivity worth the price?

A: Yes.

It may not bring in much ad revenue (yet) and it may take effort (but less than creating content), but if you treat interactivity — and the people who do it — with respect, good things will come of it: content, improvement, promotion, respect.

You cannot afford not to interact.

Q: By the way, do we really need ombudsmen?

A: No.

Everyone in a newspaper should have a direct relationship with the public. They should all be their own ombudsmen.

: I’ve worked with interactivity since the early ’90s and continue to learn lessons.

At Advance, our community expert taught me that moderators should not be the people who kill bad comments any more than mayors should be the guys who pick up trash. I learned that we didn’t need moderators; that’s a one-way-media way to think: that the people need hosts to tell them what to talk about. What we needed instead were police to clean up problems. Our expert showed me that the public would send us alerts to those problems, but only if we responded to their snitching quickly and reliably. It worked. The quality of discourse improved; complaints from newspaper editors declined (though none of them truly appreciated the value of interactivity); traffic and audience skyrocketed.

I also sat on the board of the company that started Plastic.com, which tried to bring Slashdot code to a broader audience. It didn’t really work. Slashdot works for a geeky public. Others may disagree, but I think it proved to be too complex — too not worth the effort — for the rest of us. Still, the idea that people can collaboratively dismiss the bozos and promote the geniuses makes sense. Someday, someone will figure out how to make it worth our while.

So what would I advise the Post — what will I advise them in a planned Wednesday roundtable chat?

I’d tell them to let the comments roll and to let all their constituencies — newsroom, ombudsman, and public — know that there will be attacks and there will be bozos, but there will also be signal worth that noise.

I’d tell them what I told CBS Public Eye when they, too, complained about the quality of public discorse: The best way to ensure a real discussion is to join in that discussion. Rather than just just making a post on a blog — and then a column on the topic — ombud Deborah Howell should have joined in the discussion in the comments. Of course, she should have followed my father’s advice about office politics and not be drawn into the lowest attacks. But she should have entered into a real dialogue with the readers who had legitimate criticism and questions and advice. What is an ombudsman for, after all, if not to interact with that?

I’d tell them to kill only the worst of the bozos’ spiteful, personal, and off-topic attacks — but to kill them quickly and consistently.

I’d tell them to give greater promotion to the external blogs that used their own space and names to enter into a discussion about the issues. The conversation is distributed.

I’d tell them to stop thinking that all interactivity should be about the newspaper and what it says. Make it about what the public is saying and what the newspaper is not saying.

I’d tell them that rather than trying to find more ways to control interactivy, I’d find more ways to interact: Solicit help from the public on stories, do the wikitorial the right way (not the way the LA Times did it but by, instead, encouraging two sides of an issue to each, separately showcase their best cases), let people remix stories…

I’d tell them to sit back and enjoy the ride. Democracy and discussion are messy, like life.

Interactivity Brings Some Surprises

March 13, 2008

Blog vs. Peer Review Update: Interactivity Brings Some Surprises

As we reported last month, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, has been running an unusual experiment with his latest academic book, which is about analyzing video games.

For the past several weeks, the scholar has posted a section of his draft each day to a popular blog he contributes to — called Grand Text Auto — and he has invited readers to praise it or tear it to shreds. They’ve done both. And by early next week, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin will have posted the whole tome, and the first phase of the experiment will be over.

How is it going? Mr. Wardrip-Fruin says that one pleasant surprise has been that some of the designers of the video games he mentions have commented on his book. “From a game-industry AI designer now at MIT (Jeff Orkin) to a UCLA AI researcher now in aerospace (Scott Turner), the original authors of the systems I critiqued came forward to share their thoughts and (sometimes) set the record straight,” he said in an e-mail interview. “It’s definitely going to improve the final book.”

“Also, doing the review in a format that allows discussion turned out to be very valuable,” he said. “Comments I might have brushed aside, not fully understanding their import, instead became the starting points for exchanges that revealed significant issues I must address in my revisions.”

Not all the feedback about the project was entirely positive. Ian Bogost, a game designer and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said he had trouble reading the book online, broken up as it was into so many pieces.

“A book, unlike a blog, is a lengthy, sustained argument with examples and supporting materials,” wrote Mr. Bogost, in a post on his blog. “A book is textual, of course, and it can thus be serialized easily into a set of blog posts. But that doesn’t make the blog posts legible as a book.”

“This isn’t Noah’s fault; he’s written what seems like a terrific book,” he continued. “But a terrific book for print, not for the Web. I’m not sure I’ll be able to read it properly until I get the thing in my hands.”

And Mr. Wardrip-Fruin said that his goal was to respond to every comment, but that recently he “fell seriously behind” in doing so.

“Of course, I may have another surprise when I see the blind peer reviews” that MIT Press has selected, he said. “I suspect they will be completely different — focusing on the broad-strokes argument, while the blog-based review has focused on the specifics of my examples and local arguments. But it could be that, say, the two reviews will say contradictory things. I’m looking forward to finding out.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Asymmetric Interactive Relationships

One of the more vexing problems in interactive design arises from the fundamentally asymmetric nature of the relationship between human and computer. All of our existing models of interaction presume interaction between humans, who are fundamentally symmetric. For example, my standard interactive model is the conversation between two people. (see "A Better Metaphor for Game Design: Conversation") Note, however, that a conversation creates a balanced relationship between both parties. I speak in the same language that you use; I listen with the same kind of ears and in much the same fashion. A conversation is a symmetric process involving two equal partners. If we remove the symmetry by giving all or most of the speaking to one person, then the event is no longer termed a conversation; it is a lecture. And we all know that lecturing somebody during a conversation is rude, because it denies the equality of the listener.

But the relationship between human and computer that we establish when we design interactive entertainment is fundamentally asymmetric. The computer is not the same thing as a human being. This asymmetry constitutes one of the major elements that impacts the design of interactive entertainment.

I shall first recite some of the asymmetries at work. Let's think in terms of my standard definition of interactivity (a sequential process in which each interlocutor alternately listens, thinks, and speaks). (see "Fundamentals of Interactivity") What are the asymmetries in listening, thinking, and speaking?

Listening: the human listens through his ears and eyes, while the computer listens through its mouse and keyboard. The human has a high capacity for information absorption. Both the eye and the ear have a great deal of preprocessing software that makes possible high-bandwidth information reception. We're talking megabytes per second of information reception capability. The computer, by contrast, has lousy listening capabilities. The average person can, with mouse and keyboard, enter a few bytes of information per second.

Thinking: Here's another area where the human outstrips the computer, but not so egregiously as with listening. The computer can indeed think, and in some dimensions of thinking, such as arithmetic computation, greatly outstrips the human. But in a great many other areas, such as pattern recognition, the human has a huge advantage over the computer. Thus, our problem in designing good thinking for the computer is to come up with good ways to take advantage of its computational strengths while masking its weaknesses.

Speaking: Here is the one area where the computer can approach the capabilities of a human. At my best, talking and gesticulating, I can generate megabytes of information per second. A computer can't quite reach that output rate yet, but it's getting close. A fully animated display with accompanying sound or music gets us up into the megabyte/second range.

Considering these three together, it should be obvious that the greatest source of asymmetry lies in the area of listening, and the least lies in speaking. This explains, to some extent, the design style of so many products currently on the market. Most listen poorly and speak well. The typical product gives the user very little to say or do, and then hoses him down with megabytes of audiovisual extravaganza. Thus, despite my incessant carping about excessive speaking and insufficient listening, the current level of interactive design correctly reflects the asymmetric strengths of the computer.

But we must remember that there are two ways of looking at the problem of asymmetry: the ideal and the "grain of the medium". The ideal represents what we really ought to do; the grain represents the natural strengths and weaknesses of the medium. Good design pursues the ideal while acknowledging the grain. The ideal of good interactivity is equal emphasis on listening, thinking, and speaking. After all, the quality of a conversation is based on the extent to which each of the conversationalists listens, thinks, and speaks. If either person puts more emphasis on any one of these areas, then the conversation as a whole suffers. In the same way, participants in any interaction must focus equal energy on all three areas to do the best possible job.

But we must also acknowledge the pragmatic issues here: the computer is a lousy listener and a fascinating talker. So we must compromise the ideal with the pragmatic reality. Our designs should have less listening than speaking.

But the compromise cuts both ways. True, pragmatic considerations force us to admit that we cannot have equal amounts of listening and speaking. But it is just as true that idealistic considerations force us to admit that we must have more listening than is pragmatically convenient.

We can express this idea in terms of effort expended. Because the computer is so much better at speaking than at listening, it is easy to get the computer to speak well and very difficult to get the computer to listen well. Therefore, we must expend more effort on the problems of designing good listening than on designing good speaking. This is the only way to achieve an effective compromise between the pragmatic considerations and the design ideals.

How well are we doing?

So let's examine the success the industry has had in designing good listening. I have to say, we're doing a terrible job! A good way to assess the quality of the listening experience is to translate the commands of the game into verbs. For example, Doom offers just a few basic verbs: turn left, turn right, go forward, go backward, slide sideways, fire, change weapons. That's the entirety of the listening that Doom can handle. Not very impressive in terms of quantity of listening, is it? Or consider another big hit of the last year, Myst. This game offers an even more limited set of verbs: "go where I clicked", and "operate whatever I clicked upon". Now, it's true that these verbs can mean a variety of things given the visual context. Thus, "operate whatever I clicked upon" can mean "open the door" or "throw the switch" or a variety of other things. So it's not quite fair to say that Myst has only two verbs. But it certainly doesn't have very many.

What's particularly sad about this is that the situation has gotten worse, not better. In the last year or two we've seen an explosion of multimedia products whose listening powers are even worse than those of most games. Many of these games have little more than "go to the next image" and "go back to the previous image", plus a few embellishments.

What do we need?

Obviously, we need to improve the listening skills of our designs. What, precisely, does this entail?

The brainless answer is that we need richer languages of expression for the user. We've got to give him better things to say, and above all, more verbs! But this raises a nasty problem: how do we increase the number of verbs without losing the audience in a maze of I/O rules and restrictions? I am reminded of Civilization, a game with a fairly rich set of verbs that also sported a 200-page manual. It would seem that we have a dilemma here: either we give the user a paltry verb set or we bury him under a huge manual.

There are three ways out of this dilemma, and we'll end up using some combination of all three. The first is to build up audience expectations of user interface. This is something that Macintosh users all understand, and DOS users just don't get. The Macintosh has a large array of user interface standards that all programs (except those from Microsoft) adhere to. For example, Command-Q will always quit an application; Command-W will always close the topmost window; Command-P prints the document and Command-S saves it. The close box, scroll bars, and menus all have defined meanings that every Macintosh user quickly learns. The result is that Macintosh users can pick up a new program very quickly. In the DOS world, every program has a different user interface, and so users can't learn as fast. The ease of handling the housekeeping through standard techniques makes it possible for Macintosh stuff to provide more verbs without boggling the user. The Windows OS is attempting to close this gap, and has standardized a variety of functions, so perhaps we'll see some real progress in the PC world. But we as designers must recognize our own responsibilities here. Whenever somebody designs a game that has its own custom version of scroll bars, or close boxes, or whatever, that diminishes the standard. So it's important that we all hang together on user interface issues. If there's a standard way to approach a problem, use the standard way. Rely on your own custom design only if you can PROVE to a skeptical observer that it's superior to the standard method.

The second method is to rely on the natural linguistic skills that all people have. People can learn languages rapidly; they have a lot of firmware for language interpretation. Take advantage of that! Use linguistic structures where possible. Think in linguistic terms. What's the subject, the verb, and the direct object of this command? Present your I/O in linguistic terms.

related essay: Towards a Linguistic Approach to Game Design

The third method is to throw some computer resource at the problem. Jeez, we have no problem throwing computer resource at graphics problems. We use megabytes of CD space, and megacycles of CPU time to come up with the sexiest graphics. Why not throw some of that resource at the problem of listening? For example, if you used a menu structure that presented the player with English sentences describing the player's options, then you could offer the player about a million different verbs with the expenditure of only 30 megabytes of CD storage space. Think of what you could do with a million verbs! That's twice as many verbs as there are words in the English language! I grant, there are other problems to consider (who's gonna design all those verbs?), but the basic point that expenditure of resource opens up a lot of doors remains valid.