The Art of Real Time

Daniel Palmer

[Originally published Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, eds. Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh & Michele Willson (Melbourne: Fibreculture, 2001) 215-223]

This paper sets out, in what is perhaps an appropriately compressed fashion, to explore some observations about temporal experience in new media culture. With a focus on real time imagery, it argues for a renewed examination of modes of "spectatorship" as it applies to digital media, and especially as it applies to artistic practices. I begin from the premise that our media culture of "real time" imagery is tied up with broader shifts in modes of participation in the media imaginary that are in turn a component of the changing character of contemporary capitalism. In this context, a considerable amount of new media art may be understood in terms of a resistance to the typical forms of participation demanded. I conclude with a few brief examples of recent Australian new media work.

"Real time" is both a technical temporality underpinning contemporary media culture and a cultural imaginary. The term is a slippery one, used, more often than not, with imprecision and hype. On the one hand, its meaning is revealed as historically and contextually variable. As the artist Bill Viola has said, the term only entered popular vocabulary as it became necessary ‘to distinguish our familiar time from the other kinds of time that were beginning to co-inhabit the present moment’.[1] A definitional and historical account of real time as it relates to mediated imagery would need to detail the emergence of "instantaneous" communication technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, television and of course computers, and describe various desires for visual "immediacy" from the nineteenth century to the present day. Within the present configuration of media technologies, we see both continuities between and complex mixtures of television’s electronic "liveness", video’s "customisation" and computerised interactive and networked images. On the other hand, there are certain features of contemporary real time media that we can identify as being unique to the digital realm. Specifically, as imagery is progressively becoming informationalised, made up of data, it may be tailored and manipulated by the end-user.

Lev Manovich offers what I think is a useful account of "real time screens", and their distinction from conventional representational systems.[2] Tracing their history to the radar, real time screens are those capable of instant changes in output, generating dynamic images experienced without delay and typically driven by some form of user interactivity. Real time screens, Manovich argues, oscillate between windows and control panels – inviting us to be both witness and participant. They therefore involve an individualised virtual address with media. Their imaginary worlds take us to the limit case of mediated time, towards a participatory realism that is based less on a referential than a temporal illusion (where the "index" shifts to the experiential time of the user’s body). But to note that real time image forms are both more and less than representational is not the same as the familiar paranoid response of Baudrillard, Virilio, Jameson, Castells et al against real time. While these writers are obviously different in many respects, and often insightful, their shared loathing of real time mediation – which, in their various accounts, abolishes, collapses or dissolves history, memory, reality and even time itself – needs questioning. A more nuanced way of conceiving the significance of the real time imaginary is surely required, one less insistent on the separation of the real from its representations, and one that thinks more carefully about our embodied involvement with different forms of screen imagery rather than assuming a passive recipient.

Now while real time screens are typically associated with the computer monitor, television is entering a process of digital transformation. Already, TV screens demand highly individualised modes of participation, but we are in the midst of seeing qualitatively distinct forms of viewing relations emerge. To track these changes, together with broad theories of the televisual and ethnographic analysis, we need to address media consumption, and the temporal logics involved in the production of isolated bodies in participatory visual environments. Jonathan Crary’s work on the production of the modern observer and Margaret Morse’s work on the bubble-like subjectivity of media engagement are helpful here.[3] Indeed, their work offers a parallel development in visual media theory to sociological accounts of the character of contemporary capitalism, such as Ulrich Beck’s forceful thesis of "individualization", in which a massively casualised labour force and the mediation of our everyday intimate exchanges by the global marketplace is producing an ever more individualised culture.[4]

Many writers have observed the link between the rise of the information economy and a post-industrial mode of prodcuction. Manovich shows that digital media is characterised by variability, which in practice often means its customisation for commercial purposes.[5] In fact, an individualising of references reflects the modus operandi of the real time imaginary. As Manovich notes:

although different software solutions have been developed to make Internet navigation more of a social experience – for instance, allowing remote users to navigate the same Web site together, simultaneously, or allowing the user to see who already accessed a particular document – individual navigation through the "history-free" data was still the norm at the end of the 1990s.[6]

Nevertheless, since the capacity for real time imagery is shaped by practical media contexts of production and reception, it is inadequate to simply link a media potential with an actual viewing relationship. We must study the overlapping characteristics of participatory visual culture – such as customisation, intimacy and vicarious embodiment – within contemporary media genres as diverse as news imagery, reality television and webcams, computer games, and media art.

Consider the news, a media genre of continued centrality to visual culture by virtue of the strength of its reality claims. Broadcast news imagery, especially in its "live" mode, needs to be understood in terms of participatory desires. As Morse suggests, television news establishes a virtual shared time between the newsreader and the viewer, with its mix of narrative and dialogical imagery, while maintaining a continual connection to the televisual "promise" of liveness.[7] Meanwhile, web-based news combines elements of the newspaper and radio, but increasingly simulates television’s direct address (eg. Ananova – the virtual newsreader) and through interactive real time selections of elements from large branded databases, from which variable "end-user" news products are generated. It is too early to say whether personally variable versions of the news, now available for different end users ("My News" constructed in the real time of my interaction), together with the rise of customisable video imagery on the Web (iVideo) and via digital television, is heralding a mass customisation of news imagery. Certainly, in the hours following the attack on the World Trade Center in September, CNN’s television live coverage appeared to win over customised web news (the more eccentric of which, such as nakednews.com, simply went offline). Nevertheless, in the sense that web news epitomises the utilitarian logic of Internet temporalityk, which take users out of the collective temporal context of mass media into their own personal routines and idiosyncrasies, an ongoing tension exists between broadcast imagery’s collective mediation of "our" imaginary relations with "others" and web imagery that simulates more intimate or individual relations with events. In the world of commercial news, real time imagery is employed to actively involve pockets of viewers and a certain form of spatialisation of media memory is emerging. Thus, as a dominant information form, the news is increasingly structuring a certain kind of imaginary in which personalisation stands in for participation.

If we turn to an entertainment genre such as the reality TV phenomenon, a televisual form heavily reliant on computerised production processes, or the related fascination with webcams, we see further instances of the viewing relationship beginning to be established on the basis of presumed immediacy. As plotless dramas, reality TV programs and webcams foreground the real "speaking for itself" – pointing insistently to their origins in the real world and to the camera mediation itself – offering an enhanced proximity to the real by virtue of their live-to-camera status. They utilise the temporal potentials at the heart of television and the web for their authentic "reality effect". Even as reality TV and webcams increasingly mimic and enhance one another, their differences are revealing (the paradoxical "live still" image of webcams can be read as television’s repressed other; where reality TV typically produces a generic spectacle of survival, webcams tend to monitor located bodies, etc.), but as the streaming media of event-based full motion webcasts predominates, televisual logics become ever more entangled. Both, however, reveal the importance of the body in real time media presentations. The exposed vulnerable "everyday" body, I would argue, is in the fact the preeminent subject of reality TV and webcams – and, unsurprisingly, both are dominated by touristic, voyeuristic, and at times surveillance-like modes of spectatorship.[8] A mute and anonymous relation is established to the embodied spectator, whose domestic media consumption invites a peculiar contemporaneity of viewer comfort with an other body under duress. In short, the temporal form (liveness) is matched by the referential remainder that exceeds the symbolic order (the body). In the process, reality TV and webcams undermine distinctions between public/historical and private/subjective space-times, between performers and spectators in the new democracy of spectacle, involving the viewer as a quasi-participant in an ongoing "reality" drama that unfolds over several viewing weeks and invites viewer interaction – simulated within the tyrannical premise of self-preservation. Their "real" time is ultimately the other’s potential suffering.

Or what about computer games, that exemplary digital cultural form, suggesting a new relation to visual representations based on live graphic interaction? Here, interactivity finds its most robust and popular manifestation within the unique realism of "game play". Thus computer games have a special claim to immediacy, since the player’s actions have a direct consequence on the virtual world often through first person point of view, and often explicitly against the clock. Visually, video games involve an interactive graphic media of dynamic simulation, an actually existing instance of "virtual reality" where digital icons become interactive and fluid. What separates game imagery from older media such as cinema is its power to induce direct stimulation through the degree of control and response offered to the user. Like all real time imagery, computer games involve both a heightened sense of embodiment, and the desire to escape the body’s spatial limits. Partial freedom, as regulated agency, augments the impression of kinaesthetic presence of involvement in the image. As live action interfaces, the real body is engaged, only to be disavowed in the dominant game theme of the player’s vicarious survival. Real time gameplay elicits an intensely subjective, experience of time. As games increasingly integrating themselves into everyday life rather than remaining a single event (with online multi-player games, and "reality games" such as The Sims or the more radical Majestic, which introduces game events into the player’s real life) we encounter the real time media logic of translating everyday time into media. Based on endless repetitions and fragmentation, intimations of mortality are repressed by commercial demands, which also conceal the uncanniness of the "presentness" of the interactive human-computer interface, only betrayed in the endemic problem of the lag factor (reminiscent of The Matrix, where "the real" is revealed in the glitches).

When we come to the relatively autonomous, non-commercial "meta-media" aesthetic space designated as "new media art", we find a strand of practice which takes media time as its subject offering reminders of the uncanny gaps and tensions across the real time imaginary. Some of the basic strategies of temporal estrangement can be traced directly back to early explorations with video art. Experiments in live mediation and feedback loops by artists such as Dan Graham were targeted specifically to critique the illusions of presence generated by conventional television. At the same time, in the sanctified gallery context, as Morse also argues, video art installations involve the viewer in a kinaesthetic performance with the artwork, now only complete with the engagement of the user. The result is a new kind of temporal and experiential engagement with the art "object", distinct from the contemplative distance assumed by most visual art of the past. With the gradual combination of video and computers in the 1980s – exemplified by the work of Myron Krueger and Jeffrey Shaw – a tendency has emerged towards a meta-commentary on the logic of interactivity.

The rise of the home computer in the 1980s and the Internet since the mid-1990s has opened up a new space for artistic experimentation and the experience of artwork in real time. Unsurprisingly, a dominant genre of "net.art" has constituted a critique of the narrow understanding of real time interaction found across the commercialised web.[9] Much of it formally deconstructs the consumer driven logic of the Internet and its urge to virtual homogeneity (so called "browser art"). But net art is perhaps first of all, an experience in real time. This is well illustrated in the art of telepresence, where the real and virtual world meet in a shared temporal image (Ken Goldberg’s Telegarden (1995) being a well known example, in which a remote controlled arm and camera allowed multiple users to view and interact with a garden filled with living plants). Such work, in its implicit deconstruction of the fictional presence of mass media and its reliance on a similarly intimate relation with the viewer, exaggerates the otherness of real time imagery. In doing so, the art of real time offers the hope of a more differentiated experience of time, one for instance concerned with the interruptive force of memory. Indeed, far from being about the loss of history, new media art seems to have a singular obsession with remembering.

In this context, one tendency within digital art that especially interests me is the enlivenment of photographic images by their insertion into the on-screen environment, as in the use of QuickTime VR. Artists working with the panoramic frames of QuickTime VR often emphasise embodied spectatorship, and a desire to remove the frame, to make the image more dialogical. This corresponds with an important development in contemporary art to examine gaps between personal and cultural memory, and to examine trauma as a paradoxically enabling experience of temporal disjuncture. A few recent Australian interactive CD-ROM works will have to suffice here to illustrate this point. Dennis Del Favero’s Cross Currents (1999) begins with an image of an ordinary living room. One can click on various "hotspots", and in real time, move to another screen space and time – a device frequently used in narrative computer games to move to another scene, or simply to move closer to an object to examine it in detail, to get to the next "clue" stage. In Cross Currents, these nodes become entry points to memory, and specifically to sites of "unclaimed experience" (as Cathy Caruth describes trauma).[10] The work investigates the interpersonal dynamics of the sex slave trade industry in Western Europe: we are rapidly transported from a living room to images of a train rushing through a landscape, a war-ravaged city, and to the sound of a woman crying. Such disjunctive editing is a radically different experience than viewing an ordinary photograph, where (as John Berger notes of the best images) the viewer is invited to give the image a past and future, in other words to invest the image with narrative potential. In Cross Currents, the fragmentary visual narratives are scenes waiting to be explored, something like a cross between a computer game and an avant garde film, where the imagery contains a coexistence of times, and the computer user becomes a complicit witness.

Dennis Del Favero, Cross Currents (1999)

In Uncle Bill (2000), Debra Petrovitch deals with memory and child abuse. Set against the industrial backdrop of a post World War II Australian steel mining town, its narrative explores the psyche of a young girl whose fragmented memories of a malevolent and domestically violent upbringing are evoked through flashbacks and sonic resonances. Possibilities for escape to barren exteriors and apocalyptic landscapes are embedded in the foreboding interior of a fibro house, which we are free to explore. Uncle Bill digitally combines video, 16mm archival film footage and sound to take the viewer into a disturbing psychosexual space in which we must create a synthesis of memory from cut-up visual and sonic residues.

Debra Petrovitch, Uncle Bill (2000)

Like Uncle Bill, Ross Gibson & Kate Richard’s Darkness Loiters (2000) offers a new use for photographic memories. Based on a hidden New South Wales archive of post WWII scene-of-the-crime photographs, the work uses forensic images to open up possible spaces for imaginary narratives (Gibson calls it a ‘story engine.. that continually strikes little hammers in the mind’ ).[11] Within randomly emerging black and white images, a trace of bodies looms in every scene, though most are unpeopled. Combined with haiku-like lines of suggestive text, the work calls up surrealist juxtapositions and poetic condensations, but also explores the intersections between personal and cultural memory and the imaginative work required to live historically. In all of these works, archives of lens-based media are employed to strategically layer experiences of mediated time. To explore what these shared media histories mean for our sense of belonging is a positive project for artists working with digital images – an effort to simultaneously deconstruct the fictional discourse of presence that haunts the mass media to by giving it a memory that it otherwise structurally lacks and to make intimate public media history. Needless to say, the potentials for this kind of memory-work on the web are enormous, but as yet only just emerging in Australia.

Ross Gibson & Kate Richard, Darkness Loiters (2000)

To return to where we started, if real time screens are engendering forgetful and individualised new media subjects, that process is neither entirely technologically determined nor absolute. Indeed, I would suggest that the intensely subjectified time sense staged by currently dominant forms of imagery in real time is also creating a social, historical and public "excess" whose oblique witness returns within the media imaginary as the everyday body (in pain). This particular return of the repressed is consciously evident in the case of new media art: we hardly need a Stelarc to remind us that the art of real time is an art of embodiment.

1 Bill Viola, 'Video, Being & Time: Interview with Stuart Koop and Charlotte Day', LIKE 8 (Autumn 1999): 20-26;23.

2 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 99.

3 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999) and Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

4 For the thesis of "individualization", see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992) and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

5 Manovich, 12.

6 Manovich, 273.

7 Margaret Morse, ‘The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition’ in Tania Modlesk (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 55-79.

8 See Daniel Palmer, 'Webcams: The Aesthetics of Liveness', LIKE 12 (Winter, 2000), 16-22.

9 See the works collected at Rhizome: www.rhizome.org

10 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

11 Ross Gibson, ‘Negative Truth’, Photofile 58 (December 1999): 30-32;32. Ross Gibson & Kate Richard’s Darkness Loiters (2000) exhibited at the e-Media Gallery at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in November-December 2001, as part of the 24-7 Digital Art Program supported by Cinemedia’s Digital Media Fund.