INTERACTIVE MODULAR UNITS 2
DESCRIPTION:
The interactive modular unit or IMU, evolved from the many different sources and interests that form the basis of “The Work”.
It deals with the interrelationships of all people, things, thoughts, events and concepts.
Interactivity
Interaction is a kind of action which occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect (or more) is essential in the concept of interaction instead of a one-way casual effect. Combinations of many simple interactions can lead to surprising emergent phenomena. It has different tailored meanings in various sciences, and now we will apply the term also in the arts.
In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of Interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels: Noninteractive, when a message is not related to previous messages; Reactive, when a message is related only to one immediately previous message; and Interactive, when a message is related to a number of previous messages and to the relationship between them.
Interactivity is similar to the degree of responsiveness, and is examined as a communication process in which each message is related to the previous messages exchanged, and to the relation of those messages to the messages preceding them.
Human to human communication
Human communication is the basic example of interactive communication. Because of that, many conceptualizations of interactivity are based on anthropomorphic definitions. For example, complex systems that detect and react to human behaviour are sometimes called interactive. Under this perspective, interaction includes responses to human physical manipulation like movement, body language, and/or changes in psychological states.
Human to artefact communication
In the context of communication between a human and an artefact, interactivity refers to the artefact’s interactive behaviour as experienced by the human user. This is different from other aspects of the artefact such as its visual appearance, its internal working, and the meaning of the signs it might mediate. For example, the interactivity of a walkman is not its physical shape and colour (its so-called "design"), its ability to play music, or its storage capacity—it is the behaviour of its user interface as experienced by its user. This includes the way you move your finger on its input wheel, the way this allows you to select a tune in the playlist, and the way you control the volume.
An artefact’s interactivity is best perceived through use. A bystander can imagine how it would be like to use an artefact by watching others use it, but it is only through actual use that its interactivity is fully experienced and "felt". This is due to the kinesthetic nature of the interactive experience. It is similar to the difference between watching someone drive a car and actually driving it. It is only through driving the car that you can experience and "feel" how this car differs from other cars.
New Media academic Vincent Maher defines interactivity jeep as "the relation constituted by a symbolic interface between its referential, objective functionality and the subject."
Interactivity in new media
Interactivity also relates to “new media art” technologies where humans and animals are able to interact with and change the course of an artwork. Artists and researchers around the world are working on unique interfaces to allow new forms of interaction that extend beyond the QWERTY keyboard and the now ubiquitous mouse. Artists, such as Stelarc work to define new interfaces that challenge our notion of what is possible when interacting with machines. His Hexapod for example looks like an insect though walks like a dog and the locomotion is controlled by shifting the body weight and turning the torso. Others like Ken Rinaldo have defined unique interfaces for fish in which Siamese Fighting Fish are able to control their rolling robotic fish bowls to interact across the gap of the glass. Simon Penny's Petit Mal allows a two wheeled sculpture to sense and respond to human presence and intelligently navigate the environment.
The phenomenology of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty can shed light on the user experience.
Phenomenology has three meanings in philosophical history, one derived from G.W.F. Hegel in 1807, one derived from Edmund Husserl in 1920, and one derived from Martin Heidegger in 1927.
For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology".
For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is an approach to Philosophy that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the Essence of what we experience. This has been called a "transcendental phenomenology". Husserl's view stems from the School of Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas.
For martin Heidegger, the phenomenological vision of a world of beings must be bypassed toward the apprehension of the Being behind all beings, that is, as an introduction to ontology, albeit an ontology that remains critical of metaphisics. This has been called an "existential phenomenology".
The phenomenological dispute between Husserl and Heidegger influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Munich Phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder in Germany and Alfred Shütz in Austria); and Paul Ricoeur.
Art
It is important to clarify, and indeed emphasize, that the attention Merleau-Ponty pays to diverse forms of art (visual, plastic, literary, poetic, etc) should not be attributed to a concern with beauty per se. Nor is his work an attempt to elaborate normative criteria for "art." Thus, one does not find in his work a theoretical attempt to discern what constitutes a major work or a work of art, or even handicraft (l'artisanat).
Still, it is useful to note that, while he does not establish any normative criteria for art as such, there is nonetheless in his work a prevalent distinction between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in the Phenomenology of Perception (p 207, 2nd note {Fr. ed.}) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language (language parlé et parlant) (The Prose of the World, p 17-22 {Fr. ed.}). Spoken language (le language parlé), or secondary expression, returns to our linguistic baggage, to the cultural heritage that we have acquired, as well as the brute mass of relationships between signs and significations. Speaking language (le language parlant), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at the moment where it makes itself an advent of sense.
It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions.
On the subject of painting, Merleau-Ponty claims that at the moment of his creative work, the painter can start with a certain idea and desire to actualise it, or else he can begin with the material in an attempt to release a certain idea or emotion, but in each case, there is, in the activity of painting, a pregnancy between the elaboration of expression and the sense that is created (trans? - une prégnance de l’élaboration de l’expression avec le sens qui est mis en œuvre). Beginning with this basic description, Merleau-Ponty attempts to explicate the invariant structures that characterise expressivity, attempting to take account of the over-determination of sense that he had described in "Cezanne's Doubt".
Among the structures to consider, the study of the notion of style occupies an important place in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence". In spite of certain similarities with André Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux's "The Voices of Silence". Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work, "style" is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist's individuality. Sometimes it is used, on the contrary, in a very metaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a mystical sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an "über-artist" expressing "the Spirit of painting". Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorisation of an artistic school or movement.
For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration the dimensions of historicity and intersubjectivity.
The primacy of perception
From the time of writing Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with John Locke, that perception was not the causal product of atomic sensations. This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly in behaviorist psychology. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the life world (to the 'Lebenswelt')
This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema). Thus, the correlation between noesis and noema becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness.
However, in studying the posthumous manuscripts of Husserl, who remained one of his major influences, Merleau-Ponty remarked that, in their evolution, Husserl's work brings to light phenomena which are not assimilable to noetic-noematic correlation. This is particularly the case when one attends to the phenomena of the body (which is at once body-subject and body-object), subjective time (the consciousness of time is neither an act of consciousness nor an object of thought) and the other (the first considerations of the other in Husserl led to solipsism).
The distinction between "acts of thought" (noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (noema) does not seem, therefore, to constitute an irreducible ground. It appears rather at a higher level of analysis. Thus, Merleau-Ponty does not postulate that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which supposes at the outset a noetic-noematic ground. Instead, he develops the thesis according to which "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that its conceptualisations should be re-examined in the light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis.
MODULAR
The interaction between all the different elements that surround us, right down to the atom and gluons that hold them together, make each and every minute dust particle an intrinsic and interactive modular unit. Atoms interact with each other and modulate as units.
The concept of modularity resurfaces at the scale of organs and developmental units. Why are there distinct cell types organised into spatial aggregations (organs), and what are the benefits of having a segmented body plan, containing different modules (for instance, thoracic and abdominal segments in an arthropod) and where one of the possible differences between species is in the number of each type of module they possess?
Interestingly, this property has led researchers to suggest that modularity imparts a certain degree of evolvability to a system by allowing specific features (i.e. network sub-groups) to undergo changes without substantially altering the functionality of the entire system. Essentially, each module is free to evolve within, so long as the interfaces between modules remain consistent. This would suggest that the metabolic pathways at the edges between modules are relatively more constrained. It is thought that there exists an optimal degree of modularity for each given organism.
We, as carbon based life forms interact with each other and modulate as units. We interact with our surroundings and in turn our surroundings interact with us, as does every living creature, responding to an event that alters its nature, composition and behaviour.
A module is a self-contained component of a system, which has a well-defined interface to the other components; something is modular if it includes or uses modules which can be interchanged as units without disassembly of the module. Design, manufacture, repair, etc. of the modules may be complex, but this is not relevant; once the module exists, it can easily be connected to or disconnected from the system.
A typical phrenology chart (pictured on the left) depicts the "modules" of the human mind as compartmentalised physical locations in the brain. This literal visualization is perhaps best viewed as a metaphor for a cognitive (ie. conceptual) view of modularity, though research has shown certain general faculties to be localized to particular regions. This theory however is now being seriously questioned, as these regions now seem to be overlapping.
The IMU has no definite shape or form and can be composed of any element. It is something that in a way escapes by its very nature any description that can pin it down as definite.
The interaction and modulation of the unit can happen in any way, and you can find it in any place. The interaction between a peanut and the teeth, a sprig of hay and the wind, a propeller and sea water, as the example of man and car above, even numbers interact with each other and become different units. There is a link to transformation that we will explore further on, as modulation and transformation have an interactive relationship worth looking at in depth. I will touch lightly on the mathematical roots that this entails, even though the great important this has to explain some of the more complex aspects of this theory, make it unavoidable to bring mathematics into the field of Art, where its role has always been of the utmost important in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature etc.
Proportion and the golden rule are a clear example of this.
In order to simplify the visual aspects, which are the starting point, we shall start by explaining the role of the artist as an IMU the next time.
THE ARTIST AS AN IMU
Imagine an orchestra. The composer comes forth as a stimulator of the interaction between the musicians (the modular units). It is with the interaction of these units that we can produce “Art”.
So what exactly is the role of the artist? Is he the stimulator that makes the piece possible as a work of art? In this scenario, the painter is a stimulator as well. His painting is only “Art” after the interaction with the observer. The painting as an object is not “Art”. It is only so after the interaction with the viewer. It is after this interaction that we can say that it is a work of art.
It is therefore the interaction that becomes the most important moment in the life and death of a piece. It is this interactive moment that becomes the crucial make or break in any situation. We shall therefore concentrate at this moment our effort to unravel this interactive moment or event. “The Act” of thinking something into existence.
THE ACT: next
