Apparatus Images:What Ever Happened to Interactivity?

1. Vilém Flusser: Art and Criticism Must Work Against the Programmes

Technical images like photographs, films or videos, refer to written texts, the media philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920—1991) has pointed out. Writing brought about history, science and politics as its consequence. But its content was the images it had torn apart and arranged into lines in order to allow for causal one-to-one relations between those formerly pictorial elements, and to make critical thinking possible in the first place. When, finally, technical images—like the photograph—were invented, it was to render texts more easily imaginable and comprehensible. Technical images, however, are based on scientific theories and ideological beliefs, on texts. Therefore, technical images mean texts.

What we call an apparatus in our context is a machine that transforms texts into technical images and/or distributes them. Examples of this kind of apparatus are the photo camera, the public relations agency, the film industry, the television station or the museum of media art. The apparatus is based on technical and/or political programmes. In other words, it is highly ideological and always biased. There is no value-free technology. Images are meaningful surfaces, and photographs for example are of enormous political impact.

Arts that make use of technically complex machines—of apparatuses, rather than of simple tools—are called media art. Like modern artists, media artists have tried to violate the rules passed on to them. However, media artists have a further reason on top of the general modern wish to transgress the rules of the trade: they creatively abuse the camera, the microphone, the editing suite, the CGI software etc. in defiance of the rules, laws or intentions inscribed into and embodied by the very apparatus. They do so, because they believe they can only put the apparatus to artistic use if they make it work against its programme, against the inert apparatus itself, and against the text whose materialization the apparatus is.

“Photographers try to defend themselves against the absurd and the value-free inertia endemic to apparatuses.“¹ Vilém Flusser defines the apparatus as follows:

Apparatuses are black boxes which simulate human thought [...], thus mechanizing this thought in a way that in the future human beings will be less and less competent for it and will have to leave it over to the apparatuses to an ever larger extent.²

“The camera has been programmed to produce photographs, and every photograph is the realization of one of the virtualities contained in that program.”³ The apparatus is a human product and is manipulated by human beings. […] Apparatuses are tools obeying specific rules. Those who make use of them must keep to these rules. It is equally right to say that man functions in function of the apparatus as it is to say that the apparatus functions in function of man.⁴

The one who decides which photographs will appear and which will not appear in the media – in newspapers, magazines, on signs, on canned goods, in exhibitions – is a functionary of the media apparatus. He not only censors photographs, but he also decides through which of the available channels they should appear – whether as documents, whether suitable for politics or advertising, or as art. The judgement calls and decisions of the media functionary are directed back into the photographic industry through feedback channels, such as specialised publications and market research institutes. [...] This cybernetic feedback loop between media and industry functionaries produces ever truer, better, and more beautiful photographic images, that is, photographs that always fit more exactly the programming criteria of the apparatuses.⁵

Artists attempt to produce information in spite of and against entropy, against meaningless noise and against probability. Any photographer or other producer of technical images, who considers himself an artist—in other words, any media artist—must therefore necessarily struggle with the programme materialized in the apparatus.

The question to be asked of any photograph by the critic […] is: How far has the photographer succeeded in submitting the camera program to his own intentions, and by what methods? And: How far has the camera succeeded in deflecting the photographer’s intentions, and by what methods?⁶

The critic has to examine the structure of the apparatus and to decipher how the type of construction of the apparatus changes the reality to be depicted in the image. How for instance Kodak manipulates reality differently from Agfa. The structure of the apparatus is not politically and aesthetically neutral. It mirrors fundamental ideologies, and it has economic, social, psychological and aesthetic parameters that need to be deciphered by the critic.⁷

The thought process that we are pursuing here indicates just how much we need a photo criticism in the sense of a critique of photographic apparatuses and photographic distribution apparatuses. It has to uncover the apparatuses behind the apparatuses that program apparatuses. Through photographs, it has to critique the entire apparatus culture and all its totalitarian tendencies, including the apparatuses that program us. In doing so, we will discover a type of photographer who fights directly against the photo camera and the media – and, through them, totalitarianism.⁸

What can a media artist do in a situation like this? The answer given for more than thirty years now is: The artist can use the programmes frozen in the apparatuses against the intention of their authors. He or she can abuse them purposefully. While our lives take place increasingly inside the world of communicating machines, art can – and is supposed to – make an attempt to use this technology, to use these materialized concepts, in subversive ways.

Most—if not all—media have a predisposition for dialogical use. Various interests push their dialogical capacities aside and into oblivion. Before this happens, however, artists may seize the chance to raise awareness for this unwanted and widely unrecognized potential of the medium. The Sisyphean task of media art at this early stage was supposed to demonstrate the dialogical, creative and critical potential of these communication technologies. After their irreversible monopolization by business, politics and the military, however, media art can be nothing more than just a spanner in the works of these institutions and the media at their service. Such was the implicit political agenda of media art …

The awareness that machines, apparatuses and computers are more than simple tools like knives, hammers or drills has led to various efforts on the part of artists and theorists. There are two ways to look at the problem. One approach just takes the relationship between the artist (or author, creator, sender or producer) and the apparatus into account. The other one examines the relation between the artist on the one hand and the reader, receiver or consumer on the other—with the apparatus somewhere in between. Flusser’s phenomenological approach is to rather ignore the possibility of a distinction between the sender and the apparatus. Instead, he speaks of an “operator-apparatus-complex”, of a black box we do not need to know any structural details of in order to understand how it functions. Operator (artist, creator, sender, and producer) and apparatus melt into one.

This is, of course, a very unsettling notion in the eyes of many artists, who, firstly, still perceive of themselves much as they did in the 19th century, when ‘inspiration’, ‘creativity’ and ‘genius’ used to be the mysterious driving forces behind every ‘true’ artist, and, secondly, see themselves in the role of the subversive rebel—against the machine, against its programme and its code.

In order to salvage some of the mystery behind the creative process, artists have followed two different – and opposed – strategies: They have either ignored the existence of an apparatus in the communication process – and thus looked upon a software programme no differently than they would a hammer. Or they have tried to maintain the apparatus as a fully adequate member of the dialogue between sender and receiver, turning the latter into a ‘trilogue’. In an essay called ‘I, Apparatus, You’, Jenny Weight, from the School of Applied Communication in Melbourne, writes:

The core of my technosocial argument is that a trilogical relationship is formed when an apparatus mediates creative communication – the three partners in the technosocial undertaking are the human programmer/artist, the executing apparatus, and the human interpreter.⁹

There have been many similar attempts before to enhance the status of the machine, the apparatus, and the so-called ‘intelligent’ software in the process of communication between humans. All these endeavors have one thing in common: they fail in the face of the simple fact that apparatuses react according to a programme. The programme is 100% man-made, and it leaves no space for original or creative initiatives. Every single action is a reaction only. It has been written down by an author beforehand, and even if a ‘coincidence’ is generated, that, too is part of the programme, and the coincidence can never be more than a random choice from a limited assortment of preconceived and programmed ‘decisions’. It does not matter whether this kind of coincidence deserves the name ‘coincidence’ or whether the ‘creativity’ based on such a random generator deserves to be called ‘creativity’: the apparatus, in any case, is unable to act in any truly unforeseeable way. It can in no way contribute anything its programmer did not contribute before the so-called ‘trilogue’ takes place. Thus, the apparatus – while it can in no way be neglected as a part of the communication process – can not possibly be considered an equal partner in the communication between, for instance, author and reader.

If you really insisted on the computer as an active, dialogical—or trilogical—partner in the communication process, you would have to look at a previous communication process between the sender and the apparatus first, and then at a second one between an entity made up of these two and the receiver. Of course, in the apparatus you would find nothing but the frozen text or programme written by the programmer. And of course, the entity communicating with the receiver would be exactly what Flusser describes as the “apparatus-operator-complex”.

However, there is actually one way in which the apparatus is able to contribute unforeseeable, improbable information to the communication process: That is when its processor is rotting away and falling apart. As in all other dialogues, information is produced by deviation, by unwanted distortion of the original data, by noise entering into the channel. Thus, old, unreliable or decomposing, unpredictable processors are the only possibility, the only hope of a computer apparatus contributing anything truly informative or creative to a communication process. 

Flusser used a phenomenological method to recognise a certain “apparatus-operator complex“ as the motivating force behind all contemporary social and technological change. Flusser asks how this complex changes our interaction with the world when it transforms texts, such as history, into techno-images, such as television programmes, and thus impedes our perception of texts: “If [...] every historical action feeds the apparatus-operator complex, then history literally proceeds toward its end.“¹⁰

One may disregard the wheels and screws that constitute the apparatus (the countless ‘media’, ‘programmers’, and other human and quasi-human operators who compose it), and concentrate upon the images as they come out of the box left black […]. In other words, it is not necessary to analyse the whole hopelessly complex system that stands behind a TV program if one wants to understand the present crisis of rational thinking and acting.¹¹

Flusser’s version of the – once very popular – term ”end of history“ was that everything that happens today aims at becoming a TV program.

If the apparatus transforms linear texts into technical images, it also processes historical thinking into images that lack the linear, vectoral progression of verbal causality and finality.

Thus, the complex of apparatus-operator […] becomes a dam of history. It becomes what once was called utopia, the fullness of time, the Kingdom of the Lord, the communist society etc.  It is the goal of history to become a television programme. The apparatus-operator complex becomes a memory of history, preserved history. In movies, you can see Caesar or the landing on the moon over and over.¹²

Images are now always at hand. They surround us in eternal circles, and they have been stripped of their historical meaning.

The reason that technical images function this way is that they work like dams; they are surfaces which arrest flux. […] Technical images [...] suck all of history into their surfaces, and they come to constitute an eternally rotating memory of society. Nothing can withstand the centripetal attraction of technical images: no artistic, scientific or political act that does not aim at a technical image, no daily common action that does not wish to be photographed or filmed or videotaped. Everything desires to flow into this eternal memory, and to become eternally reproducible there. Every event aims at reaching the television or cinema screen or at becoming a photograph. […] The result is that every event or action loses its proper historical character¹³.

Of course, this has severe consequences not only for the assertion of a historically minded way to look at events. It also puts the technical image into a new role.

“Information is produced in dialogues. Discourses distribute this information in a way that allows its recipients to process new information out of it in future dialogues.“¹⁴

Communication is only possible if dialogues and discourses are in a balance. If, however, as in the present situation, a form of discourse dominates that stops dialogues from taking place, then the structure of society threatens to decompose into an amorphous mass.¹⁵

According to Flusser, the predominantly amphitheatrical system of discursive mass media, as well as the discursive pyramidal—and in tendency fascist—structure of modern public institutions like political parties, the church or administration, result at present in an imbalance that prevents dialogue from taking place.

Our situation is characterized by a massive superiority of discourses that program our behavior. The anonymous apparatus-operator complex produces these discourses. With the technological support of communication channels that send messages but do not receive them, they rain down on us continually. In this situation, dialogues only synchronize the information received from above.

“The masses do not conduct dialogues in the Greek sense, because they are subjected to a constant stream of discourses. This is why they have only information at their disposal that has been broadcast for everybody.“¹⁶

This situation cannot be changed in a pointless historical and political revolt against the presumed intention of the apparatus that is actually free of any intention. The only way to change it is to convert discursive structures and their technical materialization into dialogical ones.

Our dialogues go on as archaically as before the Industrial Revolution, and with the exception of the telephone they still take place the way they did at the time of the Roman Empire, while the discourses raining down on us make use of the latest achievements of science. If there is any hope to prevent the totalitarian danger of massification by means of programming discourses, it lies in the possibility of opening up the technical media to dialogue.¹⁷

Melentie Pandilovski wrote to me in one of his messages: “I surely remember a time when Interactivity was one of the new key words, whereas it has almost disappeared from the art jargon, just as quickly as it had been put up there.”¹⁸

Taking the thought of the theorist Vilém Flusser, I have tried in this presentation to sketch a theoretical approach to image apparatuses. Could such an approach explain, at least  hypothetically, the sudden disappearance of the concept of ‘interactivity’? And if so, how?

The term ‘interactivity’ has vanished from the scene at about the same time as ‘Big Brother’ shows and other programmes designed for a very passive kind of consumption, took over, about ten years ago.

Let us assume there has been a war going on between Art and the Apparatus. The apparatus’s capacity to devour images, texts, dialogue and poisonous art, to digest it and to transform it into aesthetic shit, may have simply turned out to be more powerful than the concept of a deviant, progressive, non-conformist avant-garde (media) art. Is the incompatibility of that process with the concept of  ‘interactivity’ the reason why the latter never really had a chance to catch on?

We have to realize that the idea of modern, deviant, ever-progressing art owes everything to modernity, to the belief in science, politics and progress, to a historical consciousness, to writing and linearity. But modernity has lost ground to an attitude that is no more based on writing but on technical images, not based on linearity but more complex modes of imagination. In this new world, the violation of borders has no artistic value in itself. ‘Art’ is a strange concept in the realm of apparatus culture. The successor of ‘art’ in the late 1980s and 1990s was that class of TV events such as the staged execution of the Ceaucescus, the attack on the World Trade Center, or the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Without television, these actions would have had very little effect.

We can only speculate what will come next. But we can be rather sure it will be a technical image. It will at first glance look as if it had a historical meaning, it will be designed to program our behavior, and it will be distributed in a one-way, discursive broadcast, top down.

Interactivity is not the only victim. Many genres of media art itself have fallen prey to the apparatus they had originally started out to provoke and put into question. Ironically, by doing so, they have provided more and more interesting fodder to Moloch, and it took their creators a long time to realize that. David did challenged Goliath, but Goliath simply ate him up. Many media artists are still not fully aware of the enormous, irresistible power of the apparatus and of the dams it can build.

Actions committed to history and against the apparatus, like monks burning themselves to death or students being killed in riots, are even better pretexts for TV programs than are deliberate scripts made by TV programmers. It may look as if the trend, in which writing is becoming subservient to image-making, planning to irrationality, and reason to magic, is increasingly automatic and autonomous of individual decisions.¹⁹

 “Nothing can withstand the centripetal attraction of technical images: no artistic, scientific or political act”²⁰.

This symposium is entitled “The Ideological Imaginary of the 21st Century”. I guess it is a bit early to say anything substantial about the 21st century in its seventh year. It may be car commercials; it may be weather-maps. Who would have been able in 1907 to describe the 20th century’s ideological visions that were, in retrospect, based on two world wars, communism, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, the landing on the moon, nuclear power plants, genetic engineering, the Internet and global warming?

However, we could talk about the present, and about a very limited sector of today’s culture, and risk a glimpse into there nearer future from there. But actually, none of us here is completely unbiased in this matter:

To achieve the distance necessary to observe the apparatus criteria, photo critics […] would have to be people who neither are employed by the apparatus nor work for newspapers, museums, or advertising agencies. Yet, it is not clear how such photo critics in the second sense of the word should make a living. This explains our inability to critique photographs. As apparatus functionaries, photo critics can theoretically be programmed and automated just like any other apparatus function.²¹

The term “ideological imaginaries” implies a visual universe with a linear substance, the equivalence of the flood of historically meaningful technical images dammed up by the apparatus and thus robbed and expropriated of their historical, ideological and political meaning. In order to get to their meaning, we would have to ‘read’ those images, those television programmes and those media art installations or video games, not with respect to their contents but with the aim of getting to the texts, theories, sciences, ideologies they actually mean. They surround us, but they are not meant to be ‘read’ any longer. Of course, this is—in principle—still possible, and its achievement is the objective of this symposium and many others. But the necessity and possibility of this kind of analysis is not what characterizes our situation today. Instead, it is the apparatus-operator complex itself and the admission that we all have become its operators regardless of whether we just buy goods at the supermarket, use iPods, watch TV, work as software engineers or produce or exhibit media art. It is indeed very important to analyse the ‘ideological imaginary’. But it seems even more crucial to investigate the effects of the apparatus and the kind of culture and political implications that are its consequences. They make up the core of our social and cultural existence today.

The apparatus as a medium is not the message: The message is not ‘apparatus’. The real meanings of the technical images produced by the apparatus lie in the ideology that allowed the construction of the apparatus.

Technical images like photographs did not originate in their search for truth, goodness, and beauty, and these values are not unattainable ideas that stand above them. Photographs originate in apparatuses and are distributed through apparatuses whose intention is to preserve themselves and multiply. The true, the good, and the beautiful are pretexts in the service of this intention.²²

Events turn into scenarios frozen into technical images that are constantly being reproduced by an inert apparatus for its eternal self-sustaining circuit.

If we do not succeed in critiquing techno-imagination and the apparatuses that produce it, “history in the strict sense of that term will come to an end, and we may easily imagine what will follow: the eternal return of life in an apparatus that progresses by its own inertia“²³. The apparatus’s pictorial diarrhoea will then make sure we will drown in a messy flood of kitschy aesthetic pictorial shit.

Self-sustaining inertia is not much of a value. It lets down all the apostles of conspiracy theories, of meaningful political systems or transcendental beliefs in society. Rather, it reminds us of the situation inside the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when HAL, a computer gone mad, is thriving for self-preservation only, at the cost of human life on board, while his human counterparts are still trying ‘understand’, to project meaning into HAL’s absurd messages.

In the case of the apparatus and the technical images it spits out, the programmers, the creators of the messages have long ago disembarked. The meaning of the images is the programme that made them. There is in fact more to the picture than meets the eye. But it is not the objects in the picture, and there is nobody who speaks to us through them. Actually, there have never been any speakers in the true sense at all. The image carries no meaning beyond whatever has constituted the apparatus itself. Elvis had left the building, long before the concert had even begun.

Andreas Ströhl was Director of Cultural Program of the Goethe Institut in Prague until 1997. Since 2004 he has been Director of the Munich International Film Festival.

Ideology of the Imaginary in the 21st Century was a Symposium presented by the Experimental Art Foundation, in association with the 2007 Adelaide Film Festival, and supported by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. Curated by Melentie Pandilovski.

© Copyright for all texts remains with the indivdual writers and the EAF