— Symbiogenic Experience

In his recent paper “The Implicit Body as Performance: Analyzing Interactive Art” , Nathaniel Stern argues that Mark Hansen & Katherine Hayles privilege technology in their analysis of interactive art experience. He argues that their analysis treats the body as if it merely responds to technology and that the body and technology are characterized as two “extant entities”, with each acting as a “catalyst or glue” to combine one with the together. In contrast, Stern argues that the body, technology and world are not “pre-formed” and that interactive art “intervenes into entwined relationships that are always already emerging” . Yet, in her discussion of Simon Penny’s piece “Traces”, Hayles says that embodiment emerges from dynamic interactions with the environment. This seems to contradict Stern’s claim that Hayles posits or presupposes a distinction between artwork and a participant. It appears here that Hayles is arguing, much like Stern that a participant’s embodiment is realized only through relational, dynamic, co-emergent interactions with the environment that Hayles says are always in flux. Thus, the a priori co-emergence of body and artwork that Stern emphasizes is implied, though not completely spelled out, in Hayles’s analysis. While Stern is right to point out this potential contradiction and source of ambiguity, it nevertheless leads to some confusion regarding the body and embodied experience with regard to the interactive artwork. I believe the confusion stems from a lack of consideration about the notion of boundaries and it this concept that I would like to focus my discussion on here.

Stern eschews discussion of boundaries, arguing that in effect they don’t exist and are presupposed by Hansen and Hayles. His analysis draws from performance theory and Brian Massumi’s theory of the body as relational in order to construct his analytical model. Yet It seems to me that there are strong connections here to enactive cognition (whose roots can be traced by to cybernetics and autopoietic theory) and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology, evinced by Stern via his notion of body and world co-determining one another through recurrent interactions. In addition, there is also a similarity to the idea of cybernetics showcasing a world of “emergent becoming” that Andrew Pickering describes . Further drawing from these areas may help clear up the confusion I mentioned above. This is where I would like to begin my discussion of boundaries.

Though not at the forefront for their analysis of interactive art, Hansen and Hayles’s concept of boundary is drawn more or less directly from cybernetics and autopoietic theory. For a closer examination of the interrelated cybernetic concepts of boundary, closure, circularity and autonomy we can turn to Hansen and his notion of “system-environment hybrids” (SEHs) . Arguing against Hayles’s call for a total dissolution of boundaries , Hansen instead argues for a flexible and adaptive understanding not only of system boundaries and the concept of closure as originally developed by its authors , but also more broadly, for an understanding of the legacy of neocybernetics. Hansen asserts that the technical sophistication and intensity of our environment has evolved to such a degree that we must pay closer attention to the agency wielded by it (through increasingly technical means). This agency calls for a more provisional, dynamic, contingent and ultimately less stable notion of closure, thus differentiating system closure from autopoietic closure. Like systems proper, SEHs reduce environmental complexity through contingent selection of particular environmental processes, which may be described as a form of boundary formation. What distinguishes an SEH is the very nature of this boundary formation, one where the distinctions between system and environment are less discrete and always already in (re)development. Thus, as Hansen notes, they realize their autonomy “through constitutive relations with alterity” (emphasis in original) wherein the (increasingly technical and “intelligent”) environment itself can compel or suggest changes. Instead of the organism selecting which aspects or perturbations of the environment are relevant to it (as in traditional autopoiesis), the environment itself can force or suggest certain changes in the organism rather than merely being a source of perturbations.

We see here Hayles’s and Stern’s analysis is not as different as it may appear. Hayles calls for a total dissolution of boundaries, while Stern avoids discussion of boundaries altogether, presumably because they don’t exist in the first place. What is never considered is the (somewhat paradoxical) idea of evolving, permeable but nevertheless still present boundaries that characterize the openness to alterity and environmental agency that is at crucial of the co-emergent processes that Stern calls for and which I assert are a central component of the emergent arts. Hansen’s more nuanced and granular notion of boundary is crucial for appreciating how in in his words, the “biological flexibility of the human being can open up new cognitive dimensions but only when correlated with the most creative, culturally and technologically catalyzed interactional possibilities” . Thus, this sense of a collective form of agency I believe can be brought into high relief via the varying relations of alterity and “creative interactional possibilities” common in the emergent arts. More to the point, this biological flexibility made possible by shifting, contingent boundaries is, I assert, how Stern’s amplification of “entwined relationships” are made possible. Closure, after all, is what gives a system its autonomy. This autonomy is crucial for any interactive art experience that is characterized by an intervention into “entwined relationships”. Thus it stands to reason that the multiple and contingent levels of closure made possible by shifting, evolving boundaries result in variations and degrees of autonomy and thus precisely the kinds of complex, diverse and always emerging relationships that Stern describes and that characterize the emergent arts.

There is still work to be done here in connecting these ideas with the experience of an interactive artwork. How is this collective form of agency arise or emerge in experience? Like Hansen, I am asserting that the alterity of intelligent machines is “a crucial source of connection to a world ever more difficult to grasp directly” , and that this can give rise to what I call symbiogenic experience. Making these connections between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and these neocybernetic theories is the task that lies ahead.

Works Cited