Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
before
"
artists were self consciously exploiting this fact. In an
essay from the
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s Umberto Eco talked about what he called 'open
work', works which the performer and the audience both help to
complete, through different kinds of engagement. 'Open works' are
indeterminate and open to different kinds of interpretation. Eco
cites the work of Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio, rather than that of
Cage, which work he may not have been aware of, as well as the liter-
ary work of Mallarmé, Joyce and Kafka, as examples of such open
works.
6
(Interestingly, in relation to the previous chapter, in another
essay of the same period Eco explicitly connects the issues of com-
munication and indeterminacy within such works with the then
recently developed Information Theories of Wiener and Shannon.)
7
But Cage, by stripping out all the other elements normally associ-
ated with a work of art, such as content, foregrounded the very
question of interactivity itself. This was particularly resonant in
relation to other events of the time. Two months after the premiere
of
1960
"
the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb. Issues
of nuclear defence and deterrence determined the development
of interactive technologies, such as those associated with SAGE.
Such issues also fostered a climate in which questions of time and
attention were of great importance, as well as those of emptiness
and the possibility or otherwise of hope. This was made explicit
in Rauschenberg's painting 'Mother of God', which preceded the
series of white paintings which so influenced Cage's composition
of
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"
. In this work a white circle is painted over a number
of city maps, constituting a grim commentary on the potential of
nuclear destruction. Cage's piece would seem to deny the nihilism
of Rauschenberg's use of white, by suggesting that empty spaces,
whether visual or audial, can become the loci of engagement, inter-
activity and, thereby, hope. If the beginnings of modern interactive
digital technology can be traced in practical terms back to the needs
of nuclear defence, then the reconfiguring of that technology as
a creative medium owes at least part of its impetus to the work of
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