Information Technology Reference
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we are performing. Interface metaphors rumble along like Rube Goldberg
machines, patched and wired together every time they break, until they
are so encrusted with the artifacts of repair that we can no longer interpret
them or recognize their referents.
This confusion over the nature of human-computer activity can be al-
leviated by thinking about it in terms of theatre, where the special relation-
ship between representation and reality is already comfortably established,
not only in theoretical terms, but also in the way that people design and
experience theatrical works. Both domains employ representations as con-
texts for thought. Both attempt to amplify and orchestrate experience. Both
have the capacity to represent actions and situations that typically do not
and cannot exist in the real world, in ways that invite us to extend our
minds, feelings, and senses to envelop them.
In the view of semioticist Julian Hilton (1993), theatre is “essentially the
art of showing, the art of the index. . . . it involves the synthesis of symbolic
and iconic systems (words and moving pictures) in a single indivisible
performed event.” Hilton employs the myth of Pygmalion and Galathea
(familiar to many as the basis of Bernard Shaw's play
Pygmalion,
or the mu-
sical version,
My Fair Lady
) to express the relationship of the theatre to the
domain of artifi cial intelligence. He describes the value of the theatre's abil-
ity to represent things that have no real-world referents in semiotic terms:
Galathea in a literal sense imitates nothing, and as such defi nes a class
of icon (the statue after all is a picture of itself) that can simultaneously
be an index. It is this category of non-imitative index which enables the
index to liberate its true power, whereby it has all the infi nite valency
of the symbol while retaining the immediate recognisability of the icon.
(Hilton 1993)
Computers are representation machines that can emulate any known
medium, as Alan Kay (1984) observed:
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine
or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can
dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media
that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many
tools. It is the fi rst metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom
for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet
barely investigated.
