Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars – A perceptual difference in telematic space

Through descriptive accounts of my working practice and its general post-structuralist standpoint it is my intension to describe and convince the reader that the activity of an interactive art installation viewer is far more complex than simply becoming a user (or a browser) – a commonplace term for the new media art viewing public associated with the activity of navigating through screen based interactive systems. Through the increasing interest in an open-systems approach to interactivity that embodies generative data and undefined personal experiences – as oppose to relying on a closed-system of finite variables that default back to there original state upon leaving the piece, the user is rapidly becoming a performer or actor within the new organic narrative environments defined through avatars and agents in both online screen based interaction and offline interactive environments, or as Andrea Zapp refers to as “story rooms” [1] – a mediated space that encapsulates its “performers” in a complex social interchange in the form of a new media narrative. This social move towards the public performer is commonplace at every cultural level from endless phone in radio stations to ubiquitous surveillance observation and the global domination of reality TV – perhaps best encapsulated in Peter Weir’s The Trueman Show in 1998. In the same way that Lacan suggested the human psyche is constructed in the mirror as if on stage in front of us, I am suggesting the method of identity construction is taking place on the new global media stage and it is in the form of interactive telematic environments and their user determined narratives that we are able to become consciously aware of the performer role we are adopting at all social and cultural levels.