|
|
|
The Interface Metaphor in the Digital Archive
The mechanized sound of an old movie projector is
triggered by the flickering motion of an early 1950's black and white movie.
A smiling woman turns her head towards the camera through a shower of film
scratches. A man walks into the frame and they kiss. To the right of this
scene a color panel comes alive with a fast moving camera pan of a graffitti
covered wall and stairs, the movement accentuated by the sound of heavy traffic
noises. The camera stops when it reaches the site of the kissing scene recorded
some fifty years earlier. With the click of the mouse, the screen changes
to an architectural floor plan animated by the sound of footsteps of what
we imagine to be archivists silently moving around.
An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive artwork on
CD-ROM designed as a museum exhibition display. The Archive features early
1950's Central European personal and official Communist material in the form
of home movies, objects, family documents, Socialist propaganda, money, sound
recordings, news reports, books, identity cards, photographs of public documents
and video footage of Central European places and events. These have been part
of my collection of objects and narratives related to the Cold War, gathered
during the past twenty years. The items, grouped into some sixty topics, were
organized thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan
of the former Workers' Movement (Propaganda) museum in Budapest, the original
contents of which have been in permanent storage since the end of Communism
in 1990.
Viewers experience this Archive both in the digital environment of the CD-ROM
and in the real-world architectural space of the gallery in which the computer
program is generally exhibited. The Archive's contents are listed in white
letters on the darkened gallery's walls surrounding the table on which the
computer is positioned. This visual cataloging serves to emphasize the installation's
reference to a research archive environment. An overhead projection and loudspeakers
amplify the computer's contents to engage the standing audience waiting their
turn. Each viewer interacts with the computer archive by selecting stories
according to their own interests and chance. As a result, they construct varying
synopses of the archive's content and context determined by the sequence of
their choices and the depth of their explorations.
The objects, sounds, publications and stories that make up the contents of
the Anecdoted Archive were collected during sporadic visits to Hungary
in the 1970's and 80's. They eventually evolved into a loose grouping of artifacts
that came to embody a biographical narrative about an identifiable place and
time. In the process of organizing the archive's contents, categories emerged
which established their own sense. At this juncture, a transformation began
to take place as the Archive's disparate elements of personal to official
and ideologically diversified material began to coalesce through a set of
internal links. The process by which diverse knowledges merge formally into
an institutionalized discourse exemplifies the dynamic nature of the archive
described by Michel Foucault as that "practice that causes a multiplicity
of statements to emerge as so many regular events." An interactive archive
consisting of digitally encoded contents became the means to fuse the items
and multiple references together to inscribe them into a unified form.
The somewhat irreverent idea of superimposing my personal narrative on the
floor plan of the Budapest's Worker's Movement museum provided structural
cohesiveness and a rich narrative potential. The appropriated museum's floor
plan was subdivided into color coded "rooms" to establish thematic
ordering for the accumulated fragments, stories and objects. These "chapters"
created contextual meaning for the archive's contents, defining hierarchical
relations and differences. The floor plan metaphor further emphasized the
discursive potential of its interface as a site where the personal narrative
could enter into dialogue with the formal structure and content of the museum's
authoritative history. The intent to contrast subjectivities and interpretive
commentaries in relation to the distant formality of official material functioned
to underscore this archive's supposition that historical inscription as an
act of narration refutes the notion of a single unified history, resulting
instead in fragmented narratives that contradict and disprove one another.
On first thought, a digital interactive archive might not seem that different
from its analog counterpart, for instance such as a standard library where
one samples books in a non-linear random fashion by selectively pulling them
off-the-shelf. However, near instant access to information across geographic
space, simpler modes of information storage with greater precision, simultaneous
retrieval of cross-media data such as sound, image and text, and the ever
increasing superior sorting and ordering capabilities of structural databases
over analog sequential models are some of the obvious advantages of interactive
digital media.
The transition from the real-world information environment to the digital
model involves an additional necessary component, the interface metaphor which
functions as an organizational model that conceptually situates the viewer
into a place and provides a framework or a logical way of accessing data.
Some of the current familiar examples include "mail", obviously
a system of sending and receiving communication, architectural environments,
and adventure "treasure hunt" narratives, each of which functions
according to the logic of their referential models. By knowing "the story"
or metaphor, one can successfully navigate within it to access the information.
These metaphor environments promise to be the key site for innovative developments
of a linguistic, symbolic, aesthetic, sensory and conceptual nature, redefining
the interactive viewer's experience within the digital environment.
Interface metaphors quantitatively transform the information that pass through
them. They charge the information contextually with new meaning on both the
symbolic and literal plane. When the viewer first begins to interact with
the Anecdoted Archive, the articulation of the interface's navigational
and visual structure becomes the initial experience of the archive's content.
The museum floor plan reference, the interface design, the pathways, and architectural
metaphor embody the environment through which the viewer must navigate in
search of stories. One's focused attention to the interface quickly diminishes
with the acquisition of maneuvering skills and becomes displaced by the search
and consumption of the Archive's stories. But on further reflection,
the somewhat taken-for-granted interface environment, consisting of title
bars, selection buttons, color coding, defined pathways and sequentially determined
events, reveals itself as the key component of the work - Its site of authorship.
Without it, the Archive's stories, images, sounds and references would collapse
into a meaningless mass of information; narratives without a place to belong,
odds & ends without a context and framework.
The interface metaphor provides the context that weaves the stories together
and gives the work its meaning. A narrative evolves in the viewers' minds,
constructed through the sequential accumulation of their viewing choices and
guided by expectations or a sense of truth or the real. In Vision &
Painting, Norman Bryson argues that the real is that which "lies
in a co-incidence between a representation and that which a particular
society proposes and assumes as its reality: a reality that involves the complex
formation of codes of behavior, law psychology, etc. all those practical norms
which govern the stance of human beings toward their historical environment."
In the digitally simulated environment where the viewer actively participates
in shaping the outcome of the story as it unfolds, to function within an interactive
archive is to engage in constructing a hybridized real, to make visible one's
beliefs within a reality articulated by metaphors.
Budapest, 1994
|