I must admit that I disagree with the broad statement “Technology add nothing to art” but I agree with what Penn (who I might add is a he, unless of course you already knew that and are making up for years of gender discrimination by referring to everyone as a she – jk) says afterwords, at least in relation to narrative.

I think that you’ve hit on something when you point out the difference between an audience and a user, however, I think that you can be both when it comes to art. I think that it is possible to passively consume art but there are also cases where choice can be conducive to an interactive experience of the artwork. So, I guess its not so much a matter of choice, but the choices one is being asked to make in relation to subject that is up for debate here.

But choice! – what a wonderful thing. Anyway, there’s some good psych research that shows that artificially restricted choice results in test-subjects enjoying test-tasks more. I can’t pull up the reference off the top of my head, but the conceptual reason for this seems to be: with choice comes responsibility, and if a test subject chooses to do a task, and then does it poorly, there is the felt responsibility that the reason for the negative outcome has to do with a failure of their own, namely, making a bad choice. Still, it should seem true, at least after a little reflection, that too much choice can be a bad thing, viz. HCI at least. I don’t want my laptop to ask me every time it boots whether it should connect to this or that 802.1 network. I’m quite happy to have certain processes automated; indeed, relieved. Taking away choice can lead to a simpler and better user experience, so long as the choices taken away are (perhaps somewhat ironically) choices that the user would choose, if given the opportunity, to have taken away.

Anyway, here’s another interesting point. I recently participated in a study being run by a fellow grad-student in the art department. I’m not exactly sure what hypothesis they were testing, but their project was quite interesting. They coded a little java program that did the following things: started a web-crawl at a page randomly selected from a list of pages which had Marxist or social revolutionary content, and then began it’s crawl by more or less randomly following links from that page. The user would see, in the applet window, snippets from the crawl, interspersed with, e.g., almost meaningless Marxist slogans and pictures. The applet would also search for e-mail addresses on the pages it found, and send out an form-letter e-mail indicating to whoever received the e-mail that a web-page had been viewed by the program, and asked the reader of the to respond with their thoughts.

The philosophy behind all of this was situationism; the program was an attempt to do online something the situationists loved to do in Paris in the 1960′s: walk around without much of a plan, and experience things as they came, and I suppose utter Marxist and revolutionary slogans amongst themselves while doing this. The situationists didn’t really have an intention to interact with the environment in any particular way, nor was there right way or a wrong way to go about these walks. Of course, intellectually, these walks could be seen to, e.g., challenge capitalist modes of interacting with the environment by presenting through example alternative ways of moving through space. You don’t have to go into a store just to buy things, for instance. Still, on that interpretation, the walk has a point, and I gather they wanted to avoid that. Anyway, this applet simulated the walking, the Internet simulated Paris, and, importantly, the user of the applet was entirely passive through-out: she could only watch what the applet found, and could not make a choice about what would be shown to her, except, of course, by stopping the applet.

When I was debriefed after the experiment, the questions I was asked by the people running the study all centred on choice; did I enjoy not having a choice in the matter of what I was seen? How did it make me feel about my computer, realizing that I didn’t have total control over my computer? I was really puzzled by their questions, and I gathered that most of the other study participants hadn’t really enjoyed being entirely passive subjects. Perhaps they were testing the principle that HCI projects should always seek to maximize user choice. Perhaps they were testing the interactions between art concepts of space. Who knows. It was all very po-mo.

Anyway, assuming that my hunch was right about the other users – that is, they hadn’t really enjoyed the applet – then this, combined with the comments about (assuming they are right), seems to imply the following moral: choice may be necessary such that certain things, like art and using a computer, are generally enjoyable. However, the relationship between choice and enjoyment is pretty complex, and it has to be proportioned in the right way. Too much user choice leads to bad OS design; but too little authorial choice leads to bad art.

And in a way, this might suggest answer to the question, What’s one difference between a user and an audience? The answer, it seems, is: a user is allowed some choices in a domain, but not too many. An audience, by contrast, is allowed none. Likewise, the difference between a programmer and an artist seems to be this: the programmer proportions choices, sharing them, in a way, with the user. The artist, by contrast, has no corresponding egalitarian responsibility. But both the process of programming and creating art can be beneficent, as both can be pursued entirely to further the audience’s or user’s enjoyment.