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Burning the Interface: Artists' Interactive Multimedia

1999
Mike Leggett
Thesis

"A statement could use the narrative form and the first person singular and begin on the first day of life, or first day of school, or college, as a student, as a teacher, as an artist. Hacking into the substance of what seems important about the topic of interactive multimedia could also use the narrative form and construct that comforting umbilical tube that moves its nourishment - “starting at A, through K, to Z”.
But such a monocular viewpoint is not how the world is encountered and is certainly not adequate to describe my research into interactive multimedia and the way in which it has been used by artists as a medium of expression. There are too many complex relationships. The narrative descriptive form, the thesis, with an introduction, a middle and a conclusion for instance, has a tendency towards over simplifying the research process as well as the reception of an understanding of outcomes from the project. The very act of ordering these words is unrelated to the temporal sequence in which phases and details occurred. The choice of words and the whole technology of language as a reductive process is not the most appropriate for conveying the complexity of another iterative technology, especially one that in these early days of its definition and development, finding both material and poetic form." Extract from Introduction.