Abstract

Installation

h|u|m|b|o|t

Screenshot: H|U|M|B|O|T installation, 'net condition', Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999-2000 with a team of hackers, datatects, artists and architects assembled by Philip Pocock.

An Aesthetics of Participation rather than Consumption.

There are risks involved, of course, facing cybercinema strategies. If an author usurps his or her authorship, sharing authority over the production of media with audiences, as unpredictable as human nature is. Applying dated aesthetic criteria stamped by an imperative of passive audience consumption, cybercinema cannot be measured. The value added by a radical, and in some ways ancient, rebalancing of consumption and production, unfolding a new participatory aesthetic into a consumptive one, has far too few precedents of its own in technological media. Critics must rewind to pre-literate, pre-technolgical, oral and corporeal cultures, to imagine a set of criteria which may be applied to measure the value of a aesthetic rebalancing consumption and production by all participants, authors and audiences alike.

H|U|M|B|O|T audiences may passively trace previous interactors on the site, or lean forward and participate themselves. If the dramaturgy falls short due to an ingrained aesthetic based purely on consumption of our media, at least, a message encouraging individual involvement in the production of global culture is being delivered, along with lyrical and informational cybercinema. It may seem chaotic, just too many interactions, but essentially interactivity by individuals in the consensual creation of content (form and meaning) is as crucial a tool to ensure personal freedom and human rights as voting. There is only an active vote, and although it may seem lost in an ocean of votes, it does have meaning. To produce rather than consume political leaders may be not much more important in the unfolding century, as producing rather than consuming our media

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