space*c open gallery, the private collection of bearbricks

Commonly, people do not think that the collective something lacks the reflection. The usual belief for the collection is represented simply unreasonable immersion. However, as we discover the Google as the power, any collection mirrors the will. And gradually this tendency become stronger. The triad of collecting-reflecting-representing now decisively constructs the central pillar of the house named power. For example the geeky collection of valueless stuffs was blamed for its unproductivity. But even this blame is a element of the discourse which surrounds that unproductivity. And by this discourse, the unproductivity starts to produce something in the form of discourse. Throughout this way, any kind of will to collect is always a latent power. In my beliefs, we can discover this unconscious power machine is working around us. Take a close look how the unproductivity of the work of art eloquently produces the immaterial discourses and the material uselessness by the logical but self-effacing collection of modern museums and individual collectors.

컴퓨터기반 시각예술작품에 나타나는 들뢰즈의 안면성

컴퓨터 기반의 시각예술작품은 상호작용성을 획득하기 위해 다양한 종류의 입력장치를 가지고 있다. 그리고 이렇게 받아들인 신호를 처리하여 시각적인 결과물을 다양한 종류의 스크린에 투사한다. 관객의 적극적 참여가 필요하다는 점에서 컴퓨터기반시각예술작품은 예술작품에 대한 새로운 시각을 요구한다. 기존의 시각예술에 비해 컴퓨터기반시각예술작품은 매우 동적이다. 프로그래밍을 이용한 상호작용성은 관객의 행동에 다양한 방법을 반응한다. 센서를 통해 입력된 신호는 컴퓨터의 처리를 거쳐 면에 투사된다. 사용자의 반응은 컴퓨터 처리 과정에 개입하여 투사된 결과에 영향을 준다. 이러한 일련의 과정은 얼굴이 반응하는 과정과 동일하다. 얼굴은 타인의 시선, 움직임에 반응하여 표정을 바꾼다. 표정없는 얼굴은 다른 사람을 마주하면 표정을 드러낸다. 이러한 과정은 컴퓨터 기반의 시각예술작품이 기능하는 것과 많은 유사점을 가진다.

A computer-based interactive art as a white wall / black hole system in Deleuzian understanding

For Deleuze, the white wall / black hole system represents the intersection of two axes, signifiance and subjectification.

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies†.

Usually, the audiences in interactive art believe that they are manipulating the artwork by themselves. Every sensing device which is connected to the computer system detects human activity so precisely that the computer system as an artwork functions as programmed by artist. At a glance, this system undoubtedly gives the right to operate the artwork to the audience. Moreover, the fact that the artwork does not function until the audience starts to act gives more probability to that belief. But the odd thing, in the view-point of software engineering, is that the audience is not so much an active subject as an adopted catalyst. As a participant, spectator, operator, whatever, the person who is involved in the interactive art behave as a set of pseudo-class. Basically, modern computer program is executed on the basis of the philosophy of Object Oriented Programming. In this concept, every behavior which is done by the audience is formulated by the programmer. As a result, the boundry of audience’s behavior must be narrowed. During this process, audience’s regulated behavior can be translated as a pseudo class in the whole program. For Deleuze, the problem of expression reveals on the point where the subjectfification and the signifiance intersects. At this point, the white wall / blackhole system start to work as an abstract machine which is called as the face.
Thus, we can restore the matter of expression to the white wall / black hole system. In the computer-based artwork, every sensing device became the black-hole that carries out the process of subjectification. Also, every represented

Before the audience reacts to the artwork, the artwork itself is just an expressionless face. Regardless of the fact wheather the computer-based artwork has its subjectivity or not, through the inclusion of audience to artwork (white wall / black-hole system), the artwork starts to function as a field of subjectification and signifiance. In this state, the artwork has its specific expression (visage) which is differentiated by the audience.

† Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). p.167

Graeme Kirkpatrick, Between Art and Gameness: Critical Theory and Computer Game Aesthetics, 2007
Jesper Juul, The Game, the player, the world; Looking for a heart of gameness, 2003
Jan Simons, Narrative, Games, and Theory, 2007
Progress Quest

Progress Quest is a next generation computer role-playing game. Gamers who have played modern online role-playing games, or almost any computer role-playing game, or who have at any time installed or upgraded their operating system, will find themselves incredibly comfortable with Progress Quest’s very familiar gameplay. Progress Quest follows reverently in the footsteps of recent smash hit online worlds, but is careful to streamline the more tedious aspects of those offerings. Players will still have the satisfaction of building their character from a ninety-pound level 1 teenager, to an incredibly puissant, magically imbued warrior, well able to snuff out the lives of a barnload of bugbears without need of so much as a lunch break. Yet, gone are the tedious micromanagement and other frustrations common to that older generation of RPG’s.

Summary

According to the notion of Tomasello, human species has own distinction with the primates. It’s the joint attentional scenes. Through the joint attentional scenes, human kind accomplished the ability to understand one another as an intentional agents and the object of communication. During this process, joint attentional scene diversed into two different types. One is the mimetic games and the other is the narrative thinking. And also the games work as the cultural ratchets throughout the human history. In this way games, narrative and media coevolved.
As a second condition for her argument, Murray borrows Donald’s concept of the coevolution of cognition and culture. According to Donald, the process of cultural development can be categorized into four different steps.

Episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
Mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication
Mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
Theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.

In Murray’s view, we are in theoretical culture. As a result of this coevolution, “we can think about the history cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns.” And “we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, a paradigm of symbolic communication, and a union catalog of expressive symbols of every kind.” Through this we can handle the computation-based media as expressive symbols.

In this article, the origin of games can be dated back when human nature accomplishs her own prominence. If this is true, we can imagine games not the isolated medium but the multi-layered multiplicity which combines manifold medium in itself.

Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture

Janet H. Murray
Georgia Institute of Technology

POPULAR COMMUNICATION, 4(3), 185–202
Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Abstract
Digital games are an expanding popular cultural form and the focus of a new field of scholarship that has been concerned with defining games and establishing boundaries between games and other phenomena. Studies of the coevolution of human cognition and culture can throw light on this discussion by putting gaming into a longer human perspective. Although 2 chief theorists of this field, Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald, have not explicitly focused on games, their work has suggested that games could have played an important role in shaping the human mind and human culture, by expanding and preserving adaptive cultural patterns, furthering symbolic thinking, and expanding and preserving the expressiveness of symbolic media. Digital games can be understood as carrying on the same functions, using the new affordances of the computer.

Quotation

p.185
… “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

p.186
The shape of videogames is, therefore, tied to older cultural forms and the pleasures of videogames seem to be rooted in our age-old attraction to games in general.

p.187.
Games have not been treated as an expressive genre, such as theater, poetry, or folk songs.

Recent attempts to provide a definition of games as the basis for serious study of digital games have produced struggles with a few key outlier cases that make it difficult to see the boundaries between games and non-games.

However, such a solution runs into the even more contested category of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997).

The boundary between videogames and other forms of digital media is also becoming confusing.

p. 188
Michael Tomasello (2000) explained this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition: the ability to understand cospecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself. This foundational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning. Culture is the key element here, because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowledge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children.

[directiveness; not only in a current time-space but also in other time-space, indexical.]

• Point or gesture to outside objects for others.
• Hold objects up to show them to others.
• Bring others to locations so they can observe things there.
• Actively offer objects to other individuals by holding them out.
• Intentionally teach other individuals new behaviors.

p.189
Tomasello further believes that the ability to follow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when he or she is his- or herself the focus of the adult’s attention and
gaze, and this begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the social world. This cognitive leap, which happened for the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250,000 years or so) and for the individual at 9 to 15 months old, forms the basis for the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement. It is the basis of sharing, negotiating, learning, and symbolic communication.
The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint attentional scene.

What are they fun? What is the primary motivation to engage in them?

What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it? What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play?

p.190
Indeed, the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary for gaming:

• Shared limited focus on external objects or behaviors (or both)
• Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the shared
context
• Symbolic communication between participants
[object, share, communication]

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to engage in the activities characteristic of games: to treat abstract representations consistently, behave according to negotiated rules, and limit one’s actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what “counts” in the game by screening out other stimuli and actions.

Joint attention organizes two fo the core activities of games: turn taking and synchronizing behaviors.

• An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agent–objects
• The ability to shift perspective from one’s own point of view to the point of view of others, to imagine what someone else is thinking, and to see oneself from the point of view of the other
• The ability to intentionally teach and learn, which is the foundation of all human cultural development

p. 191
She interpreted their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language.

It says no by saying yes.

Finally they describe their actions as they do them: “I jump” or “big jump!” while jumping off the box.

The pleasure of the game lies as much in the communication as in the actions, and it lies particularly in the matching of language to action, and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction. The pleasure of games reinforces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors.

p.192
Perhaps in these imitative interactions they are experiencing both their similarity to others and their separateness. Perhaps they are learning that we each are intentional agents of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing (Malcom, 2000).

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules. They are intrinsically social and can, in fact, be understood as a celebration of the social—of the very presence of other intentional beings. The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessing and enacting intentional acts forms the framework for mastering complex physical and social skills. Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance, and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship: You do, I do; you do, I do. The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance, for presenting the self as a performer in a socially constructed arena, and for incorporating multiple individuals into flexible but predictable group structures.

… we can think of Ring Round Rosy as the paradigmatic game.

It synchronizes the behavior of the group, which is one of the key requirements for survival in a culture of hunting.

p.193 THE COEVOLUTION OF GAMES, NARRATIVE, AND MEDIA

If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and coevolving with the development of language, leading to the development of more complex social patterns, more complex causal thinking, and more elaborate symbolic culture.

• The understanding of one’s fellow creatures as intentional beings, leading to the exploration of joint attention, which can be understood as the birth of mimetic games
[intentional beings]
• The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes, which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns, which can be understood as the birth of narrative thinking
[mimetic games]

p.194
… the elaboration of symbolic communication, starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language, which can be understood as the birth of media.

[
episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication.
mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.
]

p.196
Human children play rule-governed games by imitation, often without any formalized instruction.

Yet the more on thinks about the elements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem.

The process of cumulative cultural evolution requires not only creative inbention byt also, and just as importantly, faithful social transmission that can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward.

Games seem to be well-suited to role of cultural ratchet, preserving patterns of behavior from one generation to the next through the intrinsic pleasure of shared attention and imitation.

Many patterns that are rigidly enforced in games are also the basis of general social organization, such as turn taking, following the leader, exchanging property, team formation, conflict containment, and collective focusing on common goals. The win-lose pattern of games seems also to be adaptive in motivating repeated practice and competitive effort.

p. 197
As Donald (1991) pointed out, human cognitive advancement is closely linked to the development of media of communication.

Games have been, and continue to be, useful in directing our attention to all of these media, allowing for exploration of new means of expression and preserving outdated media forms for later reuse. Games can be seen as a means of coevolving our minds and our media, of assimilating new technologies of inscription through exploration of their capacity for symbolic representation, and of preserving and expanding symbolic expression by making symbolic systems the explicit focus of activity.

p.200
… the history of human cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns:…

… we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, …

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium we have ever had.

Note & Summary

Collaboration for what? At this point, we should re-think about the purpose of the game. In the view-point of Murray, which is inspired by Tomasello’s, it is presumable that every individual and group activity is directly connected with the survival in the very early stage of the evloution of primate. That is to say, the collaboration between the individuals is strongly led to the competition between the groups in the higher level. In the intantiated game, Lord of the Rings, there is also the non-player character, Sauron who is the clear enemy of this game. In this way, the collaboration becomes the sub-goal for the competition. Even the situation when the visible enemy cannot be found, in game such as Tetris, the rule that interfere the player’s will became the competitor which should be overcame.

Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games

José P. Zagal, Jochen Rick
Georgia Institute of Technology

Idris Hsi
Microsoft Corporation

Abstract

Collaborative mechanisms are starting to become prominent in computer games, like massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs); however, by their nature, these games are difficult to investigate. Game play is often complex and the underlying mechanisms are frequently opaque. In contrast, board games are simple. Their game play is fairly constrained and their core mechanisms are transparent enough to analyze. In this article, the authors seek to understand collaborative games. Because of their simplicity, they focus on board games. The authors present an analysis of collaborative games. In particular, they focus on Reiner Knizia’s LORDOFTHERINGS, considered by many to be the quintessential collaborative board game. Our analysis yields seven observations, four lessons, and three pitfalls, that game designers might consider useful for designing collaborative games. They reflect on the particular opportunities that computers have for the design of collaborative games as well as how some of the issues discussed apply to the case of computer games.

KEYWORDS: board games; collaboration; collaborative games; cooperation; computer games; decisions; game design; individuals; lessons; multiplayer games; LORD OF THE RINGS; payoffs; pitfalls; teams; utility

Quotation

J. P. Zagal, J. Rick, I. Hsi. (2007) ” Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games.” Simulation & Gaming 37:1, 24-40

Summary

25
How can electronic games be designed so that collaboration is a worthwhile, interesting, and attractive option?

27
Players in RPGs frequently seek to create a satisfying storyline for their character, rather than successfully complete the adventure (Fine, 1983). From a game-theory perspective, these players are not playing a game; instead, they are creating a narrative. Consequently, RPGs are often understood in terms of narrative theory, rather than game theory (Heliö, 2004)

29

figure 1. Lord of the Rings gamel Moria Scenario Board

32
If such a moment of self-sacrifice is interesting as a story, it is even more engaging when you are the one to make the decision (in the game).

33
Communication among the players about the available resources for a particular task becomes more efficient than a single player trying to marshal all the resources at one time.

Pitfall 2: For a game to be engaging, players need to care about the outcome and that outcome should have a satisfying result.

This pitfall applies to all games; however, we feel it is particularly important for collaborative games. If players do not care about the outcome, then they are not motivated enough to help each other or improve on their performance.

A good game can be a good story.

34
Unlike completely deterministic games, like Chess, LORD OF THE RINGS cannot be played exactly the same way twice.

So, unlike competitive games, like Chess, collaborative games need to adapt to the players’ abilities to maintain replayability.

35. Implication for computer games
communication flexbility

Many basic cues of identity, personality, and social roles are absent in the online world (Donath, 1998), making it harder for players to understand each other and agree on plans of action.

37
To conclude, we maintain that games have a unique potential to engage people in collaborative activities. On the other hand, collaborative games are rare and extraordinarily difficult to design. This article has hopefully illustrated some of the particular difficulties inherent to the design of these games as well as showing that simply having cooperative elements is generally insufficient for collaborative play. We have noted how many computer games do apply some of the lessons we have identified, though most tend to fail when it comes applying them all.We believe that computer games not only have the potential for addressing many of the issues discussed but also many affordances to solve them.We are hopeful to have provided insight that game designers might be able to use to create more and better collaborative games.

• Lesson 1:To highlight problems of competitiveness, a collaborative game should introduce a tension between perceived individual utility and team utility.
• Lesson 2: To further highlight problems of competitiveness, individual players should be allowed to make decisions and take actions without the consent of the team.
• Lesson 3: Players must be able to trace payoffs back to their decisions.
• Lesson 4: To encourage team members to make selfless decisions, a collaborative game should bestow different abilities or responsibilities upon the players.

Challenge in designing collaborative games

• Pitfall 1: To avoid the game degenerating into one player making the decisions for the team, collaborative games have to provide a sufficient rationale for collaboration.
• Pitfall 2: For a game to be engaging, players need to care about the outcome and that outcome should have a satisfying result.
• Pitfall 3: For a collaborative game to be enjoyable multiple times, the experience needs to be different each time and the presented challenge needs to evolve.

More information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan
http://catanonline.com/default.htm?MSID=f12bf66534774191adb1953ecd48504d&c00=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiner_Knizia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Rings_%28board_game%29
Lord of the Rings Images / BoardGameGeek

Database Aesthetics; Issues of Orgarnization and Category in Online Art; AI & Society, The Journal of Human-Centered and Machine Intelligence

In an age in which we are increasingly aware of ourselves as databases, identified by social security numbers and genetic structures, it is imperative that artists actively participate in how data is shaped, organised, and disseminated. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, broken with the help of communication technologies, marked a beginning of collapse for many walls of categories. In this context, artists become information architects helping to usher in this new way of working, thinking, anticipating and helping to visualise new structures.

Database aesthetics
Design|Media Art 258: Links
Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Electronic Mediations) (Paperback)
Database Aesthetics; Art in the Age of Information Overflow by Victoria Vesna
Net Art 101; Database Aesthetics Sites & Readings

presentation and article written for the class, advanced media aesthetics
Referred article, vizster, visualizing online social network, (pdf file link).

Summary

In my personal view-point, this paper concentrate on 2 important concept. The first one is visualization. If so, what is the information visualization? Though it’s hard to make clear definition of visualization, I believe the most important purpose of visualization is to understand something better. Undoubtedly, through the simplification and emphasis, the information visualization help for us to understand and comprehend the object better. Then, in this article, what is the object for understanding?
It is friendster. Friendster.com is a social network service. And this is another main subject in paper. Like cyworld in South Korea, friendster helps people to mange their relationship in internet. The description page of friendster.com will be more helpful.

• Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.
• Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests.

The essential concept is very simple. From now on, we’ll cover how it works in short.
You can make your account through the invitation or sign-up. And the first page shows your current profile. Your bookmarks, groups and your friends, too. But, If you signed up by yourself, you would have no friends at the first time. To make friends, you can use various ways. You can type your offline friends’ e-mail address or their name. Or you can browse the member list by their photos or videos. Also, you can search by keywords in the pre-determined criteria such as hometown, movie, music, books and so on.
That’s vizster. In this paper, the authors said vizster is a visualization system that end-users of social networking services, friendster, could use to facilitate discovery and increased awareness of their online community. And from now on I want to show how the authors accomplish their goal.

See slide # 13. This is the screenshot of vizster. In the left panel you can see the structure of the lines and icons which consists graph. Each icon, the authors call it node, represent the member of friendster. And the line, I mean edge, show the relationship between the members. In the right panel, you can see the individual information about the selected member. Each time you clicked the member icon, the right panel exchange, and will show you the member’s information. But I think the essential function of vizster is to show the connection between the members. Who is who’s friend? That’s the main concern.

First, you can find one member’s friends by the different saturation of member icon with mouse over action. Or, it’s possible to know the connection between two specific members. You can type the desired keyword to the text field by yourself. [See slide #16].
Or you can choose the keyword in the given criteria at the individual information panel on right side. Then, you can see the highlighted member icon which answers with your keyword. In this slide, you can see the members for the keyword, “student”.

See slide #17. Here is the different mode of visualization which is called x-ray mode, to visualize attribute values such as age, number of friends, gender, relation status, or time since last log-in. Now, you can see the gender difference at here. You can happen to know whether someone is male or female among Amanda’s friends. And the distribution of gender, too. Through the clustering close members, you can see the overview of the community structure. And with the dragging the community slider, you can change the state of clustering as you want.

After development of vizster, the authors test their work through the public installation and informal laboratory setting. The public installation was took in San Francisco with the group of party-goers and early-adopters of friendster. The test in lab, the participants were also friendster members. The authors found that both group enjoyed exploring social network and playing with this tool. And during the process of discovering the pattern of the community, the participants re-produce the story about the community. In this way, they tends to give a higher level of sophistication to the community analysis that is shown. As a result, the end-users of vizster use this tool to explore and play with their networks.

Topics

topic 1. the information and its visualization in the sociological context

higher level patterns of community

it can be regarded as the characteristics or meaning of information. Shannon and Wiener also said that the we can get information from the extracting pattern from something in his book, The Human use of Human beings: Cybernetics and Society. the interesting thing is the Wiener and Shannon derive their definition from the theory of the signal processing theory in the communication theory. Though, as I think, the partial concept of the visualization is obtained from the practical situation, the central concept is based on the other related studies, such as sociology, communication theory and cybernetics. For this reason, the coupling of the sociological data-set and the visualization of the technical regeneration is not a strange at all. In other words, the discovery is not a technology-based concept rather it occurs in our everyday life in spite of our unawareness. I want to insist that the discovery of the pattern as a process of producing information exists in the social perspective of our culture as well as in the individual context.

topic 2. virtual subjectivity

The most difficult part for reasoning about subjectivity is the sense of alienation between one’s representational subjectivity to public and his own sense of subjectivity or subject. One’s representational subjectivity in real world is out of subject’s control, or most of us believe that this proposition is true. On the contrary, in the virtual world or the online social networking service, the members assume that they can detach their own subjectivity which is generated during his online social behavior. That is to say, the created subjectivity in the online social networking service, i.e. the virtual world, is the different aspect of subject. Or it is possible to say that the virtual subjectivity has nothing to do with his real world subject. Like we need to have a set of several masks for our social behavior, the online subjectivity is the another set of our masks to live in the virtual society.

topic 3. information visualization and database

As a whole system, the platform for online social networking service imitates the real world. During this imitation, the complex system of real world is simplified by the generalization. And this generalization needs judgment. Because, during generalization, you should judge which factor in given dataset is necessary or not. For there is no photo-realistic method to represent or imitate the snapshot of online social activity, to grap the flash moment of virtual world, or to log the whole data-transfer, we have to judge which part of human activity has to be converted to the data in server. With this judgment, the architect who design online social network service represents the dynamics of the real world. Then, as a framework which represents the human activity, the database is a result of the judgment and representation. This premise can be a start of the asethetic discourse on the database. Further, we can think about the connectivity between the database as a structure of selective data and the information visualization as a reflection of real wolrd.

variablization of aesthetic subject in the computer-based media art

Like a random function in Math class in any kind of high level program language, subject in the media art functions as an Math.random() method. Regardless of the numbers of parameter which is passed to the core algorithm or the main OOP model, there are no doubt that the subject, usually participants, in new media art works as a signal emitter. They produce many kinds of signals, and then the computer-based artwork find the desired pattern among the bunches of the signals made by the participants. During this process, the participant works as a function. With this point of view, the computer-based media art is the evolved form of the Turing machine by Alan Turing. Then the artwork itself becomes the continuum of the objects. that can be called as a environment. Or sometimes, we simply name it as an interface. Thought the state of the interface in these day is so primitive, there are no doubt that the artwork is the perceptible execution code. Even the simplest program code run by the simplest type of Turing machine, the purpose of the computer code is to variablize human behavior, or finally, the subject. Like a point of view in the functionalism, or those of the situationist, the most important role of the human subject is his function in his own situation.

- deus ex machina
- functionalism
- Descartes
- situationist

얼굴(face)은 기계다. 얼굴이 동작하면 표정(visage)이 나타난다. 얼굴은 정보가 없으나 표정에는 정보가 있다. 표정은 얼굴이 동작한 결과이다. 표정은 얼굴 없이 동작할 수 없고, 얼굴은 표정이 드러나지 않으면 무의미하다(‘의미 없음’ 또한 의미작용의 대상이라면 문제는 또 달라질 것이다). 이를테면 얼굴은 그 자체로서 감각([그]aisthêsis(αισθητική); 감각(작용))의 대상이 될 수 없으며, 표정을 통해서만 감각할 수 있다. 표정 또한 얼굴을 떠나 존재할 수 없다. 얼굴 없는 표정은, 감각할 수 있는 형태로 드러나는 것이 불가능하다.
목소리는, 또한 모든 소리는 울림이다. 울림은 감각 가능한 상태가 되기 위해 조음기계(울대)에서 떨어져 나가야한다. 표정은 얼굴을 떠날 수 없지만, 목소리는 울대를 떠날 때에만 감각할 수 있다. 울대 안에 갇혀 있는 소리란 존재하지 않는다.

공학은, 혹은 기술([그]techné(τέχνη))은 얼굴이 표정 짓는 방법이다. 울대가 소리 내는 방법이다. 표정의 규칙은 얼굴에 들어 있지 않다. 소리의 규칙은 울대에 들어 있지 않다. 하지만 표정과 소리의 동작에는 분명히 규칙이 존재한다. 표정과 소리가 의미 작용과 관련되어 있다는 전제 하에 그렇다는 의미이다. 표정과 소리의 동작은 시간축 위에서 일시적으로(temporal) 나타났다 사라진다. 동작은 기록이 필요하다. 일시적이기 때문이다. 반면 규칙은 일시적이지 않다. 그것은 의미가 생성되는 방법이다. [들뢰즈와 가타리에 따르자면 이러한 의미 생성의 방법은 언어학을 뛰어넘어야 한다. 언어학이 덜 추상적(abstract)이기 때문이다. 그들은 더욱, 한참이나 더 추상적인 의미 조직의 방법이 필요하다고 생각한다. 이 방법은 조립(assemblage)이다.]

의미들이 조립되지 않는다. 조립되기 전에는 아무 것도 아니다. 조립하기 위한 규칙을 위해 우리는 아무 것도 아닌 것에 무언가를 부여한다. 반대로 나아갈 필요성이 생긴다. 무(無)에서 비롯된 무를 회피하기 위해 무에 이름을 붙인다. 무에서 무가 비롯되면 일자(一者)의 원리가 깨어지기 때문이다. 원인으로서의 무가 존재해서는 안 된다. 반면, 조립에 소비되는 것들은 무(無)이다. 존재하지 않아서가 아니라, 존재하되 존재하지 않음과 동일하기 때문이다. 조립이 중요한 이유는 의미를 조립하기 때문이 아니다. 조립을 통해 의미의 다양성이 확보되기 때문이다. 언어학적 의미 조직의 방법은 제한되어 있다. 그 방법은 결국 언어학적 틀 안에서 사고하게 만든다. 계열(paradygm)과 통합(syntagm)의 관계를 통해 의미를 구성하면 통합과 계열의 틀을 벗어날 수 없다.

기술은 어디에 있는가? 기술은 다시 언어로 돌아가고 있는가? 인공언어 기반의 기술은 계열과 통합의 관계를 넘어섰다. 인공언어는 조립되고 있다. 인공언어는 언어가 아니다. 조립하기일 뿐이다. 기술이 조립(assemblage)을 통해 이루어진다는 사실을 다시 주목할 필요가 있다. 표정 없는 얼굴, 소리 나지 않는 울대이 있었던 자리에 표정이 생기고 목소리가 생기고 있다. 과거, 기계의 자리에 사람이 있었다. 사람은 스스로를 조립하여 표정을 짓고 소리를 울렸다. 기계의 자리에 다시 기계가 들어간다. 기계가 표정을 짓고 기계가 목소리를 낸다. 사람은 무엇을 하는가. 표정과 목소리를 조립한다.

- 얼굴과 표정은 구분될 수 있는가?
- 목소리와 울대는 구분될 수 있는가?
- 기술은 ‘조립하기’인가?