Authors:

 Daubner, Ernestine.

Title:

 "Interactive Strategies & Dialogical Allegories: Encountering David Rokeby's Transforming Mirrors Through Marcel Duchamp's Open Windows & Closed Doors."

Keywords:

 Duchamp, Rokeby, Interactivity, Specularity, Dialogism
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Abstract:

 Calling Marcel Duchamp, the "first interactive artist," David Rokeby divulges his own interaction or dialogue with this figure. Most evidently, his artworks, like those of Duchamp's, involve the viewer-reader or "interactor" (Rokeby's term) in diverse and significant ways, prompting the question: does an engagement in their respective artworks reflect the interactor's subjectivity, his/her position as a mediated subject?

Rokeby has partially responded to this question by emphasizing that the artwork does not simply engage the participation of the interactor. In his words, "[a]n interactive technology is a medium through which we communicate with ourselves - a mirror [or, more precisely, a] transforming mirror." Rokeby's observations about the specular relationship between the interactor and the artwork makes a dialogue between these two artists both intriguing and enlightening. This is because Duchamp himself continuously referred to specularity, to the "mirrorical return." Most significantly, Duchamp constructed a body of works as a self-reflexive or dialogical sign system. In effect, Duchamp's oeuvre may be read as two distinct allegorical texts: Etant donnés (1946-66), as a "closed" system, and his pre-Etant donnés works, as an "open" one. Both allegories engage the viewer-reader in diverse, and "self-reflective" ways.

In light of Duchamp's own "interactive art," I would like, in this paper, to examine how the "transforming mirror" operates in Rokeby's two works, Very Nervous System (1983-91) and Caller of Names (1998). Also, by bringing together the words and works of these two artists, I shall be able to examine how their artworks implicate, integrate or otherwise "activate" the interactor. This dialogue between Duchamp and Rokeby will (ex)pose some pertinent questions about interactivity: Does the artwork/mirror address the interactor as body, as mind, as cyborg? What are the implications of "closed" or "open" systems for the interactor? Is the interactor able to "see" him/herself in the artwork/mirror? Is the artist-creator (in)visible in the "transforming mirror?" Does it, in fact, matter?
Daubner, Ernestine. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada A lecturer in the Art History Department at Concordia University since 1990, I have taught a variety of courses on modern and contemporary art based on interdisciplinary methods, including "Technology and Contemporary Art." My expertise lies in the art and art theory of the 20th century (early to contemporary) and in the histories, ideologies and critiques of modernity and Enlightenment culture, as well as in (pre)modern and contemporary art and discourse on nature and culture, on science and technology, particularly as these relate to issues of the body, to theories of representation, to issues of authorship, spectatorship-readership. I am a doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program at Concordia University, specializing in Art History/Theory, Cultural History, Contemporary Literary Theory. This doctoral project is based on "interactive dialogues" with Marcel Duchamp's last, secretly-constructed work, Etant donnés and with his prior works, read as two distinct allegorical texts that relate to gendered constructs of science, technology and Enlightenment thought. The theoretical framework for this dissertation is poststructuralism, dialogism and feminism. I plan to expand this area of research in postdoctoral studies on contemporary "interactive art" as it relates to the mind/body question and the mediated subject. My research has been presented in academic publications in English and Spanish (translation), in scholarly papers at national and international conferences and congresses (in Canada, U.S, Mexico, and Europe), in public lectures, as well as in a graduate seminar as visiting lecturer in the Escola da Comunicaçöes e Artes at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil in June 1998.