White Lines: Code and the Aesthetics of Intimacy

Jason Wilson

Abstract

In the last half of the twentieth century, we find white lines drawn in a number of artworks and games that grasp at an aesthetics of intimacy. Creative practice becomes more preoccupied with designing systems that integrate the spectator’s body, and which creates ‘bubbles’ of intimacy which put playing bodies in proximity with technologised images. Reading games and media art through Walter Benjamin, Peter Sloterdijk and Jack Burnham, we can trace the lines of a tradition that incorporates abstract expressionism, media art and game design. The aesthetics of intimacy are gradually incorporated as the basis of transformations in a systematisation of life and work.

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. (Benjamin 1986)

The foregoing remark comes near the end of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1986). Each time we reconsider it, it puzzles us more. Art, we’re told, creates a demand which it cannot meet in the moment of its creation, but that later art can. At certain times art forms aspire to what will only be possible “in a new art form”, which appears to give media a kind of agency, future-orientation, and memory. It raises the possibility that works in critical periods might have inscribed in them a failure that corresponds with that unmet aspiration. Is it also possible that we will be able to detect an unruly trace of the future art form that it cannot yet be?

Benjamin is surely not proposing anything like the crude reduction of aesthetic and technical modernism that Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy (2006) call, in relation to digital games, “upgrade culture”. This is the historical perspective (and industrial imperative) that envisions a medium moving forward developmentally on a single line of necessity, and from this deduces and demands a particular version of techno-aesthetic progress (Dovey & Kennedy 2006). Rather than the internal history of particular media, Benjamin is interested in how ‘demands’ are reframed as they leap across different media and contexts. The example he discusses is the prefiguration of cinema in Dada. In Dada the work of art

became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. (Benjamin 1986: 238)

Dadaist bullet-space prefigures and is present in the cinema of distraction, transience and shock. Benjamin is not concerned with the technical gulf between the two milieux, but their shared tactility. Dada mobilised distraction and auratic destruction against the contemplative aesthetics that it saw as representing bourgeois decadence. But the core of its aspiration was only fully realised in the mass art of cinema, and between times it had lost its imperative of moral and political antagonism. Cinema’s variant of Dadaist shock had the character of a revelation, or a purification: “film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect” (ibid). The trace, the failure, the waste includes those discarded wrappers. But in what is retained we can discern what I will call traditions.

If Benjamin here undertakes a media archaeology, its artefacts are not objects but affects and virtualities, kinetic effects, and changing regimes of the sensible and the sensorium. He suggests forward movement in media history, but not a necessary progress. His sense of what resonates across media makes later modernist obsessions with a hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, or distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘kitsch’ seem misplaced. If this is media theory it is not one that seeks to formalise, but to show how somatic effects disclose a shared aspiration. There is no self-conscious anticipation of cinema by Dada, no necessity in the way Dada’s ballistics propel themselves into the cinematic, nor any explicit desire from filmmakers to improve and purify Dadaist effects And there is no shared technological substrate. They are not the same medium, at least on familiar understandings of the concept. Nevertheless, Benjamin directs us to the way in which artworks in different technical registers establish themselves in relation to the organism of the viewer. They share not a technical means, but they can be seen to execute fragments of a shared code.

II

In what follows I link the fragments of a disparate tradition in media/art practice, and try to trace traces a luminous path through the late twentieth century. My concern is not the domestication of avant-garde antagonisms in distractive cinema. Rather, I am concerned with movements away from the presumed alienation of modern spectatorship, attempted passages from what was presumed to be mass-mediated alienation, back to forms of contemplation and companionship. This essay argues that interactivity should be understood within an aesthetics of intimacy. Benjamin inspires the methodological wager that effects and reconfigurations can be recovered across different media; that aspiration in works is haunted by the traces of failure; that kinetics are knotted up with tactilities.

But rather firing bullets, the works I discuss blow bubbles. The white lines we find in each are the weld and the seam that discloses the production of interiorities and marks their incompleteness. Inside the works, the spectator - the player - is in a dyad with a slippery ‘nobject’. It is invisible, but it is sensible as we are subjectively enveloped by its systemically nurturing effects. Oftentimes we call it code.

III

Peter Sloterdijk has shown how humans are driven to create and inhabit protective, insulating and “immunological” interiorities. We are immersed in spheres, where each is an “interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humans - in so far as they succeed in becoming humans… Living in spheres means creating the dimension in which humans can be contained” (Sloterdijk 2011: 28). Sloterdijk, Schinkel writes, “asks not the question ‘who or what is man?’, but ‘where is man?’ and […] finds the answer in the creative building of spheres as psycho-social containers in historically varying shapes” (2011: 11). At all times the sphere is a metaphor for shared interiorities of intimacy. But spheres are also visible in architectural interiors, traditions of art, and religious iconography.

Spheres afford protection: immunological ‘air-conditioning’ and ‘atmospheres’ in which human lives are lived. “Man” [sic] builds spheres because he needs “life forms that cover him, in which he can be immersed” (Schinkel 2011: 7). In traditional cultures, protection is reflected and made in the details of magical beliefs and religious totems. Modern scientific revolutions disrupted the classical-medieval cosmology of geocentric spheres, depriving humans of “the comforting notion that the Earth is enclosed by spherical forms like warming heavenly mantles” (Sloterdijk 2011: 23). Modernity, then, can be understood as instituting immunological crisis:

To oppose the cosmic frost infiltrating the human sphere through the open windows of the Enlightenment, modern humanity makes use of a deliberate greenhouse effect: it attempts to balance out its shellessness in space, following the shattering of the celestial domes, through an artificial civilizatory world… What makes the Modern Age special is that after the turn to the Copernican world, the sky as an immune system was suddenly useless. Modernity is characterized by the technical production of its immunities and the increasing removal of its safety structures from the traditional theological and cosmological narratives. (Sloterdijk 2011: 24-25)

In the claim that modern civilisation carries out immunological functions by technological means, Sloterdijk’s media theory makes technology legible within a longer history of magical and metaphysical thinking:

My assumption is that there is nothing in technology that has not formerly been in metaphysics, and nothing in metaphysics that has not formerly been in magic. Rationalization takes us from magic, to metaphysics, to technology. These metaphysics of man are condensed in technical devices. (Sloterdijk 2013)

This spherology depends in the first instance on a ‘microspherology’ of intimacy. The larger project aims to “praise transference and refute loneliness” (Sloterdijk 2011: 13) by theorising “solidarity”, the “connecting force… which allies people with their own kind or a superhuman other in shared vibrations” (Sloterdijk 2011: 45) The first volume of the Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, is a series of returns to the task of ontologising the basic ‘biunity’ of dyadic intimacy. Following Thomas Macho, Sloterdijk disrupts psychoanalytic individualism and its structure of subject and object. He posits instead a basic drive to reconstitute a primary intimacy which is a result of being commonly “equipped with memories of prenatal situations” (Sloterdijk 2009: 2-3). The paradigmatic experience of intimacy in spheres is our residence in the womb, where the “primal companion” is the placenta, which offers us an experience of “prenatal proto-intersubjectivity” (ibid). The “With”, as he calls it, is in our early experience, a “living and life-giving It that remains yonder-close-by” (Sloterdijk 2011: 356). He connects the placental separation with the Orphic myth: “All births are twin births; no one comes into the world unaccompanied or unattached. Every arrival who ascends to the light is followed by a Eurydice - anonymous, mute and not made to be beheld” (Sloterdijk 2011: 413). But prenatal biunity provides a pattern for the formation of new, intimate interiorities:

Eurydice’s farewell gift to Orpheus is the space in which replacements are possible. Her Away creates a free sphere for new media. Eurydice gives Orpheus his strange freedom; thanks to her withdrawal, he can devote his eternal infidelity to his former companion. Replaceability is Eurydice’s inextinguishable trace; it enables her separated lover to be constantly involved with others, whose changing faces always appear in the same ‘place’. (Sloterdijk 2011: 415)

The ‘genius’ or guardian spirit in the classical world was one way of figuring and replacing the lost partner of this constitutive intimacy. Newer, technical media can also play the role of genius (Sloterdijk offers the example of Andy Warhol’s tape recorder). He follows Macho again in calling these intimate augmenters ‘nobjects’. Nobjects are “things, media or persons that fulfil the function of the living genius or intimate augmenter for subjects” (Sloterdijk 2011: 467). The “projective dynamism” (Sloterdijk 2009: 2) of sphere-construction is understood as the repetitive creation of relations of intimacy with nobjects. This projective construction of intimacy repeats itself; we are encoded as sphere-makers.

Sloterdijk finds a precedent for the idea that modernity creates immunological interiors by technical means in Benjamin’s ruined account of interiority, The Arcades Project:

He asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. (Sloterdijk 2009)

Now, our technologically-realised protective islands are different. Sloterdijk is preoccupied with the ‘hyperventilation’ of sports stadium and the ‘connected isolation’ of apartment living and mass commuter transit. But technical media can also play a part in furnishing protective interiorities. Interactive works offer a different form of immersion, not least from the relentless flow of tidings through 24/7 media’s always-open “windows on the world” (see Spigel 1992) . Those I will talk about represent one aspect of the aspirational use of interactivity to technically produce immunological shielding and forms of intimate being-together with code.

IV

Together the works discussed signal a slow transition away from the crafting of self-sufficient cultural objects, and a move toward works whose subject, technique and outcome is relationships in system. A concept of ‘system esthetics’ was defined by Jack Burnham (Burnham 1968), in response to the emerging post-objective or ‘postformalist’ (Drucker 2005) turn in art in the late 1960s. As artists came to work with technology, and to orchestrate happenings, performative experiments and creating relationships rather than creating objects. Noting the increasing preoccupation with technology among artists, Burnham predicted that change would transform “artistic and technological decision-making into a single activity” (Burnham 1968). Notably, alongside the similarity between Burnham’s preoccupation with systems and Sloterdijk’s with relationality, we note the resemblance between Sloterdijk’s augmentative objects and Burnham’s interest in things “that can loosely be termed unobjects, these being either environments or artifacts that resist prevailing critical analysis” (ibid). Burnham saw systemic artists as designing and implementing “stable, on-going relationships between organic and nonorganic systems” (ibid).

The aspirations underpinning the works discussed below include the creation of systemic artworks that immerse the spectating body in relations of intimacy with images, technologies, and systematicity itself. Provisionally, at least, I will try to think about the system and the sphere together in the artworks we consider. Precedents for thinking about shelter systemically is found not only in Benjamin’s architectural analyses of modernity, but in other more recent architectural metaphors. When Tim O’Reilly (2005) coined and began proselytising ‘Web 2.0’ in the middle of the last decade, design in this paradigm was described as the construction of “architectures of participation”, not long after Henry Jenkins (2006) described games in terms of “narrative architecture”. Like Benjaminian arcades, the architectures of participatory works are immunological, even where they are rhetorically positioned as critical and confrontational. But there is also a clue of the nature of the shelter they provide in those moments early on in this tradition - in its avant-garde phase - where mass media is identified with state power, and participation as a radicalised rejection of mass spectatorship.

The spare pictorial compositions in these works are evidence not of stylistic minimalism, but moments of systemic maximalism. Suddenly, mimetic depiction becomes inadequate, or the visual needs to accommodate an expanded system. The bubble expands to take more in. These lines are drawn in establishing a postformalist art of intimacy. Their minimalism inaugurates the perennially deferred, constitutive promise - particularly marked in games culture - of a future naturalism in the impossibility of a perfect simulation. They are all white on black - sharp or staticky lines and mobile blocks on blank screens. In each case what is less important than the fact of visual abstraction in itself, than the way in which abstraction grounds more complex patternings of information design, and elicits new forms of embodied information behaviour from the player-spectator. Abstraction here is not alienating or denaturalising, but signals the enfolding of the player into a new kind of intimacy orchestrated by code, which is perfected in a conformity with the system that code elaborates. The early examples are radical in intention or effect - either the creators set out to disrupt the politics of then-prevalent forms of media consumption, or they do in fact inaugurate something transformative. Among the things at stake in this tradition is training in the manipulation of images in a graphic interface, a fact - like Cavell’s “fact of television” (1982) - which is at the centre of our life-worlds.

V

Barnett Newman is sometimes characterised as the exponent of a grandiose Cold War modernism. If the market is any guide, posterity has put him near the centre of the canon of postwar abstraction. There is no doubt that as geopolitical conflict deepened, artists of his milieu were aggressively promoted by the US state and its dependent institutions as evidence of American cultural and intellectual tolerance. The trajectory of co-optation played out in a new way, as an erstwhile heroic-humanist avant-garde were enlisted as avatars of liberal freedom. But in this crisis of high-modernist purpose, Newman found a kind of opening, or a response. In his technique, his thematic content, and his efforts to manage spectatorship, Newman aspired to an offer of shelter.

Newman’s success derived from his finding what Cavell calls an “automatism”, a way of producing paintings that not only “generates new instances: not merely makes them possible, but calls for them, as if to attest that what has been discovered is indeed something more than a single work could convey”; a discovery not only of a new way of making pictures, but of the significance of that method (Cavell 1979: 107). Newman had begun to execute a powerful code. From 1949, he began producing massive, dense fields of colour interrupted by vertical white ‘zips’. The Onement series institutes this technique and its elaboration. He insisted they were freighted with a religious significance. When they were first exhibited, Newman affixed little notes to the walls beside them specifying how close the viewer should stand to the work. He wanted the canvases entirely to fill spectators’ fields of vision. The abstraction and the paratextual instructions signal his desire to manage or encode the relationship between the spectator’s body, sensorium and the pictorial surface. The goal is plainly to effect an immersion of the viewer in the colour field. In reproduction these can look flat. But viewed directly they tend to be less solid, more textured, with the pulse and indistinction of an organic interior, or a gas giant.

The zip is a get-out clause, for the painter and the viewer. It preserves a semblance of form and purpose in the dense fogs of colour. The zip both constitutes and highlights technique. It is a safety valve for the disorientations of indistinction, but as an object for focussing contemplation they are no object at all. They are not-colour; they undergo a gestalt disappearance as we try to fix on them. They are Eurydicean: they disappear under our gaze. They are the marker of and the barrier to intimacy, an acknowledgement of the incomplete character of the paintings’ immersions. They are the weld-lines of what Newman explicitly regarded as meditative, spiritual enclosures, which don’t quite provide immunological shelter from the global antagonism that Newman’s work had become a token in.

To this extent his still-objective artwork was grasping for a system which would incorporate the picture and the viewing body in a system of contemplative intimacy. In a halting way, he was attempting to produce what Lev Manovich (2001) might call a new kind of information behaviour by means of a variance in his information design. Newman’s white line creates the sublime as a field of embodied intimacy.

VI

In 1963 Nam June Paik’s exhibition at Galerie Parnass, a private home in Wuppertal in Germany, introduced a range of works based on manipulated televisions, which Paik would reiterate and refine over several decades. The exhibition marked a refocussing of Paik’s practice from music to media art. Eleven televisions, in various states of disassembly, modification or systemic incorporation, showed the results of his efforts to directly manipulate the electronic innards of television and thereby its image. Paik became an engineer in order to turn television inside-out.

Among the works was Zen for TV. This set was doctored to produce a single vertical strip of light on an otherwise blank screen. It referred to other works by Paik - such as Zen for Head where Paik painted a single black line on paper with his hair. Beyond their self-referentiality, though, these works are in a complicated relationship of quotation with Newman’s paintings. On the one hand they mock Newman’s seriousness by porting the portentousness of his abstract religious painting to a television set. In this sense they are trenchant criticisms. By putting Newman on television, Paik juxtaposes the hubris and control-freakery of official modernism and the command-and-control culture of mid-century broadcasting. Both try to manage the viewer, and the readings they might make. Paik explicitly identified broadcasting with political conformity and the undeclared war of the 1960s. Reflecting on his television works in a catalogue a decade later, Paik wrote:

Communication means the two-way communications. One-way communication is simply a notification ... like a draft call. TV has been a typical case of this non communication and mass audience had only one freedom, that is, to turn on or off the TV ... comparable to the freedom in concentration camp where inmates had only one kind of freedom, that is, to touch or not to touch the electric care wire. My obsession with TV for the past 10 years has been, if I look back and think clearly, a steady progression towards more differentiated participation by viewers. In my first ‘Electronic TV’ show… I mainly manipulated the TV scan-line, which is the prime mode of control in the technological society. (Sonsbeek Foundation & Paik 1971, ellipses in original)

Television - at least in the context of broadcasting - is here identified with the worst excesses of modernity, in Paik’s suggestion that the state supplements confinement and extermination with more sophisticated methods of social control, condensed in the CRT scan line. Paik’s Fluxus entanglements led him to think that this could be disrupted playfully; his absorption of the McLuhanite understanding of the relationship between media and society could think that, thus disrupted, a critically hacked television might change the world (See Cramer 2005). His white line is an early playful, political critique that prefigures the long, post-Fluxus orthodoxy that still frames critical strategies in contemporary art, tactical media, hacker culture and forms of independent digital cultural production.

On the other hand, Zen for TV honours, even refines Newman’s aspiration. It reopens the question of immersion and embodiment in relation to a new medium, or automatism that this work establishes. (Like Newman in his Onement series, Paik was driven to reproduce Zen for TV and the other television works repeatedly). In contrast with the indistinct textures of Newman’s colour fields, the dark screen is pure absence: the line is the whole of the picture. But this only broadens our gaze, and reveals the work as a sculpture. As such it invites us to reflect on its means. First, a technological commodity transformed by the hacking artist, with ‘know-how’ derived from a politicised, improvisatory enthusiasm (Fuller 2013), into a surface of local pictorial inscription. Thus, as further announced in its title, the black box of broadcasting is transformed into a new pathway: Newman’s contemplative, meditative, localised intimacy.

VII

Another piece in the exhibition that Paik reworked and revised over time was Participation TV, wherein the viewer - perhaps already a player - is invited to generate a transient image. Their voice is channelled through a signal processor on a path to the cathode ray tube, which creates abstract patterns of dots and lines on the television screen. The variable, pulsing line is a function of the incorporation of the human voice into a circuit that includes a pictorial surface. At one level it is a predigital algorithm of visualisation, along with Alan Sutherland’s contemporaneous Sketchpad, a graphical user interface that produces visible evidence of human inputs by recoding them. Computers are not present, but data visualisation is. The kinetics here flow in the opposite direction to those in Benjamin’s cinema. Instead of a spectator on the end of a bullet, this is a screen that refracts a shout.

If there is something spectral about the images thus produced, it could be because they are a response to an incantation. Miriam Hansen’s account of the “cluster of meanings” surrounding the concept of “aura” in Benjamin’s thinking marks the particularity of his concept of a ‘medium’:

It proceeds from an older philosophical usage (at the latest since Hegel and Herder) referring to an in-between substance or agency - such as language, writing, thinking, memory - that mediates and constitutes meaning. It resonates no less with esoteric and spiritualist connections pivoting on an embodied medium’s capacity of communing with the dead… Aura as a medium of perception - or perceptibility - becomes visible only on the basis of technological reproduction. The gaze of the photographed subject would not persist without its refraction by an apparatus, that is, a nonhuman lens and the particular conditions of setting and exposure; it already responds to another - and other - look that at once threatens and inscribes the subject’s authenticity and individuality. (Hansen 2008: 342-343)

Like the Hansenian-Benjaminian photograph, Participation TV both “threatens and inscribes the viewer’s individuality”. It visualises the individual’s voice by encoding it as input in an immersive system. It blurs subject and object in a shared interiority of interaction. It identifies voice and visualisation, and invites the viewer to put their agency at the service of systemic logic. If there is something spiritual about the images, it may be because the player-spectator creates them by means of their words, their breath; each time the work is played with is explicitly an act of inspiration. If forms of distraction are made possible within the logic that Participation TV first exemplifies, they are those of systemic immersion rather than the kinetic assault of Dada and cinema. This is the intimacy of breathing, speaking, looking in the interior of an artwork that is not only post-objective but post-subjective.

Paik wanted to transform television to a political purpose, but, despite his antagonistic ambitions, the main circulation of his work was first in fine art galleries and eventually as spectacle in the global network of prestige museums in their “hypermodern” era (Prior 2003). It was in this context that Paik became a producer of significant forms of media spectacle, as in the late-career, Tate-and-Guggenheim-friendly spectacle of Laser Cone. Despite his willingness to embrace reproducibility and manufacture, and to experiment with television broadcasts, Paik’s practice never properly formulated the problem of mass distribution. His moral, political and rhetorical antagonism to the networks of mass consumer culture inhibited the recoding of television across the much more extensive network of its appearance and use.

Along with its other functions, the white line in Zen for TV marks off Paik’s practice from broadcasting, its normativity, its ubiquity, and its articulation at the national level. Within the membrane the line marks out is a form of practice that, though technologically engaged, only worked on one machine at a time. Paik’s works preserve the auratic even amidst the artisanal reproducibility of their electronic manipulations. Not least of their paradoxes is the conversion of a commodity of mass consumption - the television - back into a signed and authorised artistic object. (Later, in our own post-broadcast, post-CRT era, Paik’s works become museological, preservational technologies, and a critical account of a form of spectatorship, both of which are now passing from use). The white line also marks the limit of a concept of intimacy based on the singularity of event and attraction, as opposed to one that sees it as susceptible to a wider distribution. Paik’s works are still attractions that the audience must travel to.

VIII

American engineer Ralph Baer was also looking to change television. His intermittent work on producing a television image which was manipulable by the home viewer took place over the 1960s. and early 1970s. German-born Baer fled Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s. He worked on electronics qualifications in technical schools. After World War II, he studied television engineering on the GI bill. He returned to his home in New York City, and in 1951 he found work with Loral, then a small electronics company. Its chief engineer put him to work on designing a home television set, with the instruction to make it “the best TV set in the world” (Baer 1998). Baer immediately suggested building games into the sets. His idea was rejected, and he was only able to devote serious time and resources to it from 1966, when he himself was a chief engineer at military contractor Sanders Associates. Retrospectively, Baer commented that

I had frequently been thinking about ways to use a TV set for something other than watching standard broadcasts. There were about 40 million TV sets in the USA alone at that time, to say nothing of those many more millions of sets in the rest of the world. They were literally begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts! (Baer 1998)

The desire to reconfigure the uses of television is pronounced here, even though Baer does not share Paik’s antagonisms. Baer reconceived the near-universal penetration of television technology as an infrastructure to be hacked. He filed patents in 1968 and his efforts culminated in the launch of the Magnavox Odyssey as a home console in 1972. His white line turned television into a monitor, and a surface of simulation. In outline, Baer created the rudiments of an analogue virus, a technology which would parasitise television and turn it into a monitor.

Baer’s innovation was compromised as a product, however. It shipped with overlays that softened and disguised its radically minimalistic imagery. It was presented clumsily, and there was confusion among consumers as to its compatibility with televisions from other manufacturers. But perhaps its biggest problem was in its historically premature misdirection at the living room, which had not yet had time to make room for anything other than television. Brian Winston shows how new media technologies with radical potential are frequently resisted by custom, or social forces invested in the status quo (Winston 1998). Williams shows us how important the flow of broadcast television was in resolving postwar contradictions through mobile privatisation; Spigel shows us nevertheless that great effort was expended in encouraging people to take the new technology into their intimate spaces; Jacobs shows how quickly and effectively that intimate screen developed a rich mise-en-scene (Spigel 1992; Williams 1974; Jacobs 2000). Looking back through the accumulation of forty years of interactive screen-based media - we can miss the radical implications of cutting television as a technology off from the social, cultural and institutional forms of broadcasting, and replacing its realism with the tinkerers’ austere abstractions . Baer was proposing a bubble within a bubble - a system of intensive interactivity within the overdetermined intimacy of the suburban domestic interior.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, released the epochally successful game, Pong, after seeing Bushnell’s demo at an expo. Bushnell’s decision to aim the game at arcades showed that he was a better media archaeologist than Baer. He was a computer engineer, but he had also worked in the penny arcade business. He understood their capacity to accommodate new media and how they required what Gunning calls, in relation to early cinema, “astonishment” (Gunning 2003). He saw indeed that their raison d’être was as a reserve for the exhibition and slow domestication of astonishing novelties. Like Paik and Newman, Bushnell thought hard about the place of the viewing body in systemic artworks, and about what sort of information behaviour he could demand as a designer. His earlier, failed port of mainframe game Computer Space - Space War - was hobbled by baroque instructions. He needed a game that a “drunk” could play.

The simplicity of the Pong is not only in its subject matter, but also in the instructions and the character of the images and their movement in space. By contrast with Spacewar, Pong’s instructions were almost absurdly simple: ‘Avoid missing ball for high score’. The physical interface was equally rudimentary. A continuous dial controlled movement of the player’s block avatar on a single, vertical axis. The economy of the instructions allowed the emergence of a form of intimacy featuring new, clearly seductive relations between the apparatus of human perception, players’ bodily movement and the images, screens and circuitry. Fulfilling the instructions, or attempting to, requires that the player divine the relations between their manipulation of the controller and the vertical movement of her surrogate or avatar on screen, to predict the angle of reflection resulting from the avatar’s contact with the square ‘ball’, to conceive of the extension of the experience of play in time as open-ended, potentially limitless, and dependent upon her own skill. This is not the kind of relationship with the television monitor to which most people had hitherto been accustomed. But the player is integrated into this disciplinary/performative system in a way that seems intuitive, and belies its complexity and (in 1972) its novelty. Cohen writes about how quickly the patrons of Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale adapted to Atari’s Pong prototype:

One of [them] inserted a quarter. There was a beep. The game had begun. They watched dumbfoundedly [sic] as the ball appeared alternately on one side of the screen and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end of the screen. The score was 5-4, his favor [sic], when his paddle made contact with the ball. There was a beautifully resonant “Pong” sound, and the ball bounced back to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to use his paddle. They had their first brief volley just before the score was 11-5 and the game was over. Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the constant Pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing, everybody in the bar had played the game. (Cohen 1984: 29)

Pong presented a system where the relationship between the playing body and screen images, mediated by the simple dial interface, was such that players were quickly able to attend to it, and quickly able, too, to derive pleasure from immersing themselves in it. Once again, though, the abstract character of the imagery grounded the formation of this new, seductive relationship between body, screen and surrounding spaces. The recruitment of players to a new kind of popularised ‘participation TV’ was not possible for Computer Space: the game was too complicated to coax the user into a position where, as Woolgar puts it, that user might be herself be “configured” by the machine (Woolgar 1991).

IX

Filmmaker Alexander McCall shared Bushnell’s showman’s instincts. His 1973 work, Line Describing a Cone, was made the year after Pong. On the screen, a white line is slowly traced on a black background. Shown in a smoky room, McCall’s film creates a luminous, sculptural object that audiences tend to want to play with together. This white line changes the locus of cinema from the screen to the room and the interactions within it; this is a reconfigured cinematic spatiality, an expanded cinema. The cone serves as the focus of a shared, localised intimacy. Spectators inevitably thrust a dubious hand into McCall’s ghostly nobject, recalling St Thomas, but also returning us to Newman’s insistence on the presence of the spiritual in the abstract, and Hansen’s Benjaminian ‘medium’. McCall’s work is essentially playful - at least as playful as the work of the game designers, to the extent thatLine Describing a Cone illuminates a problem with any essentialising distinction between ludus (rule-governed, goal-driven) and paidea (free, open-ended) play. In McCall’s film, cinema yields itself up as a game, and creates a playful interiority.

X

In the 1970s and 1980s arcades were turned over to paradoxical exhibitions of intimacy. They became places where mimetic desires for intimacy with systems convened around bright lines was cultivated. They were, until the 1990s, the industrial focus of the games industry. Within these spaces, in bright lines, Atari’s designers sketched out a universe.

Night Driver , designed by Ted Michon and released by Atari as an arcade game in 1976, uses white lines to attach us to a world, but rather than the development of collaborative exploration, here we find ourselves welded to the intensity of headlong motion into darkness. Little white lines mark the edges of our permissible lateral movement. Night Driver employed the old electromechanical driving game technique of a pre-rendered dummy car. Instead of the painterly trompe l’oeil found in the mechanical tradition, we find the starkest kind of depiction imaginable. This can’t be understood as simple realism, and problematises the commonly expressed desire for it in videogames in a particular way. The visual is not inessential to interactivity, as is claimed in some versions of game studies, but it needs to be understood in context. It is a component of immersion, which needs to be understood systemically, and atmospherically. Night Driver’s stark drama of onward movement suggests the possibility of escape from its own suffocating spareness. Thus the simple visual trick in the recession of white lines inaugurates upgrade culture: already we are anticipating submersion, not in the real, but in the televisual. It encodes the promise of a perfect simulation as an unreachable destination. It is the first in the ongoing string of necessarily incomplete, essentially disappointing simulations, where astonishment is followed soon by dissatisfaction. The bubble bursts itself. These white lines offer perspective, and open up the uncloseable, constitutive gap between simulation and the real.

XI

Nokia’s Snake gives us the white line’s negative image. Its lineage is traceable to the arcade game Blockade; it’s a fairly straightforward port of a game, also called Snake, available on the TRS-80 and BBC Micro machines. In 1997 Nokia Designer Taneli Armato coded a version for inclusion in the 6110 handset; a later version, Snake 2, shipped with the 3110. Some 350 million versions of the game have been in circulation on mobile phones (Goggin 2011).

It is a simple affair of collection within bounds, on an inexorably ascending arc of difficulty. The simple controls allow vertical and horizontal movement, and the player must eat pixelated food and avoid obstacles, including the eponymous snake’s own lengthening tail. Success imposes more and more telling constraints and difficulties. The game’s pace initially seems slow, but over time it grabs the player in its python squeeze, demanding attention. It configures an intimate mobility.

It might be going too far to see its central problematic of consumption as an ironic commentary on mobile media’s dizzying, integral version of upgrade culture. But its ludic tension did a lot to draw the possibilities for the intimisation of mobile media. The little bubble of concentration was not site-specific, this was neither the living room nor the public space of the arcade, though it could in principle have happened in either. Like later games, it coached users in the intimacies of mobility (Wilson et al. 2011). Chesher’s concept of the ‘glaze’, between the glance and the gaze, was developed to describe console gaming, but it resonates somewhat here:

After an hour of playing the game you are transfixed, held to the screen. Your hands are aching from pummelling the controller. You are no longer thinking about which buttons to press. Your own actions seem inseparable from those of the character on screen. Your eyes are sore from staring at the screen. You’re barely aware of other things in the room. (Chesher 2007)

From the outside, the player of Snake is a figure of intensive immersion. They stand in a bubble of intimate association, a closeness of touch and gaze. The snake - at the centre of their attention - is in a field projected from the thing in their hand. This bindedness is now the subject of a system of etiquette; then it was a subject of pedagogy.

XII

These are scenes in which white lines signal the gradual elaboration and proliferation of an aesthetics of intimacy. The passage from participation as a radical, critical gesture to the central contemporary fact of interactivity is discernible as a series of seductions. Just as Benjaminian cinema ‘purifies’ Dadaist kinetics of its antagonism, the coaxing of players into spheres of interactive intimacy becomes less and less a critique of broadcast spectatorship, and finally comes to occupy a central place in contemporary work and leisure. Now, little bubbles of interactivity are visible everywhere: in the thumb-scrolling stares of our fellow commuters; in the smartphone-centred gamification of automobility; in the embroidery of dining, dating and death with the threads of social media.

Criticism from the perspective of an aesthetics of intimacy looks to describe the stitching together of playing bodies, minds and sensoria with circuits, surfaces and images in relations of systemic and physical proximity, in bonds of attention and even care. Unlike the imaginary of the network, which is attuned to a flat ontology of nodes and edges, the aesthetic of intimacy allows is to register the localised atmospherics in spheres of systemic play. A concern with the properties of objects would, on this view, be misplaced: the concern is more with the quality of the playful systems in which subjects and objects decompose and recompose.

As in Benjamin’s archaeology, there is an interest in the ways in which particular effects and aspirations are anticipated, reframed, improvised on and reconfigured across the boundaries between what, since McLuhan, we are accustomed to thinking of as ‘media’. The medium here is understood more as a field; the technical medium as a device which summons up a new relationality. Resemblances and effects will also need to be pursued over time, and across the line that separates the avant-garde from the popular, art from kitsch, high modernism and the culture industries. The aesthetics of intimacy has no choice but to take Andreas Huyssen’s (1986) proclamation that we live after “The Great Divide”.

Increasingly, as our everyday, augmented reality becomes subject to ‘infoglut’ (Andrejevic 2013), information, interactivity, and the relentlessness of data accumulation are themselves becoming things from which shelter is sought. Time management applications are among the ways in which a new immunology directed at interactivity is being constructed. New archaeologies of interactivity and intimacy may help us arrive at new forms of protection.

Biographical Note

Jason Wilson is a writer, researcher, and a visiting fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. He has published scholarly work and commentary on games, digital culture, politics and aesthetics for more than a decade. He was co-editor of the collection The Pleasures of Computer Gaming.