Death of the Visual

ARTIFICIAL REALITY by Myron W. Krueger '64 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1983. 312 pp., $10.95, paper

Here is a lively and imaginative book by a man who has fallen in love with technology and its more playful applications. During the sixties, he helped design several media environments which offered varying degrees of participant interaction. Krueger calls these "responsive environments," and an over-simplified analogy would be a life-sized video game.

Krueger wants to create an entity that engages participants in a dialogue. "The environment expresses itself through light and sound while the participant communicates with physical action," he says. He wants to create thus because he believes art is dead: "The visual is dead. Numbed by the onslaught of visual information, . . . our most heavily-trafficked sense is no longer capable of reacting to paintings or graphics as art." The author also believes that we need "new forms of art and entertainment that will involve our bodies rather than deny them" because "we have all but eliminated the necessity for physical exertion."

Krueger's thinking has led him to an ongoing development the creation of "Videoplace," a responsive environment, a kind of media room, which takes one beyond entertainment into the educational and aesthetic realms. It is a highly imaginative concept impossible to describe in a few sentences but which places human beings in artificial worlds which sense, respond to, and deal with specific societal needs.

Artistically these projects are naive and uninformed (the author appears not to know that many of his fantasies have been realized by artists such as James Seawright, Woody Vasulka, Len Lye, and Nam June Paik), and Krueger seems to want to be an artist even though his most valuable contribution is as a philosopher/ inventor who shows us many remarkable applications for new technology. His explanations of new video techniques are lucid and aimed at the layman. So too are his impressive and useful discussions of computer hardware and software. His remarkable projections of the future use of computers will delight any reader. How about the "hugaphone" for couples separated by travel? "Even at night a couple would be aware of each other's stirrings as they slept. Voice communications would always be available in the infrequent event that one of them spoke. Tactile communication, which requires low bandwidth, might be included to provide a physical as well as auditory presence." Move over, sweetheart, I want to read Krueger's next book!

Jon Appleton is Geisel Professor in the Humanities at the College, as well as professor of musicand director of the Bregman Electronic MusicStudio.