Interview with Mike Heim

Mike Heim is a philosophy teacher author of Electric Language (Yale U. Press, 1987, 1999), Virtual Realism (Oxford U. Press, 1998), The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 1993.

He currently teaches Virtual Worlds Theory and Virtual Worlds Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California

Mike kindly answered some questions on Computer Mediated Communication. Here is our exchange.

R.C.:

Golem is a Hebrew word whose meaning is “shapeless mass”. According to a legend, in 1560 Prague's rabbi Leone ben Bezabel moulded with clay a huge human shape, that he called Golem. The creature, that could be animated writing the word “emet” (truth) on his forehead, had to defend the Hebrews from the persecutions. If the Golem threatened to rebel or to become too violent, it was put back to sleep erasing the first letter of “emet” to change the word in “met” (death).

In Hinduism one must be careful to stress correctly the word Rama in the Rama mantra (endless repetition of the word Rama , a Hinduistic God) because if during the chanting instead of invoking Ra ma- Ra ma- Ra ma (positive calling) one, in the process of chanting, changes the stress and sings ra Ma -ra Ma -ra Ma , the invocation of a celestial God becomes an invocation of Mara, the Lord of death.

Such can be the power of language. In Neuro Linguistic Programming great importance is given to reframing, that is giving another name to the same experience in order to have a more ecological balance in the personality of the individual. Switching words does not change the reality of things, but only the way we live them.

In your writings you have very often pointed out the double nature of our relationship with computers, in the sense that they both expand and limit ourselves. I wonder if we can consciously limit the possible destructive side of using ICT through the use of language, as we are told in the story of the Golem. And of course, the other way round, if we could enhance holistically the interaction with computers redefining the language that describes that experience

MIKE

Yes, the language by which we address our use of computers is very important. Like all vocabularies, the words by which we address the computer interface has a poetic quality, by which I mean that such vocabularies reveal our anticipations and feelings about what we are doing with a technology. As my late friend and Renaissance scholar Ernesto Grassi was fond of saying, technology is about humans and becomes humanized through our use of poetic metaphors like "desktops," "windows," and "cyber- space ." In fact, we can perceive a range of subtly shaded attitudes that show various attitudes that are contained in our references to the Web. We notice different poetic (meaning “creative”) possibilities in the choice of words.

Some people prefer the term "cyberspace" by which they reveal a tendency to take computer networks romantically as areas for creativity, inhabitation, self-expression, and belonging to a community. Others prefer to speak of "information systems," a term that emphasizes the objective transmission of electronic bits, a mathematically based signal/noise phenomenon that was measured by Claude Shannon and the heirs of Leibnizean rationalists. Others speak of "the Web" in the context of commercial activities like shopping, financial transactions, and product displays that capture and hold attention like a spider's web. Still others prefer "the Net" as they enjoy email, chat groups, and networking with other people. All these language nuances are poetic fictions that shape the way we use technology.

These semantic variations are not simply matters of hermeneutics or interpretation of what we all perceive. They do not interpret an already given material reality. Rather, through these terms we conjure something immaterial, something that exists in the dimension of symbolic impulses. To that extent, we are conjuring in the realm of angels, in the non-material, higher realm - "higher" because the computer environments maintain the possibility of construing, affecting and then altering the physical worlds of time and space. We can therefore speak of avatars as visitors from the angelic realm. In so speaking about the avatar worlds of cyberspace, we are poetically conjuring a role for ourselves as we enter and shape virtual spaces. The "angel" is originally a messenger (angelos) who sees from a broader, higher viewpoint and then brings that overview to those who dwell on lower planes and who are capable of receiving that message.

The poetic-angelic function of technology was long ago signaled in the language used by the ancient Greeks who merged technical skills (techne) with creative shaping (poesis). Technology and poetry, as Heidegger observed, belong together. We do a disservice to this situation when we pretend that we are passive victims at the mercy of a technology juggernaut. In fact, more than ever, we look to the Renaissance as we foster the renascence of humanistic poetry in the labyrinths of computer systems.

R.C.

“ The word museum derives from the Greek word for the Muses, goddesses of dream, spontaneous creativity, and genial leisure. Virtual libraries and museums should regain their original meaning. Museums are places for play, for playing with the muses that attract us, for dreams, intuitions, and enthusiasms .” (Metaphysics of virtual reality)

I'm particularly interested in Museums and Libraries as I've been asked to design a few virtual museums using the technology Active Worlds. These museums should allow visitors to see, in the same exposition, items that are physically stored in different locations (some of them have never seen the light of a public exposition), listen to sound textures that aim at communicating non verbally the acoustic impact with the present and past culture of the place, do things with the items and in the place, for example play games, scroll cartoons, exchange opinions or just chat with other visitors.

I have appreciated your vision about the necessity to create just standpoints, landmarks, giving as much importance to the blanks as to the pieces of information displayed inside and around virtual imitations of real historical buildings.

The voids in the fabric of the world should be designed so as to stimulate the imagination of the users, that should integrate the pre-existing data with their ideas, experiences, pre-concepts.

MIKE:

Dr. William Bricken, who created VEOS (Virtual Environment Operating System), once said that his work at Washington's HIT Lab (Human Interface Lab) sought to implement Buddhist "sunyata" (void, emptiness, non-fixation). Bricken combined Emptiness with G. Spencer Brown's "The Laws of Form," which describes the axioms that exist prior to creating any of the distinctions needed by any system of logic. By preserving Emptiness, we invoke the spacious openness of early Chinese Taoist-inspired nature painting. One approach to maintaining that void of openness was discovered by my students at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California).

In 1998, we developed some of our places in ActiveWorlds, one of which was called "ACCD" world. In ACCD, we quite consciously removed the ground planes and fixed horizons of virtual spaces, which was somewhat unusual at the time. Back then, nearly all the worlds in the Activeworlds Universe were simulacra of physical locations, three dimensional references to the world we already see around us in conventional culture. Such conventional spaces may be easy to navigate on first entry, but they fail to bring about the inherent fantasy of this medium.

Instead of the conventional, Art Center students began with vast stretches of void. From there they proceeded to build multi-level floating platforms for specific kinds of navigation. Avatars became giant birds that fly freely between the various platforms. One platform housed a Horse Heaven while another held processions of fading brides. A pottery garden existed next to a giant sphere that held within it another vast world of golden Renaissance domes where we often held public chat meetings for our CyberForum@ArtCenter series.

Our profusion may have been excessive, but at the time we wanted to highlight the possibilities that were covered by conventional expectations. Our next step was then to seek functionality in combination with fantasy, the sharpening of imagination through its application to human needs. Why couldn't a business meeting online inject fantasy into collaborative activities? Fun should not crush serious purpose, but why couldn't work regain some of the spontaneous humor of play. Angels and avatars achieve their goals with less friction and with greater lightness of being.

R.C.

“Cyberspace can cast a spell of passivity in our lives. We talk to the system, telling it what to do, but the system language and logic come to govern our psychology.” (Metaphysics of virtual reality)

How could we change this impasse? One way I ‘m experimenting with my students is to integrate different languages in the same experience. If we start and end our activity within the digital world, then our only reference is the logic of that system, and we cannot but be conditioned by it.

But if we plan things in a way that also the logic of the body, the logic of non-digital artistic creation is included, then the final product will be a result of the co-presence of different ecologies, different logics.

The project Dance and hyperlink History started with a search of the necessary information, both in books and in the Web, but the students were asked to play with data and integrated historical data with fiction and humour.

MIKE

Yes, one of the highpoints of the CyberForum series was a two-day event held on the campus of UCLA on November 29, 2000. The events combined physical dancers and avatars, kung-fu artists and virtual telepresence interaction. We used the "Visualization Portal" at UCLA and also the Electronic Arts Building (EDA). The Visualization Portal houses a giant screen for wrapping viewers in a 3D projection that arcs through part of the room. For the events, we projected specially designed avatar worlds (Activeworlds) while at the same time an audio-video Quicktime signal feed into the Internet to show our physical bodies standing and moving against the avatar screens projected on the surrounding wall.

Our physical bodies synchronized gestures and movements with the images on the wall, thus responding and leading the movements of avatars who were in real time present in the avatar worlds. Participants from around the world could then interact with us through their avatars as they could see us physically dance or perform kung-fu kicks with their avatars. An avatar in Sweden danced with a physical body in Los Angeles that was also dancing with an avatar in Australia. The lag time between all these experimental pieces of network technology was about four seconds - just acceptable enough to make the event quite thrilling! Had we had more time to experiment, we would have most likely reduced the lag time even further.

The crew of a half dozen technicians supporting the events marveled at the feeling of participatory world dance. Your dance experiments would make a nice comparison with what we were doing during in those days. To experiment today belongs to the essence of interactivity. Where most contemporary social organizations, such as businesses and schools, are preoccupied with stable revenue and controlled income, artists are not about “business as usual” and can take the risks necessary for reversing the passivity of broadcast media.

In doing so, art becomes a true “avant-garde” by showing business and education how to move from the broadcast-industrial era into the era of interactivity with information. It is not only the pathways we discover that are important but the very path itself. Business and government also need to learn from the nimble footed dance of interactive artists.

R.C.

“ The monad sees the pictures of things and knows only what can be pictured .” In other words, we can only know what can be translated in the language of the computer. Referring to the infomania syndrome, you wrote: “ a gain in power at the price of our direct involvement with things. ” (Metaphysics of virtual reality)

A direct experience is obviously rich in overtones that the rational mind can not easily detect, also because much of the communication among humans is non verbal, and the information we exchange through ICT is heavily textual and, in second instance, visually oriented.

If ICT becomes the major source of our education, we'll become quantitatively more knowledgeable but qualitatively less educated.

In the process of translation something will be missed or changed.

“ Today's computer communication cuts the physical phase out of the communication process .”

It's interesting how from a similar root the two apparently separated words translate and betray have arisen:

betray = from Middle English bitrayen, from Old French trair , from Latin tradere , to hand over

translate = from Middle English translaten , from Old French translater , from Latin translatus , past participle of transferre , to transfer.

MIKE:

By remaining alert to the betrayal of computer communication, we can perhaps develop richer, multi-layered applications for networked avatars. Our avatar angels should remain aware of their need to include face-to-face bodily communication as they project messages to earthly realms. Let me give you an example. Recently we began planning an International Avatars Initiative ( http://cyberforum.artcenter.edu ) which intends to engage youth in conflict zones, such as the kids in Israel and Palestine. Game-like encounters would establish virtual links among physically and culturally separated participants, each inside personally designed avatars that express the divergence and connections of their cultural heritages.

Our first plan involved mainly online meetings along the lines of the CyberForum series (1998-2000). But soon we realized that the personal presence and interaction of living mentors is an essential component, in this case, the engagement of college students who could mentor, facilitate and guide the kids at disparate physical locations. The college students would mentor the younger kids (8-16 years of age) in creating avatars and in participating in online avatar meetings with other kids. A helping environment, such as hospitals and schools, seemed the right physical base for the mentors, who would assist in communicating the angelic messages of openness and sharing that these "avatar encounters" can foster. So the bodily presence of mentors became an integral component of the Avatars Initiative.

More recently, we discovered the existence of the Intel-sponsored PC Clubhouses in Los Angeles. The Clubhouse already provides a physical location for mentoring youth in underserved communities who then benefit from learning computer skills through the help of mentors. The Clubhouse has branches extending around the world. We have yet to see how well we can establish nodes in undeveloped countries of the world, but we have already found broad expressions of interest from such service agencies as hospitals. We may even connect with groups like the Peace Corps.

Right now, the International Avatars Initiative is in its infancy, but the very concept seems to require the establishment of grounding physical locations where the angelic intervenes in the earthly, integrating virtual identity transformations with face-to-face hospitable meetings on the ground.

R.C.

Our virtual counterparts are without the qualities that make us human, i.e. being fragile, non always certain of what to do, at times emotionally unbalanced, and so forth. Those characteristics are the first we communicate non-verbally when we meet another person. What happens in a virtual meeting is that we choose as our ambassador to the foreign country artificially beautiful, lifelessly imposing dolls. But “ they can never really represent us ”

MIKE

Like the masquerade party, avatars hide part of ourselves while those same masks permit the expression of parts of ourselves which we normally choose to hide, which we shy away from representing in conventional contexts. Online multi-user meetings are about the interplay between hiding and revealing. Remember that conventional society is already a highly evolved and subtle system of restraints that channels specific social transactions, that limits while making possible our human exchanges.

Moral history is a process of refining and subduing our self-presentations. So conventional social life is a context for neither "pure self-representation" nor for direct self-expression. Even the clothing we wear every day has gone through a design and stylization process by commercial marketers. Avatar encounters do indeed put restraints on our self-representation, but it is just a different shift from the normal restraints. The shift provides new opportunities for using conventional “personae” or masks. (The origin of the word “personality” lies in the word for “mask.” The Latin “persona” derives from “personare,” which means to amplify one's voice, as in Ancient Civilization the actors on stage used masks as mouthpieces to project sounds throughout the large amphitheaters).

Avatars provide new channels for resonating the personality, which has never been a socially “pure” personality anyway. The artist's task is to discover and facilitate these new channels. No human encounters are perfect "mind melds" (Star Trek). Our human encounters are always mediated by bodies with their culturally shaped gestures and language. The facilitation of avatar encounters is a performance art that acts as an advance outpost for new kinds of cultural encounters.

Herein lies the importance of the moderator in virtual communities. The moderator fosters new kinds of “manners” that are needed for online society – manners which should not be confused, of course, with conventional politeness. One lesson learned through the CyberForum series is that virtual encounters require for their success a team of highly focused moderators who can work within a pre-defined time frame. Worlds should not be open-ended if they intend to create avatar encounters, as opposed to casual meetings.

The focused event can create customized environments that visually and ritualistically support performances. Encounters cannot be left to chance. There is an art of encounters. A moderator can facilitate the event so that encounters can happen. Otherwise avatars may fail to discover what only avatars can reveal. The avatar moderator must combine the skills of the painter and theater director with the insight of the psychotherapist. Moderators are crucial if avatar chat is to evolve its media-specific message and if angels are truly to appear.

R.C.

“ A virtual world needs to be not-quite real or it will lessen our imagination .” (Metaphysics of virtual reality)

In French literature there is an example of hyper-realism in the XIX century that can be a good illustration of where Virtual Reality might take us if we are not aware of the psychological consequences of its use. In 1865 two French brothers, Edmond and Jules Gouncourt, wrote Germinie Lacerteux, a story of a woman and her slow degradation. In certain pages of their novel they reach interesting effects by the mere listing of details perceived by their heroine, during a promenade in Paris and in the neighbourhood. They aim at represent realistically the visual impressions of the woman as she walks. Their detailed descriptions, originally intended to be a trustworthy portrait of the reality, transform the reality into a fantastic world. This narrative example shows how an extreme realism leads but to fantasy, to an hallucinated/distorted perception of the physical setting.

MIKE

The fictional story you describe is unfamiliar to me but it sounds fascinating. At present, I am of two minds about the issue of “realism.” When writing my book “Virtual Realism,” I conceived virtual reality as having a style of its own, a style that combines fantasy with functional realism. Such a style would use the reins of goal-oriented, time-limited focus to constrain the wilderness of fantastical imagination that seems popular in much computer graphics. Such a style also mediates two tendencies manifest in our cultural psychology: the naïve realists, who tend to have a Luddite hostility to technology; and the network idealists, who advocate information technology as a panacea.

I still subscribe to the general definition of virtual realism, but I would now want to supplement the definition with much material that has come to my attention more recently. Since writing that book, several experiences have unsettled the outlines of my earlier views. The synthespians in the movie Final Fantasy, for example, add new insights into the potential of hyper-realism. And since that 1998 book, the study of avatar graphics has opened my eyes to the ability of movement, ritual, and chat to invest meaning in online multi-user virtual reality (OMVR). We are now at an incredible turn in aesthetics when multi-user 3D graphics gains every day in usability and significance.

R.C.

In discussing the relevance of the thought of Leibniz to our contemporary minds you highlights his ideal of creating through scientific language a common language aimed at allow people to communicate.

” He advocated a universal system of symbols for all the sciences, hoping that a rational scientific language might smooth the way toward international cooperation .” (Metaphysics of virtual reality)

That reminds me of one specific technique used in the mediation of conflicts. The presence of conflicts is a natural phenomenon, and it is also natural to reduce or eliminate the destructive impact they have on our lives. A mediator is a neutral person that after having listened separately to the two conflicting parts, has them meet and agree on certain common basic issues. One way a mediator can re-establish the broken communication is to listen to the metaphors used by each of the two parts and then use them consciously to make the two parts literally see, hear or touch what they have not being able to realize in the previous conflictual period.

It could be possible that advantage of having a new common language, created thanks to the use of computers, could be to have people of different cultures translate their ideas and needs using the same icons, metaphors when they communicate one another.

This might allow for a better understanding of different needs and views.

MIKE

You raise questions here that touch quite directly on the International Avatars Initiative. What I said above appears in more practical terms on the website (www.mheim.com/iai )