According to Benjamin, film never possessed an aura, a “unique existence,”, a “here and now” (Benjamin, 21). Film possesses, merely, the ability to disseminate either capitalistic propaganda and distracting spectacle or democratic, politically significant messages. But interactive media poses entirely new questions regarding the possession or lack of an aura. Interactive works of art may not be copied, after all. In order to be interactive, art and media must fulfill criterion. For Bucy, this criteria is three levels of communication: production, distribution, and feedback. “Full interactivity [is distinguished] as a message sequence of at least three recursive iterations in which each new message incorporates references to previous exchanges” (Bucy, 375). Bucy’sparameter that interactivity is defined by references to previous exchanges is paramount. His means of categorization underscores the sense that interactivity is often high individuated; one individual navigates through an interactive platform, providing the feedback which the media must then reference back to the user. What this means is that interactive art cannot be repeated more than once; the one instance in which the interactive media was what it was to the user interactive with it is ephemeral. A single user’s interaction could, of course, be recorded or photographed, but the copy would not constitute a piece of interactive art. The recording of this interaction would be no more the interaction itself than a recording of a film being produced would constitute the film itself.
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Take, for instance, the film Sufferosa. Made in 2011, Sufferosa is a neo-Noir choose-your-own-adventure-esque, game-like cinematic experience. In a web browser, the viewer/user navigates through different rooms of a nefarious plastic surgery hospital. There are limitations on the viewser’s navigation–some rooms can only be accessed by going through another room–but the viewser may start the “narrative” on one of three different floors or choose not to enter certain rooms and engage with certain characters. The viewser’s navigation might result in the user accessing the secret to Sufferosa’s Noir’s mystery, it may result in a premature dead prior to the solving of the mystery (connoting the “game over” result of a video game) and bring the user back to the beginning, or the user might backtrack infinitely in search of the utmost clues.
Additionally, there are a host of “pop-ups” the viewser may or may not access. With four floors, multiple rooms, flexible navigation, and the “pop-up” feature, Sufferosa patents an experience that is impossible to replicate twice or from user to user. |
The fact that this one interaction exists in a specific place and time (the here and now of the object) makes the interaction an auratic one. If recorded for preservative purposes, the media ceases to be navigable and malleable: in other words, interactive, just as a painting ceases to be original if the painter has not painted it with his own hands. Mechanical reproduction still allows for copying to displace the aura, of course, but the re-inscription of the aura in a moving image challenges Benjamin’s idea that film objects are determined by their reproducibility at the onset, when Sufferosa, an interactive film, is determined by its auratic nature at the onset.
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