EXTRACT  Bioinformatic Alignments by Jordan Crandall "How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?" E.M.Forster jordan.crandall@thing.nyc.ny.us "With this system you don't need to know a thing in advance about where you're going." So states Dr. Roberta Klatzky, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who is developing a "navigation system for the blind" along with Dr. Reginald College, a geographer, and Dr. Jack Loomis, a perceptual psychologist, both at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Wearing a set of stereo earphones linked to a computer in a backpack, which links to the military's network of global positioning satellites, blind persons are able to embark on a stroll, however aimless, as places and impediments in their paths call out their names "library here, library here," "bench here, bench here"" guiding them "through a Disney-esque landscape of talking objects."[1] The system operates through the computer's interpretation of a triangulation of signals from the Global Positioning System satellites, integrated with the computer's stored maps of immediate surroundings and calibrated to an electronic compass on the blind person's head, telling the computer the exact position of the ears. The information is then transmitted via sound to the ears with a precise timing and volume to mimic the exact distance and position of the objects, as if the objects themselves were suddenly able to speak their names. The blind person then interprets this information and acts accordingly, his or her world suddenly animated through strategic, surgically- precise intervention of sound pitch and timing. Difficulties are many, of course, such as the precise phraseologies of the objects (if an object suddenly has agency and speaks to you in order to identify itself, what does it say?), the points at which objects should begin to announce themselves, and the number of objects that should talk at a given time. A greater problem also presents itself, unwittingly indicated by Dr. Michael Oberdorfer, a representative of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, which is financing the research, in his statement that a "blind person could walk down the street and know not just that he was at 80th and Broadway, but what stores are around, and that Zabar's delicatessen was up ahead"[2]-such a scenario prompts the disturbing image of ambulatory blind persons being shuttled about from store to store in a play of competing market interests (as accurate a vision of our own condition as this might be). On the other hand, as walks with this navigating device may also be previewed, rehearsed, or simulated from one's home, allowing an imaginary walk to be taken from one's armchair, an earlier walk replayed, a backyard stroll to be taken in place of an actual walk through the city, or a combination of all three, one wonders if it would be necessary to leave home at all. Indeed the possibilities for the interweaving of these "real" and "virtual" situations become endless, especially as such systems become part of interconnected telecommunicational environments. In this regard, the navigation system for the blind provides an interesting model for our increasingly networked society: it speaks of the shape that this networking is assuming as communications technology is increasingly dismantled from its mainframe and dispersed into the space of daily life, and it prompts an exploration of how this in turn augments and effects body and sensorium in this case allowing a kind of prosthetic sight, not centralized in the brain but dispersed in space, prompting an alteration of the contours of the body. Such an intermingling of the physical and the telecommunicational is already quite visible when one considers television and other media as sets of techniques of the body, which include strategies of mobilization and immobilization, methods "for the production and disciplining of attention, for the fixing and narrowing of the range of consciousness" one can regard body and sociality as partially controlled through their interlocking mechanisms and effects.[3] More obvious examples are provided in news publications, where amidst the cyberspatial gold rush one can find tidbits such as "The Long Arm of the Net," which announces that anthropologists and computer scientists at USC have attached a robotic arm on campus to the World Wide Web, allowing Internet users throughout the world to manipulate its movements.[4] While such systems, spaces, and phenomena are frequently divided into "virtual" and "real," such binary classifications (along with real/telecommunicational, or the old standby real/artificial) become increasingly problematic. So, too, with the distinctions between movement and simulation, or viewer and viewed, and the direct correspondences so implicated. In the above example, where is the line of sight of the formerly blind person? Where is the place of sight and of that which is seen? Does a distinction between "real sight" and "virtual sight" matter? Is the reality in which benches can speak real or virtual for the blind person? Such divisive barriers and causal connections cede to a play of interrelations; the relations between, for example, walking, speech, and geography, between movement and interdiction, between embodiments, systems of codes, and the economies that produce and are produced by them, intertwine and complicate each other. Barriers are repositioned as porous and actively configurative, structured through relations both trans-spatial and trans-actional. Lines of sight are transformed from vectors (eye --> object) to circulatory trajectories that disrupt polarities and interweave themselves into body, language, and landscape, shifting the nature of performativity. No longer a mirror of the body, language as such arises out of a complex of circuitries, which connect biological/synaptic processes to social processes to those of multlayered spaces of code, prompting active alterations of bodily contours and actively configurative processes of bodily sedimentation. The concept of language as a mirror or reflective surface, staging a separation, a differentiality, and a sequentiality, is augmented with a conception of language as production, circulation, circuitry, and interfaciality. Narrativizations and divisions, problematized and disrupted, stand as temporary demarcations within circulatory constructs. The body and subject, then, do not precede or stand outside of these networks of signification but are rather at all points enmeshed within them. The emphasis turns to a study of the increasingly complex webs of signification within which and in relation to which we construct such transactive relations fueled by the economies of information as living, ambulatory entities. That techne [5] that allows us to visualize and materialize these extended or alternate relations of subjectivity, body, and sociality is the interface. It is an interface, however, whose structure, following the logic traced above, is dismantled from its most familiar Cartesian incarnations such as the "picture plane" of the computer monitor and swept out into the networks of everyday life, a soft and permeable element, actively configurational, that does not divide viewer from viewed or real from virtual, but rather which interweaves fields of action. Thus the logics with which to articulate this situation are those that map not only the differential relations within coded structures but the passages traversing them. To view the networked computer screen, for example, is to simultaneously order its surface and to look through it, in a disruption and transformation of the "place" of sight and of speech: through the mediation of the interface, subjectivity is extended and relocated, embodiment repositioned, object and environment re-potentialized, allowing communication to arise out of a new social dynamic that produces and is produced by shifting patterns of subject, embodiment, object, and environment. Through social representation-schemes, built of shared language and assumptions, these patterns become meaningful. Communication in this situation, then, is built in the transformation of data flow across the interface, and in the patterns that it assumes on its interfacial surface. Embodiments and environments are built precariously upon the patterns of these activated codes, which spin circulatory systems across the interface extended biofeedback connections between bodies, bodies of codes, and the economies and technologies that produce and are produced by bodies and codes [6] that make visible the interconnections between biosocial dynamic and spatial form. From the interaction of these placeless sites, subjectivity and agency emerge: an interstitial parole speaks from an informational elsewhere. Here we conceptualize not only in terms of difference embodied by this interstitiality but in terms of mediated, circulatory flow. The surfaces or systems that mediate this flow, through which social energies circulate and around which they mobilize, become new objects of study. The dialogical context of art provides a vital arena for the study of such surfaces and systems, as it historically and self-consciously foregrounds its own surface or structure of mediation in line with these concerns. In its historicized focus upon the signifier, its conditions of existence and possibility, its placement and displacement in narrativization and circulatory flow which extends into and disrupts its own substantiality, while maintaining its own materiality, art has staked out a territory separate from, but intertwined with, other discourses engaging this situation (although it has clearly ceded much of its critical influence to them). In its study of the constitutive relationships between subject, object, and context, and the social production of meaning, art differs from these discourses in this historicized play of signification which, again, points outward into the world and inward into its own corporeality, although not dualistically but in the sense of mediated, circulatory flow which holds its body in dynamic tension as a mediatory surface, situation, or contextual space that prompts a meditation on its own existence. The challenge, then, is to embody this dynamic structurally while critically engaging the pictoriality of art a dialectic visible, for example, in the artwork of Rainer Ganahl, who structurally reconfigures the interface while drawing analogies to modernistic enframements.[7] If this challenge can be met within the new sets of conditions that present themselves in this historical moment which might be seen in terms of the rise of "informatics" art can assume a substantial role in emerging informatic discourses (as, perhaps, an "informatic art"). Here, then, is where the artwork and the interface meet, each addressing urgent concerns of the other and allowing a vital interchange. Thus embodied, they are not absorbed into one another but stand in productive dialectical relation, in the charged, hybrid exchange-fields that are weaving new modes of sociality. Facing this challenge is crucial at a time when painting appears once again as the answer to the art world's crisis, and on the other hand, when technological spectacle or "computer art" stands as its high-tech analogue: it becomes ever more crucial to contest these emerging expressionisms that threaten to seal off art's critical value in the information economy. Defined by Katherine Hayles, following Donna Haraway, as "the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development,"[8] informatics clearly marks a complexified and hybridized sociocultural environment whose powerful textualities spin whirlwinds around earlier modes of signification. To employ this term in relation to art allows us, in response to this condition, to not only to posit the artwork as a kind of interface but to revisit historical work in terms of that interfaciality, opening the channels of circulation. The art-interface can be understood, then, following the diagrams traced above, as both a play of surface allowing logical ordering (language) and as a medium of exchange, a negotiational space that mediates traffic across the border (economy). Such an interface, then, is one that stands in dynamic tension, simultaneously located and blurred: located through the textual surface (the page, the picture plane, or the computer window) as well as through its constitutive exchange-relations, which dissolve the translational surface, manifesting those on its "other side," foregrounding its constitutive social relations and its modes of production. In this sense it reveals the societal mechanisms that are masked by the fetishized object or technology, whose reification it resists, following Marx, shifting attention to the relations within which it is produced. However, again, this is not dualistic, as its "objectness" fetish or not is, correspondingly, carefully considered, particularly in its role as agent. Endowing objects with agency, in this sense, is powerful currency in the newly constructed situations enabled by communications technologies (visible in the navigation system for the blind described above and within the object-oriented structure of the MOO); however on the other hand objects and technologies do not themselves "do" anything so much as mask power interests and narratives of control, in whose benefit it is to productize relation. This masking or obscuring is not only founded on a dialectic of appearance and disappearance, as implied by Baudrillard, for example, in his observation that objects "are secretly irradiating from what disappears behind" them.[9] It is also founded on an interfaciality whose "irradiation" marks its actively circuitous traversal. The object, in this case, can be said to interface its own disappearance, bringing its interfaciality to the fore and subsuming its existence as representation or mimesis. Such a dynamic is visible in, for example, the artwork of Jeffrey Schulz, whose constructed objects and systems dissolve within nets of linkage, operating as dynamic interfaces for the navigotiation of bioinformatic space. Such a dynamic is also embodied in the artwork of Ben Kinmont, whose work employs objects, texts, and systems as mediating elements that allow a situation to coalesce, but then which dissolve to allow for the ongoing mechanics of that situation, and other situations that it sets in play, to be foregrounded. The artwork, embodying this dynamic, is located in social space and in the relations of production, allowing for its constitutive socialities to become actively visible and resisting their reification as the "art object" which no longer stands in for, or occludes, such relation. In this sense it constitutes an economy of resistance a staging of alternate currencies and transactionalities as art. The artwork-interface relation is, again, contradictory and tensional. The interface as techne alone, of course, is not art. Art itself is arguably a techne, although only in the analytical side of the playing field. Art movements have introduced new relations similar to those that interfacial technologies such as the printing press and the telephone have wrought; however, again, art does so continually and historically self-aware of its own conditions of existence, marking an appearance and disappearance, a struggle of interior and exterior a self- consciousness that technology, alone, does not maintain. The artwork and the interface, on the other hand, are both interstitial and unstable, enmeshed in the networks between sociality and spatiality, positioned on the brink, as it were. Both mediate new communities of awareness between the physical space of the present and that "alternate" reality that is not contiguous with it. The artwork was once equated with the picture plane and marked a dualistic separation between author and viewer; likewise, the interface, and the picture plane of the telecommunicational environment, both overwhelmingly Cartesian, mark a similar structure and dualistic separation of phenomena. As the interfacial structure is today brought down off the wall, so to speak, dismantled into the space of sociality, it is perhaps illuminating to draw an analogy to certain periods in art when such a deconstruction occurred, such as in the late 1950s, when artists reacted against the rigidity of modernist painting and geography. Perhaps connecting to this situation, not only in a linear, historicized mode, but in a more circulatory, negotiatory, and transactive one, can provide powerful insight into the dynamics of the interface and the possibilities at its intersection with art in this current period of the informatic. Such a technique of historicization might itself constitute a kind of interface, as might the Cartesian paradigm itself: the latter could constitute a vital stage in the construction of space, employed in order to narrate a displacement (for example, Cartesianism figures interfacially in Gibsonian cyberspace in order to allow the otherwise unimaginable complexity of this last to be articulated and understood); the interface as such exists as a tool for ordering self, space, and sociality, and which contains the seeds of its own undoing.