Deep Contact was the human-computer interactive artwork made by Lynn Hershman Leeson in 1989. There was a guide named Marion on the screen and the work asked people to touch any part of her body to play the work. An experience that it gave to audience depended on which body part was touched. They could make a “virtual connections” with the screen images by touching it. There were “a complex web of episodes” and it was triggered by audience.
There are two elements related to the essays. First, depending on which part was touched, it triggered “linking” to episode that was organized by the artist. Second, audience was required to touch any part of the Marion’s body to start the artwork. In other words, Deep Contact needs human-computer interaction to produce experience and meaning as the artwork.
In the essay by Vannevar Bush, the author introduces a device named “memex”(memory extender) that is a future device to store and manipulate the information and knowledge. And he suggests the system to operate this storage of knowledge that is resembled with the way the human think.
“The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”
-Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945
In the essay “Personal Dynamic Media”, the author focused on the possibility of human-computer interaction as “the communication and manipulation of knowledge” with many examples of the systems programmed by ordinary people using the Dynabook.
This new “metamedium” is active—it can respond to queries and experiments—so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation.
– Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, 1977
When I first saw the artwork “Deep Contact” on the official website of Lynn Hershman, the description of the duration captured my eyes.
“Duration Infinite”
It looks like a metaphor about the contemporary multimedia life. With the notion of “Hyperlink”, we never stop clicking contents. Our real body is forgotten and expanded into the screen where is never-ending, non-sequential linking of information , knowledge, events and joy.