Deep Contact (1988) by female artist Lynn Hershman Leeson is one of the first interactive artworks using touchscreens. Marion, the girl in blue in the video, calls out to visitors: “Try to reach through the screen and touch me. Touch me! Try to press your way through the screen.” Depending on the part of her body touched, a personalized narrative will unwind.
Vannevar Bush held the conference that gathered all the brilliant minds together at the end of WWII, encouraging inventions to extend man’s powers of the mind. His vision was realised perfectly and beyond his imagination by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, who built the prototype of today’s handy personal computer in the 70s, “Dynabook”. The significant reduction in the size of storage, as well as new ways to input and output information made the light-weighted touchscreen used in Leeson’s work possible.
In 1972, Kay described the main function of Dynabook at the ACM National Conference in Boston this way, “we think that a large fraction of its use will involve reflexive communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and notebooks are currently used…” This reflexive communication is achieved by allowing the users to “mold and channel its power to his own needs.” The programmable nature of Dynabook thus paved way for the construction of a personalised dialogue one could have with a machine host in Deep Contact.
Lastly, this artwork is quite thought-provoking for its feminist message. But I want to address how Leeson suggested the possibility of human desires getting way out of control in an information age. Bush have criticised “the applications of science…have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons” (at war). However out of war, soon after everyone is empowered with such a tool that helps to get things organised, especially with the invention of internet, problems like cyber bullying, addiction, illegal contents, and physical inactivity start to emerge. Among these problems, the anonymity of the digital medium brought one of the urgent threat. One can imagine the recruitment of terrorists, a ISIS member put up a trustworthy mask online and then call out to the curious innocent minds out there, “Try to reach through the screen and touch me. Touch me! Try to press your way through the screen.”