Culture Machine, Vol 5 (2003) Layers of Code, Layers of Subjectivity Chris Chesher Great! Great! Perfect! Perfect! Perfect! Perfect! Great! Miss. Miss. Miss. A crowd encircles Sam, who is staring downwards, stomping his feet on the dance floor, building up a sweat. The chants of 'Perfect!' come not from the mystified passers-by who have stopped to watch, but appear as animated text flashing on the screen of the video game, Dance Dance Revolution.1 The game itself is rating how well Sam is dancing by electronically measuring each foot stomp to the millisecond. The game sits in an arcade in the middle of the city, but Sam seems indifferent to the world around, and stares intently at a relentless stream of arrows (¬¯®¬¬¯¯) flowing from the bottom of the screen. He has to match the arrows by stepping on four footpads, marked with similar arrows. Each time he misses the beat he loses points and shortens his game. Meanwhile, across town, I am about to write this article, and I am greeted by a paperclip. It says 'Type your question here and click Search'. It's the Microsoft Office Assistant, an animated software agent that predicts, with uncanny imprecision, the help I need at this moment. It asks again, 'What would you like to do?' I click the close box to try to get rid of it. It waves goodbye and disappears to leave me in peace with my cursor. There's now just a cursor flashing at the top of a blank page in my word processor. It patiently waits for me to start typing. It is the most intense point in my field of action. It marks a gap where my words are about to appear. The flashing cursor calls me as a prospective user and a writer. Microsoft Word asks me to type. In fact, I have been hailed continually since I started up the computer and the words 'Welcome to MacOS' appeared on the screen. What else can I do but start typing? As my fingers start typing the cursor slides across the page, a vanguard ahead of my emerging words, a compact but powerful on-screen avatar giving birth to sentence after sentence. Its flow marks my presence and activity, increasing the word count, increasing the file size, recording my inspiration. As long as my inspiration comes, it is alive. I pause again. The cursor flashes. It waits in untiring subservience. I continue writing, and once again it is the centre of my power over this emerging text. It gives me power, but only within certain prescribed limits. My desires and intentions are constrained and directed through the narrow space that the cursor cuts into the computer-invoked page. When a computer addresses users, it doesn't speak as an authority like a schoolteacher or dance instructor. The cursor doesn't demand obedience so much as make an offer. It addresses me individually, because I personalised the system myself. It asks: 'Where do you want to go today?' (Microsoft, 1999). The cursor is not telling me something, but indicating that it is listening for my command. It doesn't demand that I write, but offers support if I want to write. 'Dance Dance Revolution' doesn't command Sam to dance. It's not like my primary school teachers who circled around my 8-year-old classmates and me and told us to dance the 'Pride of Erin'. Instead, it offers him constant depersonalised feedback -- praise and warnings. It asks only for another $2. As users we take on special hailing powers -- powers of invocation. Sam's magical feet call up an impressive high score. My dancing fingers summon words onto the screen. And I have other invocational powers, too. When I demand a printed document it slips out of my laser printer. I connect to the Internet and call up a reference on a library catalogue. I e-mail this document to a friend. I put it online as a web page. In magical and technological senses, the computer is the medium through which we call into presence new daemons: charmed dance floors, writing environments, databases, e-mail systems, electronic journals. Each of these daemons that is invoked has a logic and an economics of its own. Each offers the user some different kinds of power. As a new media form, it is not computation that makes these devices distinctive, but invocation. Computers should not be called computers, but invocators. Different invocators address users in different ways. Inside institutions they speak voices of authority: as punch cards often implored, 'do not bend, tear or mutilate'. Personal computers offer invocational powers directly to private individuals: a happy Mac smile or a 'Start' button. Arcade games are Chesher http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/rt/printerFriendl... 1 of 19 17/01/2014 11:31 am