This artistic research project discusses the human gaze – how we look, think and decide. It also explores the notion of ’truth’ and how emotions influence our perception of what is ’rational‘.  

Read more in the texts “Unwriting objectification” and “Prejudice and symbolic violence” in the library.

As part of this exploration, I also need to challenge myself and my positioning. I am the creator of the material in this exposition and my emotions influence what I think is rational. There is also the ever-present danger that my own unconscious biases colour my reflections. Communication of my thoughts and ideas can for this reason not be based on the notion of a common ground of rationality between me as the creator and the visitors to this exposition.

I can, however, offer more transparency about my way of thinking by including information about my background and the cultural context I grew up in, and the experiences and inspirations that have shaped the way I think and work.

Reflecting on my work and methods has made it clear to me that who I am today is indeed the sum of everything I’ve experienced so far, and I recognize this background in the way I argue in this exposition. The aim of this text is to explain and expose more of the way I think by showing ‘where I come from’ (although the irony that my unconscious biases and personal rationality will also influence what I include and omit in the following description is not lost on me).

Some facts that might be relevant?

I grew up  in Norway in a culture with Christian roots and I am of Scandinavian ancestry. I have not been subjected to poverty or war, I have grown up in a loving family and have been able to get a good education. I have privilege connected with Whiteness and the challenge of being a woman facing gender inequality.

I have also personally felt the effects of bullying and othering, growing up as I did in a small place where everyone was expected to fit in and not challenge the social order. This experience explains my strong motivation to explore objectification and exclusion in my artistic practice.  

Does having personal experience with the kind of pain that exclusion leads to make me biased – or insightful? Maybe both? Would I be better positioned to work with this material if I was a third-party observer and not as emotionally engaged in the topic? I do not know whether personal experience with othering is positive or negative in this context, but I do acknowledge that it influences way I work with the topic and I think it is relevant to mention. I leave it up to my visitors to reflect on this question.

Inquisitive futurism

The rest of this text is a description of my personal experience growing up during the digital revolution. I count myself lucky to have been able to follow this transitional period from the early eighties. Others will have had different digital journeys, but this is mine.

I believe I am able to pinpoint the moment when my interactive, artistic journey began. I was fourteen. I had read all of my mother’s crime novels and was looking for a new book. Next to “The Secret Garden”(Frances Hodgson Burnett 2014) stood another thick novel in the same red leather binding. It seemed like the obvious choice to read next. I still don’t understand why Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” (Asimov 1972) was included in the row of red children’s books, but this is how I ended up reading my first science fiction novel. It made a profound impression on me and started a life-long love for the genre. I’m still fascinated by the way defining an imaginary society on a remote planet, governed by other truths and rules, creates a laboratory where topics can be discussed and presented from new angles. By removing us from the cultural context we live in, new perspectives are easier to see. This happened in 1982, the same year that the Commodore 64 computer launched and the film “Blade Runner” (1982) premiered. The film “War Games” (1983), the first film to base its story around the idea of playing a game with a computer, was released the next year. Science-fiction and ideas about the evolution of computers seemed to merge into a mix of dystopia and futurism.

No one I knew had a computer, but the many stories about the wonderous potential in computer programming and digital innovation fascinated me. When I headed to university five years later, I chose to study computer science in Germany, thinking that this technology would change everything. I wanted to be in the midst of it all!!

I arrived at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in Aachen, Germany with a large backpack, without ever having touched a computer. I bought my first computer, an Atari Mega ST2, which made me a 'multimegamaster' with 2 MB RAM according to the adverts. There was no hard disk, only 3.5″ floppies which were used to load the programs into RAM every time I booted the computer up. It was still magical. I can feel the excitement even today, as I draw it.

We students played “Lemmings” (Tech Advisor 2020) and “Leisure Suite Larry”(Logie 2020), programmed tic-tac-toe games, databases for our record collections, and bought disks filled with computer games in book stores or as attachments to computer magazines. I read the newly-released cyberpunk novels from William Gibson.

We students were brimming with curiosity. Very little software existed, everything was new and it felt as if anything was possible. There were, however, still no digital networks available to us students, and it became evident that becoming a civil engineer in computing back then actually meant to be programming databases from scratch for companies. There was no communication element or storytelling in these projects. I couldn’t see the experimental thrill any more. I decided to cut that path short and pursue literature studies instead.

I returned to my love of books, but I took some of the experience of programming with me when learning to analyze texts and their connotations and meanings. I was fascinated by narrative theory and how meaning was communicated in context-rich novels like those of Charles Dickens or context-poor forms like Haiku poetry. It was all coding to me. I ended up writing my thesis on the use of computer language as narrative elements in the science-fiction novels of narratologist Christine Brooke-Rose. I also studied feminist literary theory and reader-response theory, which shaped my thinking about language, power and communication in ways I believe can clearly be seen in this artistic research project. Deconstruction has formatted me.

How to make things better

In 1995, I had gotten my first mobile phone (a huge Nokia thing) and was recruited as a student to an experimental development project at the Norwegian telecom incumbent Telenor. This company invested millions of Norwegian crowns in us young students, just asking us to try to find out what the World Wide Web could be used for. We experimented like crazy. The first Norwegian online newspapers launched that year, and I was trained to be an internet journalist, writing about the development of the web and online culture for the web and on the web. It felt like the digital frontier – inventing digital formats and online research methods. Twelve years later, I could look back at a career as an IT and telecom journalist and editor-in-chief, covering the development of digital technology, its uses and consequences. I followed the development of the web, social media, mobile phones, IT and telecom networks, software, etc. closely for years, analyzing and explaining. This journalistic background still influences the way I research, analyze and approach digital interactive experiences, always looking both at the available digital tools and the artistic expression.

Read my analysis of the evolution of interactive experiences in the text “My interactive experiences” in the library.

This background in journalism has also shaped my urge to communicate – to create change by providing information. The experiences I create only acquire value if and when they manage to reach people and make them think. Working as an editor-in-chief also gave me the project management skills and experience to lead creative teams and master complex media projects.

Experimenting with media

I remember that, even during those early years of jumping back and forth from IT, writing, and literature, my studies and work experiences felt fragmented. However, when I started creating interactive experiences, I  discovered that all these experiences merged and gave me various skillsets, all of which were needed.

I’m now exploring new ways to use emerging technology to create innovative experiences that might communicate in an even more efficient way. I think we need this.Although I am a futurist at heart, I am worried by the way digital media and social networks create divisions among humans.

Read about the background and motivation for this research project in the text “NUMB” in the office.

Surely, being able to reach the majority of humans on this planet through digital networks should be a way to bring us all closer?

My background has led me to explore ways to communicate non-fiction through new media formats, resulting in my largest project to date, a transmedia project including a documentary film, a mobile game, an educational tool and the founding of an NGO for change. I have become a conceptual artist experimenting and exploring various media formats to find better ways to communicate.

Finding myself as an artist

In many ways, the largest challenge in this project has been to define my work methodology, which is a required part of the reflection needed for artistic research. The reason slowly dawned on me. I could not define my artistic methods without first identifying as an artist. This also involved defining where I belong as an artist – a process I found surprisingly difficult but also very valuable.

Read more about this process in the text on “My methodology” in the office.

I have great respect for the title of 'artist', seeing it as a kind of calling for people other than me. This attitude might be because I come from a family of engineers, where creativity was reserved for hobbies. It might also be due to the fact that I have worked in the practical fields of IT industry and journalism for so long. I also think it is caused by working in a field that feels undefined.

I have come to know both the film industry and game development industry well through my projects. I find them very different, but I also find that in many ways I belong to them both.

In the film industry, I meet documentary creators who are using journalistic methods and are keenly discussing important topics like ethics of representation and co-creation, and filled with an urge to create change for good. At the same time, the film industry seems steeped in its hundred-year-old history of linear audiovisual production. The creative roles are very defined, the competition for funding is fierce, and distribution is relatively set with film festivals, red carpets, sales agents and hopes of cinema releases. New online streaming platforms are looked at with skepticism, not the futuristic enthusiasm I grew up with.

The game development industry appears completely different. There, I recognize the eager willingness to experiment and explore that I experienced in the early days of web development. Game development studios work as teams day in and day out, which gives more room for creative collaboration than the long, bumpy, and often fragmented road to film production. The roles of game developers are less defined, and give more space to the artistic vision of all team members. Game developers are also very focused on delivering interesting experiences to gamers. Being exciting for gamers is the main factor that can ensure a studio’s continued funding – it brings both sales and marketing through player community-building and fandom. The game industry matured in parallel with the emergence of the network economy, and was excellently suited to digital distribution with its code-based products. The industry avoided the distribution structure of middlemen (like distributors, sales agents and cinema heads) that characterizes the goods economy. Instead, game developers have to collaborate with the huge online distribution channels that have emerged to get into the shops of the game consoles, be listed with Apple or Android platforms, or place their PC- or VR-titles on Steam. However, these platforms want volume and welcome all content that can give them their substantial cut of the revenue. There is little marketing on these platforms and the game studios are still left to do the challenging work of marketing their games.

In my experience, this means that game developers are extremely focused on creating games that players will recommend to others, developing engaging user journeys. Motivating the player through rewards and popular gameplay is central, and everything that can increase a player’s playtime on the title is positive.

To me, this dedication to the player’s experience is fundamentally different than what I see in the film industry. Maybe it is because the job of getting people into cinema seats or in front of a screen has traditionally been left to other parts of the value chain than the film creators themselves?

I feel much more at home with the game industry’s focus on the end user and thinking first and foremost about giving users an interesting experience. However, the game industry also feels immature in the experiences it chooses to offer. So far, developing games that use genres and gameplay that have already proven to be popular seems to be the dominating strategy. Most of the industry seems to be focusing on providing entertainment and excitement. I see few examples of game developers who have the same drive for creating change, or for discussing the ethics involved in their experiences (as is common in the film industry). However, the number of games trying to motivate change or communicate non-fiction topics this field is growing and also experiencing increasing sales, proving that there is an audience for these kinds of games as well.

Belonging to neither

To me, it was as if my journalistic and digital identities were fighting with each other, and I felt as if I had to decide which of these industries I belonged to. Am I positioned in a kind of middle – between the film and game fields? It felt important to resolve the question, because the different fields have different research traditions. I felt I needed to decide where I belonged in order to figure out how to write about my work and who to address. Am I to explain interactivity to the film field, mainly dominated by creatives working in linear formats? Or should I try to explain communicating non-fiction to game developers?

Neither choice felt right. I have concluded that I am a conceptual artist with no alliance to any specific medium. This clarification has strengthened me and given me a clearer direction for my future career. My alliance lies with the artistic intention. I wish to explore emerging technologies as well as traditional media to find the expression that is the most efficient for creating reflection and motivating change.

I also believe that I belong to a field that is only now truly emerging. My experience comes just as much from journalism and literature as from film and games, and my futuristic way of exploring emerging technologies are the result of growing up at the dawn of the digital revolution.

I recognize most of these elements in today’s VR scene, a field that is yet to have any significant commercial success. So far, the field has attracted artists and storytellers who are experimental and not afraid to experiment  with immature technologies. A stellar example of such a storyteller is Nonny De La Peña, a journalist and artist who has single-handedly established the genre of ‘immersive journalism’ (Goldman 2018).

See my description of her work and other interactive examples in the text “Interactive experiences” in the library.

Maybe it’s the futurist in me talking, but I do hope and believe that media artists and industries will focus more on the experience and reflection that they can offer participants in the future. I think there is much to gain from evaluating the choice of old or new media formats more critically, ensuring that any particular format is not chosen because of tradition or habit, but for being the best suited to reach out with the intended experience.