這篇文章從媒體藝術創作/研究者的角度，談論在數位媒體創作研究中，文本所扮演的多重角色。
本文是我修讀新堡大學數位媒體博士第一年課程「質性研究與批判分析」(Qualitative Methods and Critical Analysis)的方法學評述作業，我採取了媒體藝術家/研究者的角色，討論在數位媒體創作研究中使用文本(Texts)的意圖。在第一段中，我先引用Scrivener的論文來區分創作研究(creative-production project)與傳統問題解決研究(problem-solving project)，將文本視為一種系統化地創作記錄以及創作者自我行動反思的工具。接著在後段中，我採取將電腦代碼也視同為文本的角度，來理解文本在數位媒體中已然發揮的特質。這篇文章的目的是對文本重新理解：文本不僅是媒體藝術家/研究者寫作思考的工具，也是辯證對話、創作反思以及一切數位創作可能性的基礎。
作為創作研究反思工具的文本
創作研究與傳統問題解決研究的根本差異，導致了使用文本的不同意圖。在一個創作研究中，文本通常做為藝術品與外在背景之間的連接：例如議題、 理論和文化。
在其論文：「反思和行動：藝術與設計創作博士研究中的實踐」(Scrivener，2000），於倫敦藝術大學擔任數任博士生導師的Steven Scrivener教授試圖區分創作研究與傳統問題解決研究，並建立一個防止前者被後者歸化的理論框架—這往往是因為後者具有更悠久的博士研究傳統和既定的規範。Scrivener認為一個創作研究並非專注在「某一個問題和其答案」之上，而是在議題、思考與藝術成品之間不斷改變與更新的過程。另外與傳統問題解決研究的不同之處，在於創作研究的目的是透過藝術物件與設計原型對「人類的經驗」作出貢獻。這些被創造的物件產生了經驗，也產生了對話，所以需要一個根植於文化的文本 (通常以一篇論文的形式），來反映作品與議題的連結，也記錄創作中的反思過程。如Scrivener所述，文本可以：
1.描述激發創作的議題、 關切和興趣。
2.呈現出這些議題、 關切和興趣反映了文化的當務之急。
3.呈現出作品與這些議題、 關切和興趣之間的關聯。
在另一篇論文：「作為實驗室的工作室： 結合創作實踐和數位技術的研究」( Edmonds, Weakley, Candy, Fell, Knott and Pauletto，2005)，作者們強調創作研究提供的是新的「觀點」與「觀看的方式」，而不是去傳達或延續某種知識體系。而創作研究報告與記錄(博士論文)就是藝術家/研究者使用文本來說明他們自身的自我察覺、系統化的研究方法以及反思性的工具。
援引這兩個論點，我認為在創作研究中，文本是系統化地記錄創作過程的工具，也是自我覺察、創作反思的工具。文本是創作研究者與其他聲音相遇的地方：例如在私密和集體之間，在個人經驗和一般理論之間、在現實世界和虛擬世界之間。文本也是藝術家個人對於理論、知識和資訊的理解，也是藝術家關注議題和視覺文化的記錄。
作為創意產出（電腦編碼）的文本
若考慮後結構主義之後的文本概念，對於場景、地方、資料庫和經驗，各種藝術和人文學科都可以創造彼此的「可讀性」(readability)。有學者開始認為，文本在過去被過於狹隘地定義了，文本也太依附於傳統以作者為主體的敘述。作為一個媒體藝術家/研究者，我們不難發現自己身處在一個人類媒體歷史中的特殊時期—一個藝術家、科學家和工程師可以分享經驗、詞彙、問題和解決方法的時期，這在過往並不容易。在當代，透過數位影像和網際網路，各種文化和學科之間可以快速溝通，這形成一個共同的認識論、美學和道德體系。而這個體系則根源於一種全球通用的新文本：「電腦編碼」(computer codes)。尤其在數位媒體中、電腦編碼扮演著建立溝通、傳達資料和詮釋資料的角色。所以在現在，電腦編碼應被視為一種獨特的文本形式，它呈現出屬於當下獨特的現象，也滲透一切事物，讓事物之間能夠彼此對話與互動。
在數位媒體創作研究的過程中，其中很大一部分是編寫和測試電腦編碼。這是一個資訊不斷轉換的過程：例如，從圖像資訊轉譯為社交人際、從座標資訊轉譯為互動機制、從生物信號轉譯為聲音。正如Lev Manovich在「新媒體的語言」(The Language of New Media) (Manovich， 2003)中所摘要的，在新媒體的五個原則：「數據化的呈現」、「模組化」、「自動化」、「變異性」和「轉譯編碼」之中，最後一項「文化的轉譯編碼」(cultural trans-coding)是他認為媒體在數位化後產生龐大影響力的原因，他強調：
「因為新媒體是在電腦上創建、發散和儲存的，所以我們可以推論，電腦的邏輯將會影響傳統關於媒體文化的邏輯，而電腦層次也逐一影響到文化層次」。（Manovich，2003）
美國生物藝術家Eduardo Kac的作品「創世紀」(Genesis，1999)可以更清楚地解釋「轉譯編碼」在新媒體中的意義。「創世紀」在試圖創建一個藝術家基因：首先將聖經創世記中的文本轉換為摩斯電碼，然後再將摩斯電碼轉換成 DNA 堿基，最後這些 DNA 堿基再一次被轉換為陳列在培養皿中的細菌。在他的創作聲明中，Eduardo Kac寫道：
「不同形式的資訊轉譯，產生不同境界的交互作用。這讓我能夠創造出基於語言和編碼的生命體。」(Eduardo Kac，2002)。
通過這些文本(電腦編碼)，資訊之間的隔閡、生物之間的隔閡、信仰之間的隔閡得以被穿越和重建。最近期幾本賽伯文化(cybercultural) 作者所提出的概念，例如Eugene Thacker的「生物媒體」(Biomedia，2004)、Rosalind W. Picard的「情感運算」(Affective Computing，2003)、Mark Hansen的「編碼人體」(Bodies in Code，2006)，都奠基於一個假設：人類正面臨多種新技術，這些新技術都在嘗試將所有事物都轉化為資訊─「不僅一切都可以被理解為資訊，而且資訊就是一切。」（Thacker，2004）這一個概念帶來新的技術與哲學問題：「透過(電腦)文本的編寫，人的身體能多做什麼呢？」電腦編碼作為電腦的本質和工具，形成一種新的文本體系，並如同Richard K. Merritt所言，發展成一個「新編碼模範」（Merritt， 2001），使傳統的學科之間的界限被超越、變得模糊。
在創作研究過程中使用文本的缺陷
「這一切的危險是藝術和設計的研究者會選擇打”安全牌”……，他們會選擇學術上可以接受和可以被指導的研究主題，也只使用學術性的文本使用方法。」(Seago和Dunne，1999)。
使用「符合邏輯」和「學術性」的文本對於一個以經驗為中心的創作研究來說，可能存在許多問題。如同Seago所說的，這是一種「方法學的恐嚇」。他認為，現在在藝術設計學院裡的研究工作正在失去在1950年代時，在藝術學校中的開創性、破除迷信的大膽作為、創作能量、獨特風格和機智」。因為現代研究者的創作行動和思考，都強烈地被文本閱讀和寫作所影響。如何能在創作者自身經驗與外在文本的閱讀與寫作間找到平衡，似乎是在使用文本作為研究方法時，一個重要的問題。
結論
在一個創作研究中，文本建構出一個讓創作者得以反思的空間。它讓創作者可以在個人經驗和集體主張間游移，也是創作者與觀賞者之間的對話平台。文本同時是數位媒體型塑真實世界、呈現資料，並允許藝術家操弄、轉譯現實的工具。當下電腦編碼文本已經大大影響我們的文化層次，也影響了新媒體的結構、風格和它的內容。我認為，這種文本在反思性與可能性之間的交織，是數位媒體創作研究中使用文本做為研究方法的獨特興味。
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In this paper I adopt the position of media artist-researcher and discuss the notion of using texts in a creative-production project in digital media. In the first paragraph I reference arguments to differentiate creative-production projects from traditional problem-solving ones and consider texts as systematic recordings of making and reflection-in-action. Later a notion of seeing computer codes as texts is applied to elaborate the role texts have played in digital media. I aim toward an understanding of texts as not only materials of thoughts for artist-researchers but also a foundation of dialectic context which provides reflexivity and possibility in the dynamic process.
Texts as Reflection of Creative-Production
It is the fundamental differences between a creative-production project and a traditional problem-solving project that leads to different notions of using texts. In practice-based research, texts usually work as the connection between the artifacts and a wider context: issues, theories and cultures.
In “Reflection in and on action, and practice in creative-production doctoral projects in art and design “(Scrivener, 2000), Steven Scrivener seeks to distinguish the creative-production project from the traditional problem-solving one to establish a framework of concepts that prevent the former from becoming subsumed under the latter, which has a longer doctoral tradition and well established norms. Scrivener suggests that a creative-production project is not concerned with and does not reduce to a problem and its solution, and the relationship between issues, concerns and interests and outcomes in it is one that changes throughout the entire process. Being different from a problem-solving project, it aims to contribute to human experience through the making of artifact and prototype. This object of experience, and object as discourse, requires the texts (usually in the form of a dissertation) to be rooted in the cultural context and described as a response to a set of on-going issues and reflection on action and practice. For example texts are used to:
- Describe the issues, concerns and interests stimulating the work.
- Show that the issues, concerns and interests reflect cultural preoccupations.
- Show the relationship between the artifact and those issues, concerns and interests.
More notions of using texts in practice-based research are explained in “The studio as laboratory: Combining creative practice and digital technology research”( Edmonds, Weakley, Candy, Fell, Knott and Pauletto 2005), the authors emphasizes that creative-production projects offer perspectives and ways of seeing, instead of communicating knowledge based on a justification of that knowledge. And the report and documentation of creative-production research should be the principle means by which the artist-researchers demonstrate that they are self-conscious, systematic and reflective creators.
By these arguments the author tends to understand texts in creative-production research as systematic recordings of making and reflection-in-action and in-practice. Texts work as a dialectic space for the artist-researcher to meet various voices: between private and collective, past experience and generalized theories, fiction and reality. Texts also work as the artist’s personalized review of theory, knowledge and information relevant to identified issues, concerns and interests in visual culture.
Texts as Creative Objectives (Computer Codes)
Considering texts after post-structuralism, different notions of the “readability” of scenes, sites, data sets and experiences are constructed in various Arts and Humanities disciplines. Texts are considered to have been too narrowly defined, too closely aligned with the master narratives of authorship. As a media artist, it is not hard to find ourselves in one of those special times in media history when artists, scientists and engineers can share experiences, vocabularies and views of problems and their solutions. Digital pictures and networks establish fast communications between various cultures and disciplines. These inevitable shared epistemologies, aesthetics and ethical systems have emerged with a global communicative, interchangeable texts: computer codes. In digital media, computer codes are the texts that build up communications and locate between data sets and interpretative orientations. These unique forms of texts represent the central phenomenon, which infiltrate everything and keep it in dialogue with others.
In a creative-production process, a primary part is the writing and testing of computer codes which transform information: e.g., images to social network, coordinates to responsive mechanism, bio-signals to sound. As Manovich summarizes some of the key differences between the old media and the new in “The Language of New Media”, ─ namely, the principles of “Numerical Representation,” “Modularity,” “Automation,” “Variability,” and “Trans-coding”, among these the last principle of cultural trans-coding is what the most substantial consequence of media’s computerization:
“Because new media is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer”. (Manovich, 2003)
Genesis, by Eduardo Kac, 1999
The meaning of “trans-coding” in new media can be better explained in Eduardo Kac’s work: “Genesis”. Produced in 1999, Genesis is an art work that creates a synthetic “artist’s gene” by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse code, which is then converted into DNA base pairs that are later again transformed into bacteria exhibited in a petri dish. In his artist’s statement, Eduardo Kac writes:
“The interplay between these various realms is created by the translation of different forms of information. This results in the creation of a life form that was originally based on language and code” (Kac, 2002).
Through these texts, the boundary between information, biology and belief systems are traversed and remodeled. Recent cybercultural theorists’ concept of “Biomedia”(Thacker, 2004), “Affective Computing”(Picard, 2003), and “Bodies in code”(Hansen, 2006) are all based on the assumptions that human beings are confronting a set of techniques and technologies whose central aim is to render everything as information─ “not only can everything be understood as information, but information is everything, in that everything has a source code” (Thacker 2004). This notion has brought in new inquiries into the technical-philosophical question of what the human body can do within the production of texts. Working as the computer’s ontology, epistemology and pragmatics, texts are developing a “New Code Paradigm” (Merritt 2001) that blurred the boundaries between traditional disciplines.
Weakness of Using Texts in Creative Process
“The danger in all of this is that perplexed researchers in art and design will opt to “play it safe” … and they will choose academically acceptable and supervisable research topics with methodologies culled from established academic disciplines” (Seago and Dunne, 1999).
Using “logical” and “academic” texts could be problematic in an experience-centred research. As what Seago suggest as “methodological intimidation,” research work carried out in colleges of art and design “stands a very real risk of losing those qualities of originality, iconoclasm, energy, style, and wit which have characterized the best of art school culture since the 1950s.” Academic texts reading and writing could strongly influence the researcher’s actions and decision making in this process. How to balance between the artist’s own experience and the collective context seem to form a critical inquiry in this methodology.
Conclusion
In creative-production, text can construct a space of reflexivity. It can provide dialectic foundation for the artist to think between personal experience and collective ideas, and between maker and viewers. Also, texts are the way in which the digital models the world, represents data, and allows us to operate with it. Texts form the computer’s pragmatics which greatly influence the cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres and its contents. It is the intertwinement between the reflexivity and layers of possibility that form the interests of using text in a creative-production research in digital media.