interview by Simon Sellars

Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 25 October 2004.

Newton Armstrong is a composer/performer, ex of Melbourne, now ensconced in research at Princeton University in the US. His recent project for kids, SPACE MONKEYS, focused on interaction design and performance. It involves rethinking and reconfiguring generic game controllers as tools for facilitating alternative forms of conversation.

In its first incarnation, SPACE MONKEYS was the work of 5 students from the Princeton Young Achievers after-school program. According to Newton, the project could not have happened without the help of Janet Stern from the Arts Council of Princeton, Ann Marie Grocholski and Dana Hughes from Princeton Young Achievers, Emily Doolittle, Laura Blinkhorn and Ted Coffey.

How did the Space Monkeys project come into being?

There were two basic motivations behind Space Monkeys, both of them negative. In standard school curricula there’s a heavy bias towards visual media in the teaching of design, and there’s also this implicit notion that technology is what manufacturers of technology tell you it is. So what I wanted to do was put together a project that would get kids thinking about designing with sound, and at the same time get them thinking about alternative applications of standard consumer technologies.

Why exactly did you want to get the kids thinking about alternative applications of standard consumer technologies?

It was entirely political. For the most part, kids are not being taught how to engage these technologies tactically. It’s bleak that in ten or twelve years of schooling the relationship to technology is only ever defined by a standardised repertoire of techniques. But these are the systems that are in place, and these techniques are being incorporated – actually registered in the sensory-motor mechanism – by all these millions of kids. This is not to say that the producers of consumer tech are all colluding in some dark conspiracy, but I do think it’s important to teach that media are not passive, impartial things.

How can it be of benefit to rethink a manufacturer’s stated purpose?

This varies with the medium. If we take some game controller or other as an example, then it’s unlikely that the manufacturer will state its purpose on the box. But this is a generic device and there’s already a presumption that it’s going to be used in a fairly diverse range of contexts. That a great many of these contexts involve the simulation of violence (whether that purpose is stated or not) is already sufficient reason to start thinking about alternative applications. The rationale behind the rethinking we did in Space Monkeys is pretty explicit, I think. We took this device that’s emblematic of anti-social practices (not just in terms of shooting stuff, but also in terms of the hours spent in seclusion while doing so), and we redefined it as a tool for facilitating technologically-enhanced conversations.

What would be a practical example of this outside of Playstation technology?

Again, I think these kinds of questions begin at the medium. Take some random piece of technology, examine how it works, think about the ends to which it is regularly put, take it apart, reverse engineer it, and so on. Already you’ll start devising any number of alternative scenarios and many of them will be both more interesting and more useful than the scenarios that are prescribed by the standard implementation. I’m not sure if this is what you mean by a practical example but there are plenty of people out there who are doing this kind of thing.

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