Jan C Schacher
email: jan.schacher@zhdk.ch

Daniel Bisig
email: daniel.bisig@zhdk.ch

Haunting Space, Social Interaction in a Large-Scale Media Environment

Keywords: social interaction, interactive media space, artistic strategies, interaction principles, qualitative methods, multi-modal perception

The Immersive Lab is a platform for the development and experience of large-scale audio-visual and interactive media arts. In this article we investigate questions of audience engagement, artistic strategies, and interaction principles, as well as the effects of embodied and social interactions that become evident in this media environment. Using the catalogue of artistic works developed for this platform within the past five years as as our material, we carry out qualitative inquiries through interviews and categorisations. The emerging insights generate a clear perspective on the convergence as well as discrepancies between the artist's intentions and the behaviours of visitors in the media space and allow us to, if not definitively state, then at least speculate about universal aspects that each encounter in the media arts context entails.

Introduction

"Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument ... For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements ... help to shape our perception of things." [31, p. 5

, our emphasis]

When working in interactive media, with technological installations, we rarely get to engage directly in social situations of shared exploration and learning. Conventional contexts, means, and media are more oriented towards producing finished works that produce predictable single user experiences where the mode of experience falls within a standard range of attitudes, such as cinema, TVseries, and video-games. Shared presence within interactive media spaces and installations enables the audience to enter into a direct engagement as a group. Through the experience of exploratory processes, the social dynamics of shared exploration come to the foreground.

In this article we discuss the 'Immersive Lab' (IL) platform, the concepts and activities developed therein, as well as a series of artistic works that were developed for this platform within the last five years. Focussing on the question of understanding social interactions patterns in reaction to abstract, algorithmic, or narrative media-art works, we investigate through qualitative methods some of the categorisations and salient dimensions that constitute social interaction in media environments. This covers two principal perspectives: the concepts and processes used by the artists for creating work, and the effect of the works on the audience's interaction-and engagement-behaviours. Through qualitative analysis processes based on interviews with artists, experts, and the observation of audience behaviour in exhibition situations, a multi-perspective field of interpretations emerges that can serve as a starting point for developing categories that structure elements of social interaction and engagement.

The IL platform we are developing since 2010 is a vehicle for the exploration of spatial media-arts work, combining the modalities of musical and visual surround presentation with a full-scale interaction surface. Central in the installation is the perceptual fusion of the three sensory modalities of vision, audition, and touch, thus providing a seamless interactive experience. It is sufficient to say about the design and constructing the installation itself that the dimensions and arrangement of the elements was guided by the intention to provide a humansized space which fosters multi-sensory, embodied engagement (see Fig. 1). Furthermore, a core idea of this project is to provide a platform for a wide variety of artists to experiment in and develop artistic works specific to this multi-modal configuration. From an artistic point of view, the most important challenge concerns the development of an interaction model that takes advantage of the particular setting of the installation. This is a classical interaction design tasks, but applied to a situation that presents a particular set of demands and eschews some of the classical themes of interaction design. The works need to address group and embodied interaction and shared experience in a model that is based on dynamic interactions and algorithm-driven content generation. To date, through residencies and workshops, approximately thirty artists of various disciplines, backgrounds, and expertise levels have developed more than two dozen works. This growing catalogue of works forms part of the materials for the analysis carried out in this article.

Background

The platform of the IL can be situated in the field of interactive media art and is oriented towards the general public. The installation system intended for a variety of teaching scenarios that include teaching in the domain of creative coding, interactive media, as well as computer music and algorithmic composition. It has been presented in exhibitions and showings to the general pubic as well as specialised audiences with specific interests such as scholarly or scientific investigations.

Similar media infrastructures that address immersive surround content in various configurations-some larger, some smaller than the IL-exist in several places worldwide. Prime examples are the StarCAVE systems at UC San Diego [START_REF] Defanti | The StarCAVE, a third-generation CAVE and virtual reality OptIPortal[END_REF], the Allosphere at UC Santa Barbara [START_REF] Amatriain | The AlloSphere: Immersive Multimedia for Scientific Discovery and Artistic Exploration[END_REF], the RML Cinechamber project 1 , and the Graz immersive media lab running the extended view framework. 2 The specific characteristics of the IL that distinguish it from other platforms are its intimate, human-scale size fit for small groups of visitors, and the emphasis on tangible interaction with the entire screen surface. The IL is a space for artistic experimentation, community building, and a research platform enabling investigations into creative processes, multi-modal perception, and multi-user interaction.

Immersion in its original sense means being submerged or enveloped, usually in water. In media arts and theory this term has been extended to mean envelopment by mediated contents, be they visual, sonic, or sometimes tactile. We may consider frescoes set in architectural spaces [START_REF] Almond | Sensory and Emotional Immersion in Art, Technology and Architecture[END_REF] and panoramic paintings [16, p. 62] to be older forms of mediated immersion. The concept of 'virtuality' [START_REF] Nechvatal | Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances[END_REF] is a central topic in the discourse about immersion and can be summarised as the idea that mediated contents generate an artificial envelopment. Cinema has been for a long time the principal vector for immersive experiences for a large public [START_REF] Rose | The Art of Immersion[END_REF] and today pushes further into that domain by the application of 3D and stereoscopic techniques [START_REF] Zone | Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952[END_REF]. Video games in general and the recent resurgence of virtual reality headsets have become another important way of experiencing virtuality in an actively engaged manner [21, p. 81].

A further dimension that plays a role is embodied presence [START_REF] Varela | The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience[END_REF]. It informs the perception of the digital image or abstract objects where they are integrated into the body's process of perceiving itself [START_REF] Hansen | New Philosophy for New Media[END_REF] or its environment [START_REF] Gibson | The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception[END_REF]. The importance of embodiment can better be appreciated when considering the enactive position, as does O'Regan [START_REF] O'regan | A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness[END_REF]. He postulates that cognition arises through the body's fundamental intertwining with the environment [START_REF] Hutto | Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content[END_REF]. 3 The intertwining of body and environment is present in the biological domain as a regulating principle called autopoiesis [START_REF] Maturana | Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living[END_REF]. The body's ability to perceive itself and to adapt its relation to the environment informs all sub-personal processes of perception and human experience [START_REF] Gallagher | How the Body Shapes the Mind[END_REF]. 4 These capabilities play an important role in the media context where abstract simulated content needs to be engaged with in an active, intentional manner [START_REF] Tsakiris | Neural, Functional, and Phenomenological Signatures of Intentional Actions[END_REF]. 5 Here, intellectual reasoning fails to account for an important part of the experience. It is thanks to the embodied, enactive [START_REF] Thompson | Making sense of sense-making: Reflections on enactive and extended mind theories[END_REF] connection to the environment that experience arises; based on the physical presence and subpersonal perceptions, the affective [START_REF] Russell | A Circumplex Model of Affect[END_REF] and embodied capabilities [START_REF] Varela | The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience[END_REF] inform experience and provide models for understanding abstract or metaphorical media content. By relating with the installation through a direct bodily behaviour the non-semantic aspects of a work can have their effect. Think for example of encountering body-sized figures or hands: this prompts physical reactions of touching and mimicking in an involuntary engagement. 6 This is why an important aspect of any type of cross-media work and cultural interaction scenarios is the development of metaphorical relationships [START_REF] Lakoff | Metaphors We Live By[END_REF] and blended spaces of signification [START_REF] Fauconnier | The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities[END_REF], which surpass the concrete 'mediality' of any given situation. Thus, the visitor's innate and acquired skills of recognising relationships is applied to the simulated, mediated representations appearing in the media space. This process leverages the complex educational, cultural, and social assets and occurs "by building on visitors' pre-existing knowledge of the everyday, non-digital world ... employ themes of reality such as visitors' understanding of naïve physics, their own bodies, the surrounding environment, and other people" [START_REF] Jacob | Reality-Based Interaction: A Framework for Post-WIMP Interfaces[END_REF].

By looking at the challenges and demands of designing interactions and simultaneously creating aesthetic experiences that get shared by a group of visitors 3 "In this framework embodiment can not be merely understood as the fact of possessing a body and being encased in a body with its mass and well-defined extension and limits in the physical world. On the contrary, it needs to be considered as the embedding and enmeshing of an organism within its environment through extensive sensorimotor interactions" [20, p. 6]. 4 "To be proprioceptively aware of one's body does not involve making one's body an object of perception ... Proprioceptive-kinesthetic awareness is usually a prereflective (non-observational) awareness that allows the body to remain experientially transparent to the agent who is acting" [14, p. 73]. 5 "Intentional behaviour is characterised by the presence of a reason (i.e, motive, desire, belief) to act in a way that will bring about the intended effect. Two elements are constitutive of the phenomenology of intentional behaviour: the source of the action (i.e, the intention to act) and the perception of the effects of a given act. The link between the two is made possible through embodiment" [42, p. 39-40]. 6 For a clear example of this effect see the video of 'The Unattainable/The Intimate' at 03:16 in class works on the following page http://immersivelab.zhdk.ch/?page_ id=2857.

in a common real space, principles of design and psychological foundations of sociality come into play. Considering the combined affordance of the IL media space together with the often idiosyncratic artistic ideas that the visitors are confronted with, the perspectives of activity theory [START_REF] Leont'ev | Activity, Consciousness, and Personality[END_REF] [23] are more appropriate, rather than for example structured task analyses [START_REF] Annett | Task Analysis[END_REF]. The agency of the visitor in combination with a need or motivation creates the intentional relation to the object in the world. This activity responds to affordances in the (natural) environment [START_REF] Gibson | The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception[END_REF], which are defined as the potential for action or perception that is on offer; in the discourse about design this concept gets differentiated between perceived and objective affordances [START_REF] Norman | The Psychology of Everyday Actions: The Design of Everyday Things[END_REF], between cognitive, physical, sensory, functional affordances [START_REF] Hartson | Cognitive, Physical, Sensory, and Functional Affordances in Interaction Design[END_REF], and affordances of control [START_REF] Paine | Towards Unified Design Guidelines for New Interfaces for Musical Expression[END_REF]. The visitor's learning of the interaction modality happens through a reinforcing action-perception coupling (or a circular causality [30, p. 15][11]), where they clearly perceive their own agency [14, p. 237], and see or hear a clear dependency between an action and the response by the (artistic) work, i.e., the media environment.

Interaction, within the context of media arts as well as broader technical design "means the degree of access to model parameters at runtime" [START_REF] Zeltzer | Autonomy, Interaction, and Presence[END_REF] and thus the mode of exerting influence on a system's behaviour. A mark of an interactive engagement is that a degree of autonomy is present in the system, which mimics agency, in order to appear opposite the person in an inter-subjective [START_REF] Duranti | Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology[END_REF] and thus social [START_REF] Chelstrom | Social Phenomenology: Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Collective Intentionality[END_REF] relationship. If therefore a "social action is action in which the other is addressed in the visitor's acts" [START_REF] Chan | The theory behind social interaction design[END_REF], then on the level of the human-machine interaction, the 'other' is first perceived within the technical system. Simultaneously this perception includes other persons present, be it the (implicitly present) author or another person entering into the interactive situation. This side-by-side presence is based on different types of social interaction skills that "include verbal and non-verbal communication, the ability to exchange physical objects, and the ability to work with others to collaborate on a task" [START_REF] Jacob | Reality-Based Interaction: A Framework for Post-WIMP Interfaces[END_REF]. A specific case of this relationship arises when several visitors participate in the exchange with the system. In addition to the topics of translation and behaviour between man and machine we enter into a triangular social situation, where the attention of the visitors gets divided between the engagement with the system and the other people. Through the joint attention arising in the social situation [START_REF] Eilan | Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind[END_REF], the social bond is strengthened and a mode of negotiation through social dynamics emerges. This is not comparable to an on-screen individual situation or the sharing in the virtual sphere of the social web, but takes place in an actual physical situation that occurs in the installation setting and engenders a shared experience between visitors. The occurrence of these situations is specific for a determined context, in what installation artist Snibbe calls "social immersive media: immersive media that favors interaction in a shared social space using a person's entire body as the 'input device,' unencumbered by electronics or props" [START_REF] Snibbe | Social immersive media pursuing best practices for multiuser interactive camera/projector exhibits[END_REF].

The media situation presented in the IL falls within this category. Much of the exploratory engagement by the visitors is based on these behaviour and learning patterns. Given that the principal mode of engagement is by touching the screens, the visitors, even first-time ones, can refer to earlier experiences with touch surfaces, be it mobile phones, tablets, or touch-screen kiosk applications [START_REF] Buxton | Multi-touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved[END_REF]. 7 These fresh cultural norms, that have become pervasive since the rise of the touch-screen mobile device, serve as experiential points of reference for exploring the interaction in the IL.

Developing work, in particular of artistic nature, without concrete task and result imperatives, means taking into account the biological, psychological, and cultural elements contributed by each visitor, as well as the shared gestural iconicity and familiarity with a certain type of abstraction in the presented works.

The 'Immersive Lab'

The 'Immersive Lab' (IL) installation is the fruit of several years of development, investigation, and artistic creation. Originating from research into surround sound and algorithmic composition [START_REF] Bisig | Flowspace -A Hybrid Ecosystem[END_REF], it has evolved to become the multi-sensory and fully interactive space we present here. The platform serves for experimentation in the artistic domain, as well as a device for generating experiences to be investigated from a point of view of composition, systems theory, and above all interaction and social behaviour within media environments.

Currently, the IL installation is a modular platform consisting of four freestanding frames carrying curved rear-projected screens. The frames also carry the multi-speaker audio system stacked in two circles of eight around the perimeter of the screens (see Fig. 2), 8 as well as the infrared illumination that is necessary to transform the screens into touch-interfaces. The interaction is implemented by tracking the visitor's touch from behind the screens by means of a camerabased system (OpenCV9 in OpenFrameworks10 ). The tracking system surveys the entire screen surface of the installation, which spans more than ten meters in width and 1.5 meters in height.

The circular setup used in the past four years creates an enclosed space that generates an immersive field of image and audio. Stepping into the space immediately exposes the visitors to projected light and sound from all sides and envelops them in an image that exceeds the natural field of vision. Apart from a spatial envelopment by image and sound, additional levels of immersion are generated for the visitors: they enter into a dedicated physical space, the direct tactile interaction with the panoramic surface enhances their personal engagement, and finally group behaviours and social interactions emerge within the shared space. The main activity carried out in this environment has been the development of artistic works by a growing number of artists. Their task is to develop pieces that combine panoramic image and surround sound with a focus on interaction. The curatorial guidelines established early on have led to a catalogue of artistic works that all present live-generated, multi-visitor, non-linear, audiovisual interactive pieces. These decisions put a focus on generative graphics, not photo-realistic artistic work or the use of little photographic or pre-produced video materials. The sound domain consists also mostly of non-linear modules rather than static musical sequences.

Each artistic idea uses specific materials and broadens the spectrum of ideas, generating a wider scope of experiences and evoking different metaphors. In the best case a piece exposes the inherent materiality of the installation (for example by showing the machine-perspective and using the sounds of the screen material, as is the case in 'Mirror', see Fig. 1); the pieces always constitute metaphorically blended [START_REF] Fauconnier | Conceptual Blending, Form and Meaning[END_REF], algorithmically driven models, exhibiting behaviours in media that give rise to the perception of machine agency and autonomy [START_REF] Schacher | Face to Face -Performers and Algorithms in Mutual Dependency[END_REF].

The perceived spatiality in the IL is not 'virtual' in the sense of a virtual reality. Given by the physical space that is created through the disposition of elements, a real spatial experience is generated, which provides depth, perspective, and boundaries that do not need to be simulated. In the few cases where a 'world' is created in the abstract realm (Hyperborea, Star Camber), the screen surfaces obtain the character of windows that can be approached and touched but also observed from a distance. Even then, the perception of immersion does not primarily suggest physical presence as avatar in the simulated world. Its function is more similar to a flight simulator where you look out through the window at the world, rather than inhabit a first-person perspective like in a game.

For the visitor to the installation, the first mode of engagement is assessing what and how content is being presented. Depending on the artist's concept, there might be an algorithmic piece running that modulates its behaviour and content without visitor intervention (Star Chamber; Trails), and only changes its overall state upon direct contact by a visitor. Other pieces depend on a specific type of interaction to get started (Clocks and Clouds), posing the question of audience engagement and visitor guidance. The engagement with each piece is based amongst others on the ability to ignore that the contents are computer-generated and projected as mere images onto the screens, in a willing suspension of disbelief [START_REF] Tomko | Politics, performance, and coleridge's" suspension of disbelief[END_REF]. This ability builds on the acquisition of cultural techniques [START_REF]Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks[END_REF] [START_REF] Macho | Tiere zweiter Ordnung. Kulturtechniken der Identität und Identifikation[END_REF]. 11 The emerging curiosity to engage with the presented idea and metaphor arises from the recognition of the materials and contents arrayed by the artist. The more concrete and realistic these elements are, the quicker recognition occurs; the less mysterious or abstract the piece appears, the faster patterns of engagement are tried out. Only when abstraction reaches a level of simple, primitive shapes does engagement return to a direct, playful interaction.

However, unlike Snibbe's work in museum environments [START_REF] Snibbe | Social immersive media pursuing best practices for multiuser interactive camera/projector exhibits[END_REF], where content is used to convey meaning, a message, and tell a story, in our artistic context, fewer constraints operate, thus giving the artists who develop work a greater degree of freedom. Those conceptual constraints that are imposed originate from the aforementioned curatorial intent, which is aimed at keeping the experiences coherent and with comparable degrees of interactivity, so that the visitors may transfer the accumulated experience from one piece to the next.

The same kind of learning that we observe in the visitors also occurs for the artists who engage with the challenges of making work for the IL. In this case, the knowledge-gain may be located in the shift in understanding, which displaces them from their original naïve idea to the actual implementation, based on an iterative loop of implementation, experience, and adaptation to the observed behaviours of the audience. To facilitate this process, we provide a software simulation environment, where sketches can be visualised and pre-recorded interaction patterns can be applied to the model for testing purposes.

A short discussion of the piece Clocks and Clouds' (see Fig. 3) shall serve as an example for a detailed insight into artistic ideas, the development processes, experiences, and problems, in particular with regard to social interactions. The basic idea for this piece is that of an algorithmic clockwork driven by visitor interaction. Through the layering of numerous identical elements, each with separate parameters, a dense texture emerges, that is a direct reflection of audience activity. In reaction to the visitor's touch gestures, the circular space gets filled with acoustic and visual pulse-trains that are running at differing intervals and exhibiting different life spans. The combination of the interactions by several visitors generates a complex web of overlaid visual and sonic voices', which merge in perception into clusters or masses. The guiding idea in creating this piece is a curiosity about perception of temporal, spatial, and sonic density and the way spatial and temporal textures depend on establishing in the visitors an understanding of the generative principles and the importance of group interaction. The stark and abstract quality of the piece poses a challenge to perception. It serves as an investigation into how our perception is capable of separating visual and acoustic streams and how sensory overloading has the effect of forming clusters, fused objects, or gestalts [START_REF] Katz | Gestalt Psychology, Its Nature and Significance[END_REF] that consciously emerge through the abstract phenomena perceived. The central topic of interest is social interaction between several visitors, in particular in relation to the reduced sonic and graphical elements, and the richness of the spatial envelopment arising from several people interacting at the same time. The development process of the piece was typical of working in this environment. Through a series of iterations, the original sketch slowly gained in complexity, up to the point where adding more elements, intricate state-or behaviour-mechanisms became counter-productive. Evaluating the effectiveness of engagement and interaction and judging when to stop adding complications was only possible in situations where a number of visitors entered into unguided play with the piece.

Analysing Models, Interactions, and Behaviours

In the catalogue of artistic work that have been developed for the IL thus far, a number of different interaction models are explored. Although the technical framework and physical infrastructure remains the same, a variety of metaphors and principles appear. The works developed thus far serve as base material for our inquiry into social interaction, mainly in the form of video documentation of public installation settings, through interviews with the contributing artist, a well as an interview with an expert from the field of perception.

Approaching the question of social interaction in interactive media installations is possible principally through qualitative, experience-based methods. Setting up empirical experiments for a data-driven quantitative approach is rendered difficult on the one hand by the nature of the presented artistic content, and on the other hand by the psychological dimensions of social interaction. These may manifest themselves in group dynamics that only become visible and measurable in verbal exchanges, gaze-and gesture-synchronisations but require knowledge of the behaviours for interpretation. It seems hardly possible to formalise and break this down into atomic tasks suitable for empirical experiments in the given situation. Inevitably, we use our judgement for establishing categories and attributing interpretations to systematisations. The use of common and clearly identified terms when establishing categories and the collection of key aspects through the interviews grounds this investigation in the experience of multiple people, be they the artists, audience members, experts, or the researchers themselves.

Rating Works

In order to subject the various works that have been realised for the IL to a comparative and systematic analysis, we introduce a set of categorical dimensions. The full set comprises: media content, narrative structure, system behaviour, visitor experience, interaction principles, and social setting. For the purpose of this publication, we restrict our analysis and discussion to the latter three categories. Each of these categories contains several attributes with which the works can be examined and rated. In a preliminary process by the authors ratings were attributed by judging the functional, experiential, and social aspects of each work. From the collected ratings a selection and reduction process was carried out.

Table 1 collects the insights from the primary categorisation process by identifying representative works of each category that sit at the lower and upper rating boundaries. This is complemented with a statement about the average and its significance to interpretation. This table provides an overview about the diversity or similarity of the various artistic approaches and their relation to visitor experience. In addition, it provides the means to identify how the IL as an installation setting that is common to all works expands, constrains, or pre-configures the range of artistic, experiential, and social possibilities. These considerations are addressed in the discussion section in juxtaposition with terms and categories obtained from further analysis processes. The discussion is directly based on the analysis organised and subdivided along the same categorical lines and attributes. The following sections explore the catalogue of pieces as categorised in table 1.

Visitor Experience (1) Affective -Intellectual During the visitor's initial encounter with a work the intellectual curiosity as well as a piece's artistic strategy are determining for the engagement. In all cases the principles of interaction and multimodal correlation can only be discovered through a process of exploration and discovery. (2) Individual -Shared Works that play with the concept of intimacy focus on individual experience whereas works that create atmospheric situations or a visceral immediacy emphasise shared experiences. Most pieces alternate between these extremes by providing direct feedback to interaction as well as integrating the system's response into a global and shared setting. (3) Disengaged -Engaged Almost all works establish an interaction that depends on and rewards a high level of engagement. The focus on engagement is particularly strong in works that show little autonomy or those that appropriate game principles. In some cases, uninterrupted engagement is detrimental to developing diversified and extended responses to interaction.

Visitor Experience

Affective -Intellectual

Individual -Shared

Disengaded -Engaged

Interaction Principles (4) Predictable -Unpredictable Predictability caters to expectations and the rewards provided by a piece, in particular where an instru-mental tool-action provides the basis for interaction. The relationship between the mechanism of the work and the diversity of visitor behaviours can be identified in the predictable forms of interaction. (5) Persistent -Changing Static interaction modes provide a rewarding comprehension for visitors, emphasise the dynamics of social interrelations among visitors, but also weaken the interactivity's role as driver of a piece's development. Changing interactivity fosters development and maintains an audience's attention and curiosity. (6) Conventional -Idiosyncratic Most pieces don't adhere to conventional HCI principles and those that do, do so deliberately as part of an appropriation through artistic strategy. Nevertheless, among the artists a set of conventions has emerged that is shared by several pieces, the most prominent being the use of trigger zones.

(7) Explorative -Affording Most works don't reveal specific interaction zones or principles as an affordance. Rather, these principles need to be discovered by exploring or observing of other visitors; this generates a focus on shared forms of engagement. Where graphical clues are given, it is in order to shift the focus away from exploration of interaction towards the exploration of content.

Social Setting (8) Scales to Multiple Visitors Most works favour interaction by multiple visitors, but often the number of interacting visitors is limited, either because the piece cannot accept more input or because the legibility of the work's responsive behaviour would suffer from concurrent interactions. (9) Requires Multiple Visitors Works that provide instrument-like interaction or social game situations benefit from multiple concurrent interactions. Those works that require the presence of multiple interacting visitors do so as part of their content progression principle. [START_REF] Eilan | Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind[END_REF] Requires Coordination Most pieces don't require a strict coordination between visitors but benefit from a synchronised alternation between interaction and observation modes. Where coordination is emphasised, it is in order to establish a collaborative interaction setting, which in some cases represents an artistic appropriation of multi-user game conventions. (11) Social Dynamics Drives Complexity Works that operate with the metaphor of a musical instrument establish their complexity directly via the social dynamics of the musical performance situation. The role of social dynamics is less important for pieces with autonomous and inherently complex behaviour. (12) Thematises Social Issues The specific properties of the installation setting make the social aspects of group interaction implicitly relevant to all works. However, its explicit thematisation is rare and gets chosen by artists with a background in participative performance or social media.

Interviews

Artist Interviews In order to better understand the needs, processes, and specifics of artistic development in this project, a number of artist interviews were carried out. 12 They cover general questions about concepts and metaphors of the works, the mode of engagement, the significance of interaction, unexpected experiences, lessons learned about artistic processes, and opinions about particularities of the IL.

'Hyperborea' is described by its author as "an imaginarium", stating that "the intentions of the users are converted to a medium value", that the"infrastructure becomes transparent, as you enter the space" and that visitor can show "an observing or active engagement."

Regarding 'Dolphy-Coltrane', the artist states that "the concept [is to] look for a relation between two languages that are closely related, the graphical and the musical"; it is a process of "translation, transcription from sounds to colours" and that the effect is to "touch the colours and make them sound directly, instead of playing them with an musical instrument."

Commenting on their piece 'Trails' the artists state that "the interaction model [is] that a touch has attraction forces, and works with few touch actions," however "with a larger number people a competitive situation arises." The size of the installation influences perception in that "the 360-degree projection increases the dynamics through the enveloping characteristic and exerts an almost hypnotic effect." A specific observation is that "frictions emerge between the different forms of interactions within the simulation model and between the actively engaged and the passively observing visitor" and that "through the model itself the interaction situation is being made evident."

The author of 'Star Chamber' notes that "the space is a unique space, you cannot really understand until you're in it ... its a very intimate space, [which] changes the complexion of the piece." The basic model of interaction is influenced by the fact that "the algorithm is very unstable, dynamic, the context of the data influences the changes", which implies interaction as well as autonomous behaviour. The visitors can "experience a sense of play ... an emotional experience ..., [the] sense of being dislocated and overwhelmed, [and] become part of the space and enter another world."

Reflecting on his piece 'FORMBIT', the artist states that "it's a visually dominant audio-reactive [piece]." He remarks that the perception has a specific role in the installation: "peripheral vision is completely immersed, so I can sit in it and ... the audio is encapsulating me," and that by "touching in the periphery, it is being filled with the feedback image and we can continue to have that interaction ... it's an experience I couldn't have anticipated." A central idea emerges: "in such an environment I think it's open ground for how people play with it." Finally, during the development process a reduction occurs and he "realised: keep it simple, stupid, because you really want the [interacting] person not to be frustrated." So from an artistic point of view "it's a good challenge trying to figure out how simple is enough that it's engaging and where to stop [when it is] too much." These artist's statements make evident several central elements: the unique spatial experience; the acts of translation that are necessary between the media; the main mode of interaction is that of play [START_REF] Huizinga | Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture[END_REF], that reduction and simplicity is essential in the layered media and interaction setting; and that collaboration as well as competition is a recurring social pattern.

Expert Interview A expert was invited to experience works in the IL and provide insights through an interview. His expertise is the psychology of perception as well as cognitive effects of multi-sensory interaction. The selection of works shown was made in order to provide the experience of the basic types of contents and interactions: 'Mirror' provides body-sized, media-inherent feedback to touch gestures, 'FORMBIT' provides a strongly synesthetic audio-visual experience with abstract lines and synthetic sound, and 'Mushroom Holzburger Paradise' provides the experience of a rich auditory immersive environment with an almost naturalistic visual situation. The inquiry was directed at discerning levels of engagement, modes of interaction, multi-modal fusion in perception, the change of experience over time, the expectations brought to the pieces, and the balance between affective impact and intellectual curiosity.

About 'Mirror' he states that "you don't feel alone, you always try to connect with the figures in the projections" and that there is a "social level of engagement, social gesture, bodily communication and interaction." The effect according to him is to "interact with a piece of art, with a riddle, try to explore this space, interact with the space and its inhabitants."

In his reaction to 'FORMBIT' he notices that it presents "a flat but interesting learning curve" and that the "experience doesn't really end, there is something to explore afterwards" in memory and the resonance of the perceptual field. This is due to the fact that "the perception of movement is strong; a felt kinaesthetic movement" is produced that acts on a bodily level in the same way that"you can feel the sound energy on the touch panels." Overall he states that "[the piece] focuses more on the intellectual curiosity and playfulness" in the way the interaction is set up.

For 'Mushroom Holzburger Paradise' he notes the process and unfolding over time. "You start out with black and have to start to touch ... you have to engage through sounds, have to unlock the visual sphere, try to find correlation between the touch and the sound." This leads him to state that within this process "you realise ... that you won't get surprised, [it's] more an exploration of something established," and that it is "stimulating to have this visual feedback to touch, the fluid simulation. [You] want to trigger it again, [this is the] playful element."

The new terms that appear in these interviews are the concepts of social bond (not feeling alone), bodily communication, the riddle and surprise, the notion of perceptually unlocking correlations, the different learning curves, the kinaesthetic, bodily sensations produced by the works, and finally both curiosity and playfulness. He also remarks that in each piece the experience changes over time while the learning process and the playful engagement evolves. His main point concerning expectations is that some of the intentions of the artists remain hidden and that in some cases the pieces do not evolve enough, thereby leaving his curiosity unsatisfied.

Visitor Observation

A separate mode of investigation is the observation of the behaviour of visitors towards a given work and their interaction amongst each other. This process can be carried out either live or in video-captures. To provide repeatable observations, we carried out the observations on the documentation videos captured during the project exhibitions; they are available on the project's website (see below). In each of these videos, the principal modes of engagement and exploration become discernible. The main criteria for selecting categories are their reoccurrence in several works and the involvement of at least two people. The main attitudes, behaviours, and effects that we observed and collected were: contemplation/observation, exploration, showing-doing, explanation, and competition/collaboration.

The following video excerpts shall stand for many other situations where the same behaviours and effects can be identified:

In the video for 'Dolphy-Coltrane', 13 between 00:27 and 00:46, two visitors, who happen to be professional musicians, are seen exploring collaborative playing and shaping the musical structure in the piece. Their communication and synchronisation occurs through sound, which is a habitual mode of paying attention between musicians. In the same video, between 00:54-01:10 the different modes of observing, trying out (exploring), joint attention and communicating (showing-doing) between members of a general, non-expert audience are clearly visible.

Similar behavioural dynamics are visible in 'Mirror'. 14 Here, a group of expert musicians discover (exploration) the piece for the first time and show each-other elements that they find interesting (showing-doing). A more conventional situation of passive observation and sharing understanding (explanation) can be seen in the video documenting the piece 'Star Chamber', 15 between 00:30 and 00:54. Here the interaction modality is structured by a model that only allows state-changes and the slowly evolving generative processes puts the visitors into a passive, contemplative state.

In the video of 'Monument for San Francisco', 16 with a technology-savvy audience, between 03:35 and 03:50, visitors can be seen explaining (showingdoing) to each-other what they see in the presented imagery, thus engaging in a communication situation (explanation) that goes beyond purely exploratory interaction. Similarly, in 'Nothing to Hide', in the same video, between 05:55 and 07:20, the group interaction and joint interaction is brought to a maximum, in particular with the piece's concept of exposing social media contents in an interaction model resembling 'whack-a-mole'.

The mode of competition but also collaboration is most visible in 'Hyperborea', 17 between 05:08 and 05:40, where each segment of the screen-space presents a separate but linked interaction element that is used to navigate the piece.

Discussion

After these detailed analyses the next step is to bring together, compare, and synthesise the insights. The collected keywords as well as the analysis of interaction principles generate a map of interaction mechanisms and effects, which needs to be deciphered. The installation platform and the inherently artistic situations assembled in the work catalogue form a well defined framework, which informs the observed situations. Basing our investigation on these materials enables a comparative approach across a number of cases, yet at the same time prevents the generalisation into other interactive media settings. Nevertheless, the combination of elements assembled in the IL platform represents a valid experimental setup with which to carry out the intended analysis about social interaction.

The four investigation strategies carried out on the corpus of work each represent a specific perspective. At the intersection of these four fields lies the question about social engagement in interactive media installations. Several dimensions of sociality can be observed in this intersecting field: exchanges among artists, influences between artist and the (imagined and projected) visitor, perceptual links between the engaging visitor and the abstract entities presented in a piece, and finally the different interactions taking place between several visitors. In each of these cases the relational nature of the situation is central, but their rapport is not always a direct and immediate one. On the contrary, through the different temporalities that are present in the artistic development process, in the maturation of the ideas and experiences, as well as the time of a visit to the IL, the different subjects relate to each other in circular, adaptive, and influencing loops that mark the experience. Only between members of the audience does a direct social interaction emerge, in all other cases the technology as well as the metaphors and models used to construct the works mediate the experience and the inter-relationships.

An important question arising from this state of affairs is to what degree the social interactions perceptually dominate the other elements. Does the spatial, multi-sensory, yet evidently artificial media environment not impose a stronger impact than the (group) experience that is possible within its confines? Can we deduce that an inter-subjective link provides an indispensable influence on the visitor's behaviour or does it influence it in an oblique manner? Does the action-perception loop enable a perception of lateral social interactions between visitors, or does the perception only occur when it is metaphorically established with the media work within the circular causality of interaction? Even though it is hardly possible to provide a definitive answer to these questions within the given framework, the evidence that was collected in the analysis shows that on the different levels of interaction, within the different relations, the social or at least the inter-subjective rapport forms a core part of the experience. Whether this relationship supersedes the impact of the media environment depends on a variety of factors: the number of visitors present at the same time, the interaction principle and the artistic language of a given work, the familiarity of a person with interactive installations, and a general affinity to abstract, metaphorical, game-like scenarios.

Judging from the collected interviews and the observations of audience behaviour (see also Fig. 4) we are confident that in many cases the inter-subjective exchange forms the basis for interaction. Framed by the initial curatorial brief, in none of the works does a purely linear, utilitarian tasks fulfilment principle prevail. The abstract playful engagement [START_REF] Lindley | Ludic Engagement and Immersion as a Generic Paradigm for Human-Computer Interaction Design[END_REF] 18 establishes both on real and metaphorical levels the subjective engagement of the visitor with a situation where an agent provides the subjective vis-à-vis. This subject can be perceived as the (inherently present) author or the agency-endowed, simulated entities within the interactive system.

Lateral social interaction or at least influences between persons in largescale installations are always present; we haven't been able to observe a single situation where a visitor did not engage in a dialogue with other people present. The setting is, contrary to personal devices and small screens, not amenable to solitary exploration, and if a single person is interacting there is always another person partaking who becomes the recipient of commentary and self-reports of experience

The complexity of the emerging phenomenon in the resulting interactions depends on and reflects the complexity of social situations and group behaviour patterns. This is the case both during artistic development processes and in exhibitions with visitor interactions. The only solitary moment occurs during artistic development processes, where activities of sketching and constructing ideas takes place. But even in that phase the evaluation of the models and ideas requires the presence and interaction of another person. This particularly concerns an under-standing of how synchronisation, coordination, and competition function within the interactive situations. These effects can only be seen and understood in the full installation scenario with an adequate number of visitors. Furthermore, the scale and scope of immersion is difficult to anticipate. The understanding about mechanisms and effect of interaction models on this dimension of experience can only be achieved through exposure to the actual setting. All this to emphasise the absolute necessity to experiment in the actual setting and adapt the original concept and idea to experienced and observed behaviours and interaction patterns.

In Closing

The 'Immersive Lab' platform provides a framework for artistic work as well as investigations into foundational principles of interaction and audience engagement. By laying out the framework, it's conceptual background, and the specificities of creating artist work for this interactive media environment, we have set up an experimental device with which to investigate core question that are relevant to designers, HCI-researchers, as well as artists interested in mastering this particular mix of disciplines.

The main insight from this inquiry may be that there is always mutual showing and learning occurring in the social setting of a large scale installation, and that this complex, charged media environment enables the observation of behaviours, the extension of experience, and the encounter with archetypical categories of interaction, that are provoked by the specific, particular, idiosyncratic demands and reactions inherent to each artist's vision.

Future work with the IL platform will extend the installation framework into other configurations, to enter into research and dissemination collaborations with scientific partners who investigate perceptual phenomena of proprioception, action-perception coupling, and musical performance principles. In addition, the pedagogical impetus will be broadened to include a variety of students, ranging from high-school to post-graduate arts and design students. And finally, the 'Immersive Lab' will be shown in a number of exhibitions where the general public will be able to experience the effects of human-scale, multi-modal interaction with spatial audio-visual media.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Interaction in the 'Immersive Lab'. July 2015: Haunted 'Mirror'.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. A rendering of the 'Immersive Lab' platform in its current configuration.

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Exploration and co-learning within the installation. September 2014, 'Clocks and Clouds'.

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Large Group interaction inside the 'Immersive Lab'. November 2015 at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

Table 1 .

 1 Analysis

				1							2	3
	Rating	atmospheric (MP, SC)		local manipulation (FB)				autonomous and
						bodily intimacy (UI)				atmospheric (SC)
	Maximum Rating	scientific sonification (TR)		vertigo (FB),					instrument (DC),
						collaborative composition (CC),		game situation (HY, NH)
						atmospheric (SC)
	Average Rating	affective media but	3.7	local feedback to				6.6	most pieces benefit	6.5
		intellectual				direct interaction and				from alternating
		appreciation of				global audiovisual					between engagement
		interaction concept			result						and observation
	Interaction Principles	Predictable -Unpredictable	4	Persistent -Changing		5	Conventional -Idiosyncratic	6	Explorative -Affording	7
	Minimum Rating	instrument (DC),		constant interaction		game convention (HY)	Lack of visible
		GUI (TE, NH)			principle (DC, TE,		GUI convention (TR, NH)	interaction elements ()
		media trigger (MS)		MS, more)
	Maximum Rating autonomous and		changing simulation		parameter space (SC)	Game controls (HY),
		complex (TA)			setting (TA),			simulation control (MP, TA)	GUI elements (TE,NH)
					narrative progression (SN)	construction (FB, CC)	body contact (SN)
	Average Rating	repeatable direct	1.8	interaction principle	2.2	idiosyncrasies have	5.6	relies on physical	3.6
		response			provides clarity			become installation	affordances of
									conventions	installation
	Social Setting	Scales to Multiple	Requires Multiple	Requires			Social Dynamics	Thematises
		Visitors	8	Visitors	9	Coordination	10	Drive Complexity	11	Social Issues	12
	Minimum Rating global response to	concurrent		triggering of local	complex autonomous	not an issue (almost
		singular interaction	interactions are	media (MS)			work (TA), single	all works)
		(SC)		disruptive (SC)					global interaction (SC)
	Maximum Rating Collaborative		progressive changes	collaborative			collaborative	Collaborative
		instrument (DC),	of work require	exploration (HY),	improvisation (DC),	improvisation (DC,
		social game (NH)	concurrent interaction	collaborative			collaborative	CC), interaction with
				(MP, SN)		manipulation (FB)	composition (CC)	virtual participants
							social game (NH)			(MI, SN, UI), privacy
												and social media (NH)
	Average Rating	many works	5.3	many works	2.9	many works	4.2	in many works	5	no work deals	4
		designed for		provide a (slightly	benefit from alter-	diversity of interaction	only partially
		several but not		diminished) single	nating interaction		maps to diversity of	with social issues
		too many visitors	visitor experience	and observation		feedback

of interaction principles across the catalogue of works. Piece titles abbreviated: Dolphy-Coltrane DC; Hyperborea HY, Trails TA; Clocks and Clouds CC; Mirror MI; Star Chamber SC; FORMBIT FB; Trees TE; Sozio-Natürlich SN; Mushroom Holzburger Paradise MP; The Unattainable/The Intimate UI; Nothing to Hide NH; Monument for San Francisco MS.

Table 2 .

 2 Collected keywords from the three qualitative investigation strands.

	Artists	Expert	Visitor Observation
	spatial experience	social bond	contemplation/observation
	translation	bodily communication	exploration
	play	riddle	showing-doing
	reduction and simplicity	surprise	explanation
	collaboration/competition	perceptually unlocking	collaboration/competition
		learning curves
		kinaesthetic, bodily sensations
		curiosity
		playfulness

Bill Buxton provides a useful overview over multi-touch devices from the beginnings up to ca. 2008 http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

For more details on the construction of the installation visit http://immersivelab. zhdk.ch/?page_id=20

http://opencv.org/

http://www.openframeworks.cc

"To speak of cultural techniques in this context is to acknowledge the skills and aptitudes necessary to master the new media ecology. ... Kulturtechnik comes close to what in English is referred to as 'media competence'."[44, p. 5-6]

All interviews can be found on the corresponding page of the website http: //immersivelab.zhdk.ch.

'Dolphy-Coltrane' at: http://immersivelab.zhdk.ch/?page_id=74

'Mirror' at: http://immersivelab.zhdk.ch/?page_id=544

'Star Chamber' at: http://immersivelab.zhdk.ch/?page_id=62

'Monument for San Francisco' & 'Nothing to Hide' in video 'workshop-showing' at: http://immersivelab.zhdk.ch/?page_id=3029

In "the formal system of games, the formal system of the model, and the formal systems of narratives"[27, p. 3].

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to all the participating artists and to Patrick Neff for sharing his expertise. The 'Immersive Lab' is the outcome of two Swiss National Science Foundation DORE grants: Interactive Swarm Orchestra ISO, Grant 13DPD3-109849 (2006)(2007)(2008) and Interactive Swarm Space ISS, Grant 13DPD6-124810 (2009-2011). For the 2015 activities in California it benefitted from financial support by Swissnex, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Consulate General in San Francisco, and the Zurich University of the Arts. The current project cycle is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, AGORA Grant Nr. RAGP1 171656.


The phrase "The noiseless tenor of their way" concludes the stanza of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' from which Hardy extracted the title of Far from the Madding Crowd. I have chosen it as the title of this paper as a means of introducing the questions I propose to discuss. Gray's use of the adjective 'noiseless' -rather than its close synonym 'silent' -involves a privative suffix (-"The noiseless tenor of their way": quotations, inscriptions and the words of others in Far from the Madding Crowd Emily Eells less) which points to a truncated, imperfect state. 'Noiselessness' indicates an echo or a barely perceptible reverberation. The Latin etymology of the word 'noise' relates it to 'nausea' and seasickness, thus suggesting chaos, upheaval and noisy confusion. My discussion here will focus on Hardy's unsettling use of set phrases and quotations in Far from the Madding Crowd which -to use a popular expression -rocks the boat, upsetting the relationship between signifier and signified. Hardy's use of the words of others shows how he appropriates a quotation from a particular context, and changes its meaning by applying it to a contrasting, or even contradictory situation in his narrative.

The text of Far from the Madding Crowd also makes prominent use of inscriptions carved in stone, engraved in gold, impressed in wax or set to music. They all illustrate how Hardy materializes language, giving it a concrete quality suggesting its immutable permanency. However, the solidity of the language is threatened by repetition and misunderstanding, and at times dissolves into meaningless shreds. The materialized language contrasts with the elusiveness of the spoken word with which the characters forge an expression of their feelings. The challenge they face is, as Oak puts it, to "map out the mind on the tongue" (22). Recognizing that language will fail him, Oak's solution is not to use it, as we learn when he first falls in love with Bathsheba:

He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent. ( 21)

The narrator's phrase "the coarse meshes of language" encapsulates the question addressed in this paper, as it points to the ambivalence of language. Language is a net in which one can get trapped, but whose meshes mean that it is porous, and unable to fully contain and retain meaning. The adjective 'coarse' underscores the inadequacy of language as it suggests that it can only convey a rough approximation.

This paper will begin by considering how quotations serve to chart the linguistic map of Far from the Madding Crowd, which extends from the narrator's library to the Dorset dialect, and which is invaded by a speaker of foreign languages in the person of Sergeant Troy. I will show how the use of quotations reveals a troubling differential between the source of derivation and the context of relocation. My second section on inscriptions will turn to the embedded texts in the narrative, in order to illustrate how written language is also subject to a divorce between its message and its meaning. My last section on the words of others will consider the strategies adopted by Bathsheba Everdene to negotiate the inadequacies of language in an attempt to express the "intangibilities of [her] feeling[s]".

Marlene Springer has identified "approximately 160 allusions" in Far from the Madding Crowd (Springer,57), an impressive figure which foregrounds the use of intertextuality as a key narrative strategy in this novel. Hardy's use of quotations marks a distance separating the educated, literary world of the author and narrator from the Wessex community whose tale is related in Far from the Madding Crowd. Starting with that title of the novel, derived from "one of the most quoted poems in the English language" (Springer, 58), Hardy has his narrator draw liberally from a fund of culture which he presumes to share with his educated reader, though not with the rustic workfolk. His choice of title is highly ironic, as the community of Weatherbury constitutes "a madding crowd", with its drunken workfolk, its infatuated bachelor driven by jealousy to murder his rival, and its innocent girl seduced by a soldier left to die in childbirth in the local workhouse. The first quotation, offset in the text, marks a gap between its source and the situation to which it applies. It cites Shakespeare with reference to the difficulty Oak experiences professing his love to Bathsheba:

Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales --Full of sound and fury -Signifying nothinghe said no word at all. These lines from Macbeth 5.5 are frequently abstracted like this from their original context, where Macbeth's reaction to the news of his wife's death is to define life as "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." Hardy's quotation signals the gap between the narrator's knowledge of the canon of English literature and Oak's apparent inarticulateness, though not without irony, as literary eloquence is mobilized to refer to cacophony resulting in meaninglessness.

The narrator makes abundant use of quotations, signposted by a framing in the text, thoughlike the lines from Macbeth -their source is rarely identified. In addition to creating a hiatus in the flow of the narrative and a modulation in the tenor of the narrative voice, the original meaning of the quotations sometimes clashes with the situation into which they are inserted in Hardy's novel. A case in point is a line from Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes' to portray Bathsheba's rejuvenation at the time of her marriage to Oak: "As though a rose should shut and be a bud again" (306). Keats's line referring to a drugged maiden, passively borne off in her sleep to be married, is a far remove from Bathsheba's state. She has defied Victorian convention by taking the initiative of going to Oak's home to ask him to remain on the farm, which they both recognize would be tantamount to renewing their courtship. In a similar way, Hardy inserts a quotation from Sir Walter's Scott's 'Marmion' which is out of tune with the narrative situation. He cites Scott's account of a battle to convey the Weatherbury folk's anticipation of news of Boldwood's court case. The lines from the poem use onomatopoeia to convey the trample of the horse's hooves as it bears Coggan back with the law court's decision, inappropriately marking time when both the readers and the characters are on tenterhooks:

At last, when they all were weary the tramp of a horse was heard in the distance-First dead, as if on turf it trode, Then, clattering on the village road In other pace than forth he yode. ( 296)

The use of quotations reveals not only the narrator's cultural superiority, but also his retrospective vantage point. This is explicit when he points to the proleptic value of the verse Bathsheba sings from 'The Ballad of Allan Water', written by Matthew Lewis who is better known for his Gothic novel The Monk. Little can Bathsheba know that the words of the song about a beautiful young woman wooed by a soldier's "winning tongue" foretell her own future, but the narrator shares the benefit of hindsight with the reader: Subsequent events caused one of the verses to be remembered for many months, and even years, by more than one of those who were gathered there: -For his bride a soldier sought her, And a winning tongue had he: On the banks of Allan Water None was gay as she! ( 123)

An alternative ending to the first verse and the two following versions of Bathsheba's song are not reproduced in Hardy's text, but they resonate in an ominous undertone:

On the banks of the Allan Water, When the sweet springtime did fall, Was the miller's lovely daughter, Fairest of them all. For his bride, a soldier sought her And a winning tongue had he, On the banks of the Allan Water So misled was she.

On the banks of the Allan Water

When the autumn spread its store There I saw the miller's daughter But she smiled no more, For the summer, grief had brought her And the soldier, false was he, On the banks of the Allan Water, Left alone was she.

On the banks of the Allan Water When the winter snow fell fast Still was seen the miller's daughter

Chilling blew the blast. But the miller's lovely daughter, Both from cold and care was free, On the banks of Allan Water, In a grave lay she.

The quarrel culminating in Bathsheba's first dismissal of Oak from her employment is another instance of how the narrator frames a quotation with hindsight. The narrator begins by reporting their argument in direct speech: 'Go at once then, in Heaven's name!' said she, her eyes flashing at his, though never meeting them. 'Don't let me see your face any more.' 'Very well, Miss Everdene-so it shall be.' (107)

The narrator then adds a post-script which compares Oak to Moses:

And he took his shears and went away from her in placid dignity, as Moses left the presence of Pharaoh. ( 107 It is laden with significance, because the subsequent ruin of Pharaoh's property will prompt him to recall Moses, just as the "troubles in the fold" in the following chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd will compel Bathsheba to summon Oak back. For the reader who knows the Biblical story, the allusion is reassuring as it hints that Oak and Bathsheba will be reunited in the near future. However, a repeated allusion to how Oak deals with an upheaval in his emotions by turning to the Bible undermines the conviction that he masters his state of "placid dignity". The narrator first suggests that he will read Ecclesiastes after Bathsheba turns down his marriage proposal:

No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness. 'Very well,' said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. 'Then I'll ask you no more.' (30) Oak's reading of Ecclesiastes is also referred to after he berates Bathsheba for her flirtatious treatment of Boldwood:

Gabriel at this time of his life had outgrown the instinctive dislike which every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now quite frequently, and he inwardly said, ' "I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!" ' This was mere exclamation-the froth of the storm. He adored Bathsheba just the same. ( 120)

The Biblical quotation functions here as an attempt to check a flood of emotions. It is used as a means of battening down emotions with the hatches of language, as if a phrase framed by another and printed in a text could stop the sensation of sea-sickness cause by unsettled feelings.

The distance the narrator puts between himself and the farming community is mirrored by the use of dialect which roots the Wessex folk in a linguistic space of their own. Hardy even has Bathsheba feign not to understand that Oak means marriage when he uses the local phrase "to get thee", which he then translates into what he calls "plain British" (302). In the same passage, a quotation from a poem in Dorset Dialect complements the narrator's literary references. It is taken from 'Woak Hill' in the volume of Poems of Rural Life in Dorset Dialect published by William Barnes in 1844, in which the poet expresses grief over his wife's death. The tenor of the poem therefore contradicts the narrative situation in which it is embedded, namely Oak and Bathsheba's final reconciliation. Their meeting takes place in Oak's home, and the quotation is used to describe the light of the fire reflecting on his old wooden furniture 'all a-sheenen/ Wi' Long years o' handeln' (301). Hardy recognized that his readers would not know the source of the citation, and added a footnote to the 1895 re-edition of his text to specify it. He also inscribes his presence in the text in a note on the phrase 'a devil in a cowl' with which the farm-hand Mark Clark refers to the dishonest baliff, Pennyways, meaning that he was a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. Hardy's note indicates how the natives' language has been corrupted beyond recognition: "This phrase ['a devil in a cowl'] is a conjectural emendation of the unintelligible expression, 'as the Devil said to the Owl' used by the natives" (53, note 4). The Wessex dialect is characterized by that fact that "Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase" (114), making it as "well-worn" as Oak's wooden furniture or the stone-flag floor in Warren's Malthouse which was "worn into a path from the doorway to the kiln, and into undulations everywhere." (45). The rustics' language is so eroded that it crumbles into isolated syllables and incomprehensible syntagms. The typographical presentation of the 'ballet' Joseph Poorgrass sings (to use the rustics' corrupted form of the word 'ballad') replicates his drunken stammering and the way the words have decomposed into fractured syllables. The language is shattered into pieces, so that the adjectives 'low' and 'ill' emerge out of the noun 'willow' and the verb 'will' , deepening the shadow cast by the song: 'Go on, Joseph […],' said Coggan. 'Tis a very catching ballet. Now then again-the next bar; I'll help ye to flourish up the shrill notes where yer wind is rather wheezy:-O the wi'-il-lo'-ow tree' will' twist', And the wil'-low' tre'-ee wi'ill twine'. (122) Language is fractured in a similar way by the young dunce on his way to school, trying to learn a prayer by heart. The way he splits the sentences into meaningless semantic units indicates just how little he understands of what he is reciting:

'O Lord, O Lord, O Lord, O Lord, O Lord':-that I know out o' book. 'Give us, give us, give us, give us, give us':-that I know. 'Grace that, grace that, grace that, grace that':-that I know.' Other words followed to the same effect. The boy was of the dunce class apparently; the book was a psalter, and this was his way of learning the collect. ( 233)

Even the clock over the Alms-house in Casterbridge has a chime which is not only "stammering", but also corrupted in the sense that it intones "a shattered form of 'Malbrook'" (216), the French lullaby 'Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre' which itself deforms Marlborough's name.

Sergeant Troy's "dashing" (137) use of foreign words adds a note of exoticism to the polyphony of Far from the Madding Crowd. The son of a "Parisienne" (136), he was educated at Casterbridge Grammar School, where according to Liddy he "learnt all languages while he was there; and it was said he got on so far that he could take down Chinese in shorthand" (130). Troy marks himself off from the country folk by consciously borrowing from their language, explaining that as he has already started to flatter Bathsheba, he will continue to do so: 'I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier).' (135)

Troy adopts the saying "one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" to mean that he might as well go on to a greater offence after perpetrating a minor one. Interestingly, he dismisses the expression as "not of much account" reflecting how flat it has become. Troy's use of set phrases and quotations reveals the shallowness of his feelings. On his very first meeting with Bathsheba, he glibly paraphrases a love poem to comments on how she has extricated her dress from his spur: "Your light fingers were more eager than mine. I wish it had been the knot of knots, which there's no untying!" (129). The citation comes from a song by Thomas Campbell which begins:

How delicious is the winning Of a kiss at love's beginning, When two mutual hearts are sighing For the knot there's no untying! (Campbell,241) It might fit perfectly with the context in which the narrator cites it, but the citation at the same time signals Troy's superficial romanticism. Troy spars with language as skillfully as he wields the sword, as is confirmed when his flattery is implicitly qualified as passados, in other words with a fencing term derived from the romance languages (132). His courtship of Bathsheba is framed with two phrases in a foreign language which both possess an oracular quality: the first, the French proverb "qui aime bien châtie bien" (136) serves to foreshadow Bathsheba's fate in his hands. The other one brings me to the second part of this paper, on inscriptions. It is a phrase from Ovid, inscribed in Latin on a gold watch Troy has inherited from his natural father: "Cedit amor rebus-'Love yields to circumstance'" (138). This motto adopted by the Severn family has a polysemic permanence, in other words its meanings vary according to the circumstances in which it is read. At one and the same time it could refer back to the Earl of Servern's affair with Troy's mother, hint at Troy's relationship with Fanny and predict his romance with Bathsheba.

The text of Far from the Madding Crowd contains several inscriptions worked into different media (metal, stone, wax, wood and paper) which makes its texture uneven. These inscriptions embedded in the narrative -but standing out from the main text due to typographical variation -also raise questions about the status of the written text. They are like a snag in the text or a loop-hole in the fabric of the narrative which partake in the novel's reflections on language. Inscriptions are set in a complex time-scheme involving the two distinct moments of writing and reading. Those activities are not only inscribed in time, but also in a context defined by the characters' mood and frame of mind. The valentine which Bathsheba sends Boldwood lightheartedly is a joke, but it is received in earnest, and interpreted in the grave light of the bachelor's parlour "where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week" (80). Boldwood reproves Bathsheba for trifling with his emotions, using an expanded chiasmus to explain how the tenor of a text is coloured by the attitude in which it is read and written: I took for earnest what you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. (158) The time lag between writing and reading sometimes acts like a photographic developer revealing the discrepancy between the text and the situation to which it is referring. For example, Fanny's use of tenses in her letter to Oak about her forthcoming marriage recoils on her: "All has ended well, and I am happy to say I am going to be married to the young man who has courted me for some time" (88). She transposes the verb in the title of Shakespeare's play into the present perfect tense ("All has ended well"), though this perfect, present moment will be short-lived. Similarly, Boldwood's anticipation of marriage with Bathsheba is inscribed on the name-tags on the trousseau he has bought for her. For him, as for Fanny, writing the future appears to tempt fate, and the name 'Bathsheba Boldwood' will only ever refer to a figment of his romantic imagination. Hardy uses inscriptions in this way to point to man's pride in wanting to take charge of their destinies, as the unfolding of events shows that words that aim to foretell -or predict -prove to be meaningless. The "methodizing pen" (252) bases a newspaper report of Troy's drowning on "formidable presumptive evidence" (252), though the future will prove the illegitimacy of the printed word.

Hardy pinpoints the possible contradiction between the written text and reality in the episode centered on Fanny's coffin.

Here again, there is a time lag between the moment of writing and the moment of reading. The narrator creates suspense by not spelling out the "few other words" on the lid of the coffin: of the men then stepped up beside it, took from his pocket a lump of chalk, and wrote upon the cover the name and a few other words in a large scrawling hand. ( 216)

He uses polyptoton to echo back to that passage, by transposing the adjective 'scrawling' into the noun 'scrawl' when he reveals the full inscription before he has Oak delete the end of it: he looked again, as he had looked before, at the chalk writing upon the coffin-lid. The scrawl was this simple one, 'Fanny Robin and child.' Gabriel took his handkerchief and carefully rubbed out the two latter words, leaving visible the inscription 'Fanny Robin' only. (224) Oak attempts to rewrite the chalk inscription by erasing the tell-tale "and child", but the emended text proves to be further from the truth than the whispered rumour that Fanny had died in childbirth.

Inscriptions are a means of circumscribing reality, but key information manages to slip through the meshes of language of which Oak was so wary. This is evident in the inscription Troy ordered for Fanny's tombstone, which the reader discovers with Bathsheba: The careful wording of this double inscription leaves as much unsaid as it actually says. Although it specifies the deceased's name, date of death, and the age at the time of passing, the exact relationship between Fanny and Troy is not defined and the presence of their still-born child in the tomb is elided. Whereas Troy identifies himself as the author of the first inscription, the second inscription is anonymous. Bathsheba chooses to neither admit authorship nor define her status as Troy's wife. Bathsheba's effacement from a text she authored and had set in stone brings me to the third section of this paper, on the linguistic strategies she adopts to express herself. Faced with the novelty of complex emotions, she experiences the inadequacy of language to translate what she feels and thinks, stumbling over words in her response to Boldwood's marriage proposal: '[…] I don't know how to answer you with propriety and respect-but am only just able to speak out my feeling-I mean my meaning […]. ' (101) Bathsheba feels that words fail her, and she echoes Oak's dissatisfaction with 'the coarse meshes of language' in a phrase singled out by Virginia Woolf 1 and subsequently appropriated by feminist critics:

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. ( 270) Deprived of a language of her own, Bathsheba resorts to the 'man-made' language of setphrases. This is the case in the episode of the valentine, which has been perceptively analyzed by Isabelle Gadoin in her article 'Le blanc de la lettre dans Far from the Madding Crowd.' My own preoccupation is with the composition of the message which stages a borrowing of the words of others. At a loss as to what to write on the card, Bathsheba asks her maid Liddy for inspiration. Liddy replies 'promptly', meaning 'quickly', though, in the context, the adverb also suggests that she acts as Bathsheba's prompter. The message Liddy proposes is a trite verse formulated by a male suitor and addressed to his female beloved:

The rose is red, The violet blue, Carnation's sweet, And so are you. ( 78)

The inscription on the valentine is thus third-hand language, as Bathsheba takes dictation from Liddy, who in turn borrows a male-authored romantic cliché. Bathsheba relinquishes all control of the missive allowing chance to determine the addressee as well as the seal on the envelope. Its message "Marry Me" (79) is not formulated by Bathsheba, she simply impresses it in the wax, "idly and unreflectingly" (79).

As if to offset her playful appropriation of pre-fabricated language when composing the valentine, Hardy has her express her heart-felt repentance for past deeds, using the words of a poem by John Henry Newman, set to music as a hymn by John Bacchus Dykes in 1861. The scene takes place in the graveyard outside the church where the choir is rehearsing 'The Pillar of Cloud':

[…] the choir was learning a new hymn. Bathsheba was stirred by emotions which latterly she had assumed to be altogether dead within her. The little attenuated voices of the children brought to her ear in distinct utterance the words they sang without thought or comprehension-Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on.

[…] 'Are you going in?' said Bathsheba [to Oak]; and there came from within the church as from a prompter-I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. 'I was,' said Gabriel. 'I am one of the bass singers, you know. I have sung bass for several months.

'Indeed: I aware of that. I'll leave you, then.' Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile, sang the children. (298) In this passage the narrator returns to the distinction he outlined between the words of the prayer repeated mindlessly by the young boy and his actually understanding of them, as he indicates that the singing children are "unconcerned at the meaning of their words". The religious tenor of the hymn is transposed into an expression of Bathsheba's feelings and can be interpreted as words she addresses to Oak. The children's voices in the wings act as her prompter here, couching her sentiments in the style of a prayer. She turns to Oak for guidance ("Lead Thou me on") and begs him to forgive her former pride ("Pride ruled by will: remember not past years"). The last line of the hymn resonates with her admission that she has always loved Oak ("which I have loved long since") and could be interpreted as an expression of her regret for having spurned him ("and lost awhile"). 1See Woolf's essay 'Men and Women' (published in 1920): "I have the feelings of a woman, says Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, but I have only the language of men" (Woolf,30).

After the sound and the fury of her courtship by Boldwood and marriage to Troy, Bathsheba has learned to appreciate "the noiseless tenor" of Oak's ways. Her engagement to Oak has no use for the "pretty phrases and warm expressions" of a conventional romance. Their marriage is based on a working relationship, whose unusual quality is highlighted by a bilingual reference to its "goodfellowship" or camaraderie.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowshipcamaraderie-usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death-that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the usually called by the name is evanescent as steam. (303. My emphases)

The recourse to French here strikes a dissonant note, as the language conventionally associated with romance is used to describe a marriage founded on hard prosaic reality. But the harmony is resolved with a paean to their love, which aligns two phrases from The Song of Solomon -"the only love which is strong as death" and "that love which many waters cannot quench" (Song of Solomon 8. 6-7). These phrases carry no markers and are so perfectly integrated into Hardy's text that they escaped annotation in the Norton critical edition. Incidentally, Solomon, was the son of Bathsheba and David, and he wrote the two lines the narrator cites for the voice of the female beloved in his poetic dialogue.

A conclusion on the novel's conclusion. Hardy brings the text to an end with a quotation, which he puts into the mouth of one of the leading members of the rustic chorus. It is Joseph Poorgrass who has the last word in the novel, and he makes it into the last of its thirty-eight Biblical citations: I were once or twice upon saying to-day with holy Hosea, in my scripture manner, which is my second nature. 'Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.' But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly. (308)

The negative tenor of Poorgrass's speech is jarring in the context of the marriage celebrations. Poorgrass implicitly identifies Oak with Ephraim (meaning the northern kingdom of Israel) and reproves his association with the idols. I think he means that by marrying Bathsheba, Oak has joined ranks with Boldwood, who idolized her (125), and Troy, the idolater of women in general (134). Robert Schweik interprets the quotation as "comically irrelevant" (308, note 5), but to my mind its incongruity is in keeping with the ironic use of intertextuality in this work.

My own conclusion to these reflections on quotations, inscriptions and the words of others is equally disquieting. By the end of Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy has made the point that quotations do not always harmonize with the embedding text, that written language is not reliable, and that language in general is insufficient for self-expression and powerless to prevent circumstances from having the last word. The text engages in a questioning of the faculty of language to contain the "intangibilities of feeling" in the coarse meshes of its net. It reaches the conclusion that the signifier does not always relate to the signified because both written and oral language suffer from displacement, attrition and misappropriation. In this novel, Hardy reveals the inadequacy of language thus probing one of the questions that will be central to modernism.

)

  That comparison redefines the previous lines as a quotation from the passage in Exodus in which Pharaoh sent Moses away:[Pharaoh to Moses]: 'Get out of my sight ! Make sure you do not appear before me again !' […] 'Just as you say,' Moses replied, 'I will never appear before you again.'(Exodus 10.8)

A

  motion of satisfaction enlivened her face as she read the complete inscription. First came the words of Troy himself:-ERECTED BY FRANCIS TROY IN BELOVED MEMORY OF FANNY ROBIN, WHO DIED OCTOBER 9, 18-, AGED 20 YEARS. Underneath this was now inscribed in new letters:-IN THE SAME GRAVE LIE THE REMAINS OF THE AFORESAID FRANCIS TROY, WHO DIED DECEMBER 24TH, 18-, AGED 26 YEARS. (297)