Zack's

NMR

zw268 — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:39:19 +0000

Chapter 31- Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?

1982-early experiments with video

-early results becan to call into question the sacrosanct status of montage, which had been central to film and in some ways was more fundamental to new media than experimental film up to that point

-explorations of immediacy

-Bill Viola “Bill Violas work, perhaps more than any other, represents the tendency toward the lyrical in art.”

-It remained for artists to seek and create defamiliarizing forms of interaction that would allow the technology to be envisioned in new ways that go beyond the basic narrative structure.

Chapter 32- The Endless Chain

1983 Old and new media are becoming increasingly compatible and comparable. Old and new seem to be integrating themselves into a single system.

-New Media becoming big business.

-”The Media Monopoly”: Bagdikian, 1983- predicitons of increasing media concentration and narrowness.

-6 companies that control media in the US: Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, Bertelsmann, GE

-inevitable pattern of forced integration (ie. napster)

-limitations of user bandwidth for uploading media content.

Chapter 33- Direct Manipulation (A Step Beyond Programming Languages)

1983 Jonathan Swift- project to eliminate words from language: “since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.”

-direct manipulation: instead of employing a command language to instruct the computer, the data being processed is exposed and accessed in a more graphically representational way, and immediate visual feedback is provided after every action.

-realting computer activity to ordinary action

-representing data as something habitually or easily understood.

Chapter 34- Video Games and Computer Holding Power

1984- Sherry Turkle “The Second Self”- how video games were a telling way in which children, teens and adults encountered the computer.

-via psychoanalysis, considered how the computer enables people to enact personae that are different from the ones they use in non-computing situations.

-Game play provides a way in which children as well as adults can take on different roles that are important to them psychologically.

Chapter 35- A Cyborg Manifesto

1985- Donna Haraway “Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

-socialist-feminist mythology that is not founded on belief in an idyllic past or overarching unity. the goddess has at times been seen as the figure of a lost, matriarchal utopia; the cyborg, in contrast, does not look back. The cyborg engages here and now.

-”argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”

NMR

zw268 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:55:23 +0000

Chapter 26- Personal Dynamic Media

1977- Alan kay, Adele Goldberg: Dynabook and predictions of notebook computing.

-Xerox Pal Alto Research Center: specific ideas about the uses of notebook computing

-While most saw the computer as a tool for engineers or, at most, businesspeople, Kay thought computers could be used even by children, and could be used creatively.

-Also developed desktop computer approach

-The Star: graphical user interface, which became part of popular personal computing with Apple’s Macintosh.

-Virtual paper metaphors

-”We are exploring the use of this system as a programming and problem solving tool; as an interactive memory for the storage and manipulation of data; as a text editor; and as a medium for expression through drawing, painting, animating pictures, and composing and generating music.”

-”For most of recorded history, the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even “motion” pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewers’ wishes.”

-”Meteamedium”

Chapter 27- A Thousand Plateaus

1980- Deleuze, Guattari: appropriation of terms

-”A book is an assemblage…and as such is unattributable. It is multiplicity–but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”

-”There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs.

-”A book itself is a little machine. What is it’s relation to other machines?”

-Rhizomes: subtract the unique from multiplicity. Characteristics: connects any point to any other point, its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature. It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither a beginning or an end, but always a middle from which it grows and overspills.

Chapter 28- Mindstorms

1980- era not only heralded but negotiated by the acceptance, mainly by children, of computer driven home video game consoles.

-Constructionism: philosophy of education based on Piaget’s that “looks more closely at the idea of mental construction.” The computer was seen by Papert (founder of constructionism) as a powerful tool for supporting children’s learning–for learning is a self-directed, self-motivated way, in the course of programming. Rather than seeing the computer as a mechanism for instilling knowledge and skills via work-book like exercises, Papert’s programming language LOGO allows children to take control of the computer, learning about mathematics through the experiences of mathematical concepts.

Chapter 29- Put-That-There: Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface

1980- The Media Room, Nicholas Negroponte at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group

-Used 2D screens to provide a view into 3D space: concept of human/computer interaction in which the two types of space, computing environment and architectural space, are experienced by the user as one.

-Multimodal interface allows communication with the computer by simultaneously using channels such as speech, gesture, gaze (eye tracking) and facial expression.

-Combination of speech and gesture as well as a preference for speech over typing.

-”The power is that indications of what is to be done with these visible, out-there-on-view items can be expressed spontaneously and naturally in ways which are compatible with the spirit and nature of the display: one is pointing to them, addressing them in spoken words, not typed symbols.”

Chapter 30- Literary Machines

1981- Ted Nelson: Xanadu- Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive

-Combines the benefits of anarchy with a strength derived from an initial, powerful central design general enough to support nearly any imaginable media.

-Utility method: micropayments

1 Electronic Literary System: Look at way of dealing with text based on its “true” structure, if we can figure out what that is. The service with store and send back different excerpts from this “true” structure of text

2 What is Literature?: an ongoing system of interconnecting documents.

3 A True Storage System fo Text and Other Evolving Structures: proposing a way of keeping information that seems inefficient, but has remarkable power later on. The nature of creative work is reaching back to a former condition. The true structure of text is evolving- indexing method that allows access the any previous instant. Docuplex

4 A Linking System for Text and Other Data: links may be associated firmly with the pieces of data in any evolving structure, wherever those pieces may migrate to as changes occur. Any types of links may be created.

5 The Document Convention: a document consists of its contents and its out-links.

6 Compound Documents: criss-crossing superdocuments of many parts- collected in new structural wholes.

7 Electronic Publishing- Making the Literary System Universal: using the system as a publishing system. Electronic publishing that feeds to your computer screen exactly what you ask for, as soon as you ask for it; with royalties divided between the document owners in exact proportion to how much of their materials are transmitted or used. Private and published materials.

8 Distribution and Networking: creating a network may continually unite into a single, accessible whole.

9 Vital Issues: “tuning”- development of simple, fair and well-balanced arrangements and pricing that will balance user’s incentives for the flexible and reasonable use of the system.

Chelsea Galleries

zw268 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:14:04 +0000

Postmasters- Spencer Finch

There was a sense of novelty in Spencer Finch’s pieces that I really fell in love with. His sculptures seemed almost craft-like, like they were made not with highbrow artistic intention, but out of some basic creative element. They were fun without being created for having fun with. They were simple and made me feel very comfortable, which I think is really powerful for contemporary art to do. When art becomes so contextualized and has so many intrinsic elements you become almost intimidated as a viewer. “The Shield of Achiles”- the star map made out of suspended cans was the piece that I connected to the most. With such simple ingenuity, it felt like something I would make myself and I felt this sort of bond with it. Similarly I felt that way with “Paper Moon”- the room in the back with the toy train projecting moving shadows through the window. I have to keep my eye on this guy.

Bitforms- Spazialismo

Because I’m not familiar with Spacialist texts, from which the exhibition was inspired, I really had no frame of reference to approach the works at Bitforms. It seemed like the pieces were not engaging on their own, like they had a collective voice but when stripped from the associations of Spacialist text they didn’t have much impact. From the press release I did really like the theory of promoting the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by science. I like the relationship that art works much the same way that religion does, in that it provides a way of understanding and rationalizing things we can’t necessarily make sense of, but it must be adaptive to what is revealed by means of science. Individually I really like the sort of holographic panels of the jellyfish and amophis blobs, but purely for aesthetic reasons.

Eyebeam- Preforming The Web

I’ve been to Eyebeam before and although I love that it acts as a sort of open studio, where you can come and watch the residents work on art and technology projects, I always find my experience there a little isolating. Because there isn’t necessarily an exhibition space, it can feel a little aimless to walk around while artists are in workshops and you watch them like your in some sort of zoo. There were no events happening while I was there, but I did watch a video about the “World Series of Tubing”. I wish I had seen the tournament in action. I’ve videos where augmented reality is used by scanning barcodes on 2D surfaces in realtime, and have seen the process incorporated in business cards and even baseball cards, but this is the first time I’ve seen it as a system of play. Sharing and ranking youtube videos is such a ubiquitous thing now, that it seems so natural that it would become part of gaming. I sort of see it as an extension of Scene It, a game that incorporates video clips and trivia.

Highline Park

zw268 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:45:58 +0000

This is one of my favorite places in New York (except when it’s crowded). I really can’t think of a better designed refurbishment project. To me there is a fine line between preservation and renovation that the project handled perfectly. It would have been catastrophic if something as iconic as the raised platforms were stripped of their historical narrative and function and turned into a sterile and generic public parks venture. The landscaping is gorgeous and really creates this sense of beautiful decay. The tall grasses and muted colors work so well not to romanticize the space, but to celebrate it for what it is: urban industrial space. Even the color of the wood works so well with the rusting tones of the metal and brick work. Some of my favorite elements are the teird seating area over tenth avenue with the glass wall that over looks the street, and the wooden lounge chairs that actually roll along the rail tracks. I think I have to wait for some of the novelty to wear off for me to actually spend extended periods of time their, because when its crowded I sort of feel like I’m being herded like cattle down the ramps. It’s nice to go mid day during the week or in the evenings.

Frank Gehry IAC Building

zw268 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:34:53 +0000

I have mixed feelings about the IAC building. What I love about Frank Gehry is his sculptural approach to architecture. To his it is ok to have superfluous elements in buildings. Curves, extensions, and other elements that serve no functional purpose are celebrated for the way they generate new relationships between space and it’s inhabitants. That being said, I appreciate the building for it’s unusual design, but I can help but think it looks like a big iceberg floating in the meatpacking district. It seems out of context, like it doesnt have any relationship or symbiosis with its surroundings, which i think is an integral part of urban design. It’s a show piece, and being a show piece isn’t necessarily the best way to leave your first mark on a city. One cool feature that i like about the building is the huge interactive display wall in the lobby of the building. I wasn’t able to go with the class last week but I’ve walked by the building at night, and to see the entire wall glow and light up the whole first floor was a really cool aesthetic experience. I am a fan of the experimental architecture that’s popping up in that neighborhood, and it seems like the right place to play with pushing the limits of urban design, but I think it’s still crucial to incorporate the industrial history and context of the area.

Data Visualization

zw268 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:19:50 +0000

I dont think the application of data visualization is anything new, but I agree with the article that it has become ubiquitous in contemporary and new media art, as well as in news and media. Representing abstractions like statistics and huge numbers as approachable visual concepts is something that I remember learning in elementary school as an alternative method of understanding information. There was always this dichotomy between academic and visual learners, like somehow you were contained to either left or right brain thinking and you had to pick the corresponding method of processing to suit “people like you”. I remember quantifying huge numbers with illustrations of pennies stacked as high as the Empire State building. What I think is becoming widely understood however is that exercising both sides of the brain simultaneously, through innovative visual representations of scientific information, is exponentially more effective than isolating one. New media art to me becomes saturated with so much more context and pretense than most other forms of art because it represents the collision of left and right brain processing. It’s universally approachable and challenging at the same time. And bottom line, seeing information is much more interesting that reading information.

NMR

zw268 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:20:52 +0000

Chapter 21- From Lib/Dream Machines

1974- “Computer Lib/Dream Machines”: the most important book in the history of new media.

-Janus-like codex that joins two books back to back.

-”Computer Lib” side predicted personal computers and challenged the popular notion of what computers were for at a fundamental level.

-”Dream Machine”- the importance of computers lay not in their capacity for calculation, but in the fact that they would enable new generations in media. Computer experiences were media to be designed, and that this design should be both a creative process and undertaken with the audience in mind.

Chapter 22- From Theatre of the Oppressed

-1974 Augusto Boal: interactive performance, creating opportunities for interaction around the problems that confront ordinary people.

-Working with oppressed people in South America. In Brazil the military government murdered his colleagues, jailed and tortured him for three months.

-1992 Returned to Brazil and ran for political office as an act of theater and was elected. Began developing legislation with his theater.

-”Knowing the Body” as the first stage in his process. Emphasizes embodiment.

-How can his techniques may be applied in new media? Gonzalo Frasca speculates that they might create “The Sims of the Oppressed”- enabling users to explore characters and their situations more deeply than current videogames can.

Chapter 23- Soft Architecture Machines

1975-Nicholas Negroponte

-”structures for human activity” is the basis of both architecture and human-computer interaction.

-Conceptualizing a networked or sofware system as spatial makes connection between two fields more evident.

-One of the first applications of virtual reality were in architectual programs. First person visualizations of buildings.

-1967 Nicholas Negroponte: founded the Architecture Machine Group at MIT. Developed methods of managing data spatially.

-”Intentionalities” three levels of awareness that a computer system should attempt so as to be as responsive as possible.

Chapter 24- Computer Power and Human Reason

-1976 Joseph Weizenbaum, Norbert Wiener- demanding that scientists and technologists take responsibility for the use of that which they discover and develop.

-1964-1966 Weizenbaum developed the first conversational computing program, Eliza, which ran a set of scripts called “Doctor” with impersonated a psychotherapist.

-”The ever more mechanistic image” of humanity- the influence of computing is seen not only in examining specific hardware and software technologies but in the way we employ language that has been appropriated for use in computing. People who see the computer as able to assume the intimate and human role of the psychotherapist are unable to draw the boundaries between the proper use of computer technology and “computer applications that either ought not to be undertaken at all, or, if they are contemplated, should be approached with the utmost caution.”

Chapter 25- Responsive Environments

-1977 Myron Krueger: responsive environments and artificial reality, which included the various inventions called virtual reality.

-His assertion that “response is the medium” in regard to aesthetic concerns were rejected by the computer science field. “Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation. In this condition of uncertainty and instability, not simply because of the crisscrossing interactions of users of the network but because content is embodied in data that is itself immaterial, it is pure electronic difference, until it has been reconstituted at the interface as image, text, or sound. The sensory output may be differentiated further as existing on screen, as articulated structure or material, as architecture, as environment, or in virtual space.

John Cage

zw268 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:59:28 +0000

I was in a new media performance art class last year, so we watched a lot of John Cage performances. Although I dont necessarily like listening to John Cage pieces, I do appreciate them for sort of setting a precedent for experimental music performance. The idea of manipulating instruments is really cool: using a tool that is designed to make a standardized series of noises to act as something entirely different. There’s deffinately a sense of innovation and ingenuity that i think a lot of indie music today is emulating. What I love most about the prepared piano pieces is the tangibility of adding things to the piano. There’s almost this sense of anthropology behind it when you experiment with how certain objects when stripped of their conventions become artifacts of sound. I would like to seem more contemporary bands play with that same sense of physical manipulation of sound, rather that resort to synthsizers and digital manipulation so much. One Brooklyn band that I think really represents a lot of John Cage’s ideas about invention and performance is Electric Junkyard Gamlan http://www.myspace.com/electricjunkyardgamelan . The founder of the band invents and builds all of the instruments out of garbage. I’ve seen them live and it’s mindblowing that the sounds are actually coming from these piles of stuff.

William S. Burroughs

zw268 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:43:36 +0000

I don’t understand why, but I’ve never read anything by the beats and the avant garde writers of the 50′s and 60′s. It’s just one of those things that you keep telling yourself to do, but someone you never get around to it. I think the name Burroughs has just become so ingrained in something that I should be aware of that it has almost become something that I just assumed I understood and knew about. So it’s hard for me to write about his method without being familiar with his work. I can say the documentary really made me want to read some of his early works about his travels through Mexico and South America as well as “Naked Lunch”. I’ve really only read contemporary experimental literature, my favorite being the Japanese author Haruki Murakami but I get so involved in alternative narrative because I can visualize it much more in the the context of film than i can with linear narrative. The black and white short film is the documentary was particularly interesting for me because it visualized the cut up method as something that creates tension and abstraction.

Microcosmos

zw268 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:24:41 +0000

As an avid Planet Earth watcher, I really liked Microcosmos. What I think both programs do that makes them so fascinating is they force you to look at the strangeness of life outside of our immediate periphery. These creatures and insects are always around us, but what we see as their insignificance in scale or purpose makes us ignorant of their bizarre nature and alien like qualities. We have no understanding of the most basic forms of life on our planet. So when we are forced to look at bugs and snails in astounding closeness and resolution, we see something that is entirely other-worldly. It’s like the most realistic sci-fi experience we can have, because we have no understanding of what we are seeing but we are being told it is real. Also I think macro-photography in and of itself does something really unique. It has the power to force alternate perspective. By moving in on something beyond the point of recognition, suddenly it becomes a new landscape, or something only defined by its textures.