Comics...

I perused the webcomics links on the webcomics wikipedia site and finally found one that did not give me a headache from its homepage: pvcomics.com. The rest that I looked at were all full of advertisements--flashing, dancing, shaking, etc. From reading a bit about other webcomics that wikipedia linked to, but had recently shut down, I guess I can understand why. It seems that most of these sites need tons of ads to stay afloat, as several have not survived. pvcomics is much calmer, more blog-like, more community based, it feels.

I have to admit I'm not a big fan of comics, web or otherwise. I don't know why I can't find it within myself to have the same distant appreciation for them as I do other things we've looked at, such as spinning. Aren't video games a big evolution away from comics anyway? I feel ignorant and judgemental for saying it, but, what's the point?

Of course, I'm not against the ideas of superheroes. Heroes sounds like a fun show, very X-men-esque. I like the "multi-episode story arcs that build upon a larger, more encompassing arc" idea. Similar to the multiple realities and simultaneaous universes that we've been talking about all along in class. Maybe that's the point of comics: the plots work in such a way as well? Okay, well I can appreciate the multiple story line concept. Maybe I would like comics...

Scratch

Scratch gives an extensive, in depth, and intimate look at the evolution of spinning and DJ'ing over the last couple of decades. The documentary opened my eyes to a culture that I thought had died as a fad several years ago, but in reality maintains a significant presence in underground society.

Toward the end of the documentary, someone commented that you have to know where hip hop's been in order to know where it is going. I think that is very true for any area of our culture, especially the digital medium and the internet, which is why these timelines are valuable to this class.

A radio DJ in the documentary described the scratchers' ingenuity: "These guys said, 'these are studio creations, and they should be able to happen live.' No one had ever done that before." Similar evolutions occur today as digital artists are taking the existing mediums of television and radio and using the content in unique ways.

Guest Speaker: Jon Lippencott

Whereas our previous guest speakers this semester were people already established in their career visiting to share their knowledge, our guest speaker last week, Jon Lippencott, is just now embarking on his career in video game graphic programming. Though just now getting his first real job in the industry, Jon has been respected for his skills by Ken Perlin for several years. It is refreshing to realize that even the most talented minds in digital new media industries start somewhere. I enjoyed Jon's demonstration of his virtual universe; it definitely seems like a project that could easily link onto Second Life. It is exciting that even though he is leaving to work for acompany in LA, he will have this personal project at his side to continually expand and improve.

Into the hands of the people

An increasing presence in the public realm, computing literally fell into the laps of laypeople when Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg imagined the future of notebook computing in Personal Dynamic Media. The Dynabook vision rightly envisioned personal computers being used by everyone from businessmen to children, both creatively and educationally. The pair did not foresee, however, today’s networked media use of DVD’s and MP3’s on personal laptops.

Seymour Papert had an even greater vision for children in his book Mindstorms, published in 1980. At a time when game consoles were becoming widely available for children’s use, Papert saw great educational potential in software that actually engages children in programming, something he called “constructionism.” Papert rightly predicted that future toys for children would be as technologically adept as million dollar IBM’s selling at the time.`

In Literary Machines, Ted Nelson culminated his ideas of hypertext and Vannear Bush’s conception of the memex in something called Xanadu. Xanadu is the “ultimate archive” that has characteristics of anarchy and navigation. While some aspects of Nelson’s Xanadu vision have come to fruition in reality, others have not; Nelson remains active today in continuing to push forward his ideas such as “ZigZag” and “transcopyrighting.”

The new media technologies realized by visionaries of the 1960’s and ‘70s spread into the public sphere in the ‘80s. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian took on the role of understanding and predicting what the hold of business would be on the emerging new media sphere in The Endless Chain. Bagdikian was precient in his prediction of increasing horizontal and vertical integration of companies and emerging monopolies over new media technology and distribution.

Today, direct manipulation interfaces are omnipresent, found in applications such as Photoshop as well as within internet browsers and sites. Ben Schneiderman in his 1983 essay “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages,” describes how trends will move away from computer users employing a command language and toward direct manipulation interfaces, where computer activity will imitate activity in the user’s world via a metaphor system.

Direct manipulation interfaces were especially influential in the development of video games, where operators could move control devices and directly affect movement in the game interface. In her 1984 book, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle uses video games as a social laboratory to study human-computer interaction and concludes that humans and the perception of self are influenced by encounters with computers in distinct psychological ways.

Donna Haraway has been a huge presence in the last thirty years with her socialist-feminist inspired theories of social construction in this age of science and technology. Possibly her greatest work, Cyborg Manifesto, was published in 1985. The “mythology” describes the human’s place and position as a cyborg, part organism and part machine. While some people at the time were concerned about societies movement into the unknown of technology, Haraway argued that by imagining ourselves as part machine and products of technology allows for blurred boundaries and a greater approach to locating positional objectivity.

In 1984, Richard Stallman and other computer programmers saw their free software begin to slip away as AT&T announced that UNIX would no longer be free. Programmers found themselves in a position where they could no longer manipulate programs and, due to proprietary liscensing restrictions, they were unable to share programs with others. These changes inspired Stallman to create GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) In 1985, a project that spearheaded “copyleft” and the Free Software Foundation. Stallman and his projects still fight for shared sources and software freedom today.

While so much attention had been focused on Artificial Intelligence and the ability of humans to communicate with computers, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores wrote Understanding Computers and Cognition in 1986 to emphasize computers as tools for design.

The 70's

Up through the 1960’s, computers were still relegated to the realm of central processors for military and university use. Ushering in the next decade, Ted Nelson looked to the future of personal computers in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

Nelson’s book communicated revolutionary ideas about what the computer could be used for, going beyond their capacity for calculation and into their potential for media and design. In addition, these potentials would be available for everyone to explore in an open publishing network. The network would be flexible and interconnected, reaching back to his 1965 conceptions of hypertext.

Augusto Boal further blurred the divide between producer and consumer/actor and spectator through theater in the late seventies. In his 1979 work, Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal described techniques for embodying interaction in performance. The concepts of encoder and decoder were consequently melting away in both technology and art.

The ultimate realization of immersing the “decoder” audience in the product began to be realized in the late seventies with the inception of virtual reality. Initially, virtual reality was a great application for architecture, allowing architects to visually experience and graphically design structures before bringing them into reality. Ted Nelson’s vision for computers catering to design came to life with the founding of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group by Nicholas Negroponte in 1967 and the opening of the MIT Media lab in 1985.

Virtual reality, and the relationship of art and technology, took a great leap forward in 1977 with the introduction of “responsive environments” by Myron Krueger, who would become known as the “father of virtual reality.” Krueger insisted “that the art world was ready to embrace work that focused on response rather than the creation of appealing physical items” as he brought the realms of computer science and art together to deconstruct the “form/content divide.”

Krueger also was adament that people explore all aspects of their inventions and know them because only then will we understand and be able to “choose what we become as a result of what we have made.” Krueger’s concerns echo those of his contemporary Joseph Weizenbaum, who demanded in 1976 that scientists and technologists take responsibility for computer and machine influences on human society.

G.H. Hovagimyan Lecture

G.H. Hovagimyan is a man with a compelling history and many fascinating points to make.

G.H. talked to our class about living as an artist in NYC in the '70's and '80's. He mentioned how rare and expensive new video cameras were and told a story of buying a hot one off the street. I was reading the NMR before class and G.H.'s story reminded me of a quote from Hans Enzensberger in the '70's:

"Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere there is a social conflict..."

Like Enzensberger, G.H. is very anti-capitalist and very anti-commodity when it comes to art. G.H. made the comment that "tagging" on the web is very interesting, because it subverts the traditional broadcast model; however, G.H. still warned against the fact that everything is still based on popularity.

When going through his blogs and websites, G.H. showed us a non-linear narrative video, in which he closed his eyes and shuffled all the clips around. In the end, the completed video still made decent sense. This technique is like The Oulipo and combinatorial literature featured in the NMR.

I think what I found most interesting about G.H. Hovigimyan's lecture is his question of how does one dictate what is art while resisting making it into a commodity. I believe it is the same with all information: Who decides what is worth consuming? And can we resist reducing everything to a consumer product?