Trying to decipher Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a modern philosopher. Much of his work is very abstract and difficult to comprehend. His 1972 essay "Requiem for the Media" is no exception. Essentially, however, Baudrillard's essay was a response to that of Enzensberger. Enzensberger, who came at the idea of media from a very skeptical, Marxist perspective, was somewhat pessimistic about the ability of new media to emancipate the people. Baudrillard, it seems, did not share quite the same concerns. While he no doubt had issues with media and society, he did not see the media as being quite as inherently structured as Enzensberger. The interesting part about all of this is that the internet wasn't really around at this point to the general public, and both Enzensberger and Baudrillard, while speaking loosely about cybernetics, were really writing about a somewhat unknown realm, which is perhaps why it is so difficult to really get to the bottom of what either of them are saying.

Response to Enzensberger's Constituents of a Theory of the Media

In his 1970 essay, Hans Enzensberger outlines his seven principles for an emancipatory use of media. When one analyzes these principles, compared to the seven repressive principles, it is clear that the internet today should be seen primarily as an emancipatory use of media. 

It is decentralized, each receiver is a potential transmitter, it has the potential to mobilize the masses, it calls for the feedback of those involved, it has the potential to be used for political learning, it has elements that call for collective production, and there are many communities on the internet that have their own forms of social self-organization.

Compare this with the repressive tenets, and it is clear that the internet in general is a great emancipatory media.

Thoughts about the 1970 Jewish Museum Technology Exhibition

In 1970, a group of technological innovators organized an exhibition called "Software." The primary organizer was Jack Burnham. The main premise of these exhibition was that it was to be an experiential exhibition that let people interact with new technology and media for the first time. As the pictures in this article show, attendees got hands-on experience with many technologies they probably had never even heard of before. At the same time, the exhibition allowed organizers and exhibitors like Karl Katz and Nicholas Negroponte to see the public's reaction to some of their projects, and to gauge the potential success of those initiatives.

Thoughts on ARC

Reading about ARC, PARC, and Englebart's 1968's demonstrations remind me very much of Steve Jobs' demonstrations today. This is not surprising, considering that it was ARC and the early computer demonstrations that Engelbart pioneered that type of promotion that is so common today. Many of the tools that Engelbart demonstrated (the mouse, the GUI, WYSIWYG, etc.) are things that we now take for granted. It is pretty impressive to think just how advanced he and his peers were, in terms of creating their own network to transmit data from two different locations, just for one demonstration.

E.A.T

E.A.T. was an acronym for an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology. It was a group in the 1960's that was made up of artists, engineers, and computer scientists. The primary goal of the group was to continue the fusion of arts and engineering. 

The group conducted experiments involving art projects that looked more like science experiments. In fact, the initial sketches for a lot of their projects involved relatively complex schematic drawings and blueprints. 

The pieces of work described in the chapters relating to E.A.T. remind me very much of some of the work Ken Perlin is doing in the media research lab. It is this fusion of art and science that interests me most, as it is where the most advances will be made in art and entertainment, and I am very excited to see where it leads in the future. The people in E.A.T. started this movement.

Thoughts on McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a very well known social critic from the 1960's. In 1964, he coined the phrase, "The Medium is the Message." Essentially what he meant by this was that much more so than the content of one's message is the means by which it is delivered. This had to do with many different aspects of the message and its delivery, including which media was used to get the message the the recipient and with what other messages that specific message was packaged.

McLuhan was by and large correct. We see examples today where specific messages are diminished because of their means of delivery. For example, many people tend to disregard all of the stories on Fox News because of its overall conservative bent, even if some of the stories are perfectly acceptable and unbiased. At the same time, people do see citizen journalism, such as blogs, as being as credible a source as major media such as newspapers and radio. 

The problem with McLuhan's theory, as I just explained above, is that the people who subscribe to it, most of them subconsciously, preclude themselves from significant amounts of information because they disregard information coming from places, or types of media that they have trained themselves to ignore.

Decoding the Oulipo

The Oulipo was a group of French writers in the 1960's who created all sorts of "potential" pieces of literature. Essentially these were single lines that could be put together with other lines to create literary works. It is a fascinating concept, similar to that of the hypertext novel, or even some new computer games such as Little Big Planet. I say this because essentially, all of the "code" is there on the page, and it is up to the user to put it together into a cohesive piece. This also relates back to the cut-up method, in which people take fully developed pieces of writing or music and cut them up to create new versions. The theory behind the Oulipo is essentially the opposite, where people have bits and pieces that have not really been put into a coherent piece of work, and it is their responsibility to do so.

Ted Nelson on Hypertext

Ted Nelson, a computer scientist from the 1960's, created the concept of hypertext, along with that specific term. 

It is hard to say that Nelson was ahead of his time, since the 1960's was a decade of serious progress in the field of computer science. It is fair, however, to say that Nelson, in the way in which he thought of hypertext, seems to be ahead of his time. In fact, as the article explains, may of Nelson's concepts were actually more complex than the hyperlink that we know of today. 

I think that Nelson was referring to a more intelligent version of the hypertext we know today, and that we should remember that today's hyperlinks are only one part of a much larger system that he was envisioning when he wrote this paper.

Thoughts on Roy Ascott's "The Construction of Change

Roy Ascott is a British artist who has been very involved in new media since the 1960's. Ascott was very interested in fusing art, design and technology into one cohesive unit. 

The article is short but wide-ranging, discussing topics such as how to analyze particular artists' motivations in creating their works and how artists should orient themselves into the modern world through cybernetics.

I think that Ascott is advocating that artists become more aware of the environments in which they work; who their predecessors and contemporaries are, how their work affects, and is affected by others they may not even be aware of, etc. Ascott is also suggesting that artists use technology in order to collaborate with other artists. The more artists do this, Ascott would argue, the more they can learn about themselves and the art they produce, ultimately becoming better at what they do.

Thoughts on "Sketchpad"

Sketchpad was a system created in the early 1960's by Ivan Sutherland. The system was one of the first Graphic User Interfaces (GUI). It allowed users to make drawings, as opposed to just seeing letters or straight lines on the computer screen. Additionally, through the use of a "light pen," users could actually draw directly onto the computer screen, transposing their drawings into the computer document.

This system seems like an early precursor to Ken Perlin's PAD system that we learned about in class. The similarities are striking, perhaps most notably in the idea of being able to zoom in so many levels (2000 for Sketchpad, and an infinite amount of PAD), and create "sub-documents" within each document.

Thoughts on Ken Perlin's Tour and Talk

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Ken Perlin, a professor in the Media Research lab at NYU's Courant Institute. Ken is an Academy Award winning computer scientist, who has created technologies used in many films, including Jurassic Park,  True Lies, and many more.

Ken showed our group of of the new technologies he is working on, including a "multi-touch pad" and a variation on a flight simulator.

The multi-touch pad is a piece of hardware that is a cross between a mouse and a tablet. It senses input from everything touching it, unlike a traditional tablet or touch-pad mouse. It also senses pressure, which is a major advance in terms of computer input devices. The product will also be relatively inexpensive to manufacture, and Perlin hopes that the device will become available to even average consumers, at an accessible price-point.

The other project that Ken showed us was a computer game that one of his graduate students created, using a sophisticated Austrian input device involving two pull-handles, as well as not-so-sophisticated output devices: 3 household fans. The game involved flying a bird through a series of hoops in the air. The player had to pull on the levers to make the bird's wings flap, an keep it in the air. Depending on where the player moved the levers, the bird would respond accordingly. In addition, the amount of wind the fans produced depended on how hard the player pulled on the levers, to create more wind when the bird was moving faster. While it was impressive to see such a relatively polished game produced by graduate students--this was the first time I think I've even seen a "prototype" game like this--it struck me as very similar to Nintendo Wii. The only more sophisticated element than a Wii, of course, was the output from fans, which added another layer of reality to the game. 

Response to "To the Letter Born"

Steven Heller recently wrote an article for the New York Times called "To the Letter Born," in which he interviews branding and corporate identity expert Brian Collins. The article analyzes the graphic choices of the Barack Obama presidential campaign, with specific emphasis on his font choices. 

In the article, Collins explains just how important choosing the right font is to a campaign. One good example of this comes towards the end of the article, when he suggests a reader examine the word "Change" in several different fonts (Comic Sans, Times New Roman, and Gotham). Gotham, of course, conveys just the message that the Obama campaign appears to stand for, which is why, according to Collins, they chose to use this font. 

Thoughts on "Helvetica"

Helvetica is a documentary about the font Helvetica. The film traces the routes of the creation of this font, interviewing many graphic designers, as well as the actual creators of the font.

After an initially humorous beginning, the film struggles to become a documentary more about fonts and the bygone era of creating typeface, as well as the more current profession of digitally altering fonts for specific clients. At this point, the film becomes too long, trying to cover too many subjects than it can handle, which is sad, because the first part of the film is so entertaining.

My personal opinion is that this should have been limited to a short film of no more than 30 minutes, rather than a feature that is bound to precipitously lose audiences as it drags on.

Interpreting Engelbart

Truthfully, I'm do not completely follow Engelbart's essay, "Augmenting Human Intellect." It is a relatively advanced, technical piece on the future of computing and networking. 

What I do know is that Engelbart worked for DARPA, which was the second generation of ARPA, and now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He was a successor to Licklider, and Bush before him. 

He was interested in furthering the relationship between humans and computers, essentially increasing the interactivity between the two. He saw the computer as more than a number-cruncher, and helped develop some of the technology that made computers as user-friendly as they are today. These technologies included the mouse, the graphic user interface, the word-processor, as the window. 

Burroughs on the Cut-Up Method

William Burroughs, the beat generation writer, recalls the Cut-Up method invented by Brion Gysin. The cut-up method is actually a simple writing technique, whereby writers literally cut their complete written works into words of phrases, and then piece them back together to create entirely new pieces of work. This practice is also used by musicians, lyricists and DJs. 

While this was not, to the best of my knowledge, his intention, it seems that R. Luke DeBois' work at Bitforms gallery follows a similar technique. 

Explaining "Happenings"

Allan Kaprow's 1961 essay about "Happenings" in New York provides the reader with an explanation of the phenomenon that swept the underground art scene during the early sixties. A Happenings, as Kaprow describes them "Are events that, put simply, happen." 

To be slightly more specific, Kaprow was referring to somewhat impromptu art performances that people would put together in spaces that were not typically associated with theatre; lofts, vacant stores, parks, etc. 

Kaprow explained some of the differences between theatre and Happenings, which included much less adherence to traditional theatre methods, as well as a lack of a stage, and an increased interaction with the audience.

Based on Kaprow's essay, I kept thinking of the example of Fuerzabruta, the South American "performance art" that is currently housed in a former bank in Union Square, as an example of what he would consider a Happening.

Reflections on "Man-Computer Symbiosis"

Man-Computer symbiosis is the title of a 1960 article by J.C.R. Licklider, an American computer scientist. Just after writing this article, Licklider became the head of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense. ARPA was a relatively secretive agency that worked on highly advanced technical projects, the most famous of which led to the development of the Internet. 

This essay discusses the future of computing, and Licklider's vision for a greater integration between humans and computers. Essentially, Licklider argues that at the time of writing, computers were able to solve human-created problems quite well, but they were not able to actually "think," or reason like humans. 

It is hard to say whether this has become a reality. On one hand, I do not think computers can really think for humans yet, especially considering they are still programmed by humans in some way or another. However, computers today can do far more "suggestive" work than they used to be able to. One example is predictive text, which we commonly see in cell phones, as well as spell-checking, and even phrase suggestions when users insert tags on their delicious pages. Another example of where this technology is Google's quest to be able to determine, based on a profile of its user, whether it should return naked pictures and gossip, or hotel reviews, when it receives a search query for "Paris Hilton."

I still think there is a significant way to go before the type of symbiosis that Licklider was referring to can be fully realized, but there are certainly steps in the right direction being taken today.