RMS

Richard Stallman, or RMS as he is sometimes known, is a crazy guy. GNU, which is pronounced like the insect, is an operating system he created. The primary idea behind GNU is that it is free. Stallman explains that he doesn't mean "free" as in "no-cost," but rather open, for people to make their own. He was one of the pioneers of the open-source software movement, and to this day, makes all of the code he writes available to the public. 

Cyborg Theory

Donna Haraway created Cyborg theory in 1985. The theory is a progressive hybrid of scientific thought, one that involves the integration of technology into human life. In other words, she talks about how technology can be an extension of the self. This is very similar to many of the thinkers we've read about earlier in the New Media Reader.

Computers as a Means of Living out Fantasies

Shelly Turkle's 1984 essay "Video Games and Computer Holding Power" examines the notion of computers, and their ability to give users other means of anonymously expressing themselves. Specifically she looks at why people play videogames, and makes some conclusions about how the games serve as an outlet for many people to express themselves in ways that they feel their normal lives are lacking. Turkle is a psychologist, and was interested in determining people's reasons for being so into gaming. While this was written long before Second Life the game, she brings up the notion of the "Second Self," which is the idea of using the digital realm to have a second identity that can do things the individual in real life cannot. 

Direct Manipulation

In his 1983 essay, Ben Schneiderman discusses the notion of "direct manipulation." Essentially, direct manipulation is using more life-like means to interact with a computer system. The idea came from arcade and videogames, in which people did not use text commands, but rather joysticks and specialized buttons, to affect an action in the game. Many of these buttons more directly resembled the action than entering text onto a keyboard. For example, it is more realistic to move a joystick to the right to make a character in a game walk to the right, rather than typing in "move to the right." 

This type of technology reminds me of the idea of the MIT Media room, where the scientists were interested in showing how easy it could be to manipulate a computer, and that it did not require a knowledge of a sophisticated programming language. As the GUI became more and more mainstream, the idea of direct manipulation tools, such as the eraser in a painting program, rather than typing a command "erase," grew too.

The Endless Chain

Ben Bagdikians's 1983 essay on the consolidation of media companies has some particularly fascinating points for me personally. First, The Baltimore Sun is my hometown newspaper, which my family gets every day. Second, the bank Bagdikian mentions, Mercantile Safe Deposit & Trust Company, was my first bank, and the place that my family and I used for our checking and savings until it was acquired several years ago by PNC Bank of Pittsburgh. This is somewhat ironic, being as the local Baltimore bank was acquired by what is now the 5th largest commercial bank in the United States, and how Badikian used Mercantile as the hook for his essay about media consolidation, and the bank itself has been absorbed into a larger banking conglomerate. 

In any event, Bagdikian's essay is very accurate in the sense that he points out that even though the digital revolution presents opportunities for users to be more liberated with their intake and output of media and information, there is still a growing consolidation of media sources, and this is not a good thing for society.

Bill Viola

Bill Viola is a famous new media video artist. His work has been featured at many galleries and museums, including the Whitney in New York City. Viola was a pioneer of video art, and he was one of the first to experiment with video instead of film. In addition, he was interested in exploring the future of data-space, in terms of the internet and, it seems, privacy vs. what is public. Hence the title of his 1982 essay, "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?" a somewhat abstract piece that explores what is art, what is technology, and where it will all lead with further development.

Literary Machines

Ted Nelson's 1981 Xanedu system project was a vision for something very similar to what we enjoy today in academia. Essentially, Nelson had a vision for a system in which users could upload, view, edit, and re-upload documents to a public service accessed by computers. Today we have systems such as Pro-Quest and Lexis Nexis, which allow users to access almost every piece of published information on record. The component that is not there, and where the current versions differ from Xanedu, is that Nelson was envisioning a system by which people could "piggyback" on other users' contributions, ultimately creating works that were better than what just one person or a small team of writers could create.

Clearly, the closest version of this today is Wikipedia, which Jimmy Wales sees as a depository for all of the world's information, which can be updated and edited by any user. Nelson was thinking of this decades before Wales made it a reality.

GH

GH’s presentation about his public/interactive/situationist art clearly shows that his work is strongly influenced by Augusto Boal, one of the most famous pioneers of situations art. Just as Boal tried to illustrate issues involving government corruption and impropriety, GH, as we saw in class last week, creates situations that are specifically designed to create anticipated responses, teasing out flaws in our society.

Richard A. Bolt

Richard A. Bolt’s “Put-That-There” is a 1980 article describing a Media Room that as set up at the MIT Architecture Machine Group. The media room involved several different types of input and output mechanisms, including CRT screens, projectors and screens, speakers, eye-tracking equipment, and more. The idea of the room was to create an immersive environment in which the user could command the computer to do certain things based on gestures and verbal commands, as opposed to simply pressing a button. The objective of this experiment was to show just how easy and natural a computer could be to control, and that doing so did not necessarily involve the knowledge of a specialized programming language. This development was an important step in the process of integrating computers into the mainstream society. By the mid-1980s, people were building computers with intentions other than simply using them to increase knowledge in the field of computer science, but rather, for practical, home and business uses.

Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert was an influential in furthering the penetration of computer technology to the mainstream market. Specifically, he was interested in using computer technology as a means of education for children. He developed a programming language called LOGO that allowed anyone to program basic aspects of computers. One example of this is a toy, Lego Mindstorms, that I actually played with during my childhood. The Mindstorms allowed users to program basic aspects of the movement of motors inside the Lego creations. Paper predicted, correctly, that by the end of the 20th Century, children’s toys would have as much computing power as the best IBM supercomputers of the day. His work on getting computer technology into the hands of mass-market children’s products for education was one of the ways in which this vision was realized.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote a book, A Thousand Plateaus in 1980. The introduction was called “Rhizome.” Rhizome is a very, very abstract concept, which I do not really understand. After reading about it, I think it is a type of writing. As the writers explain, “The rhizome connects any point to any other point.” I am fairly certain this is an offshoot of the idea of hypertext, in that text can be connected at many different points, and does not need to be linear. I could be totally wrong, because this piece is very confusing and vague, but this is my interpretation of what the writers were saying.

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg

In 1977, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg wrote an essay called “Personal Dynamic Media,” in which they laid out there vision for personal computing. Specifically, Kay and Goldberg discussed their idea of the Dynabook, what essentially became the modern laptop, as well as the Xerox PARC, one of the earliest versions of the personal computer. Essentially, they saw the computer as being a device that should be accessible to the average person, as opposed to just engineers, scientists and artists. They had ideas for all sorts of uses of the computer, including word processing, filing, music, drawing, design, and more. Even the pictures of their prototypes look very similar to what we know today as the modern laptop and desktop computers. They had a vision for putting a computer in the hands of everyone who wanted one, which was one of the key elements to the success of the internet.

Myron W. Krueger

“We are incredibly attuned to the idea that the sole purpose of our technology is to solve problems,” said Mryon W. Krueger. Krueger was both a computer scientist and artist, who was just as interested in using the computer for aesthetic as well as engineering purposes. He is considered to be the father of virtual reality, and his ideas probably provided the inspiration for such current inventions as the virtual reality dome that we saw in class. He was also interested in exploring the notion that “The response is the medium,” in the sense that unlike conventional art in galleries which many times was created to be sold, new media art should be designed primarily for the reaction and response of the audience. His 1977 essay on Responsive Environments provides a insight into some of the projects he was referring to, such as the Glowflow, which was a collaborative project that involved installation art, computer technology, and, most importantly, the viewers’ responses to work. Krueger’s would probably be particularly impressed by the Self Organizing Still-life work that we saw at the Sara Tecchia Gallery in Chelsea.

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976”Computer Power and Human Reason” is a work that touches on many of Weizenbaum’s concerns about the growth of computer technology. Weizenbaum was not against this growth, per se; he was in fact a computer scientist who programmed a very famous Chatterbot called Eliza, which was supposed to impersonate a psychologist. After creating the Chatterbot, Weizenbaum began to show increasing concern that people would begin trying to replace actual therapists with the ‘bot. In his work, he explains that there is a big problem if people cannot understand the line between the proper and improper uses of a computer. His thoughts strike me as somewhat similar to those of Vanever Bush. That is to say that where Bush was concerned about the growing military-industrial complex, and humans not fully realizing the power of computers, Weizenbaum, too, was concerned that humans did not understand the degree to which computers and technology should be allowed, and expected, to replace the human.

Nicholas Negroponte

Negroponte was a driving force behind the attitude that computers and new technology should empower people, and that people should not be slaves to the machines. In 1975, he wrote Soft Architecture Machines as part of the Architecture Machine group at MIT. As an example of empowering people, Negroponte wanted computers to be as responsive as possible to human inputs and commands, not just to be “number-crunchers.” One main example of what Negroponte meant by this had to do with his graphic user interface that was used for creating architecture and design.

Augusto Boal

Augusto Boal was a Brazlian interactive artist/performer, who knows first hand what oppression is. The Brazilian military government murdered his colleagues. He was spared, but before that point was tortured and then left the country to Argentina, and then Chile.

Boal played with the notion of the “cop in the street” and the “cop in his head,” as a way to highlight and tease out oppression and injustices where they existed. After many years, Boal managed to return to Brazil, and was actually elected to public office. Almost to make fun of his enemies, Boal brought his theatre/performance colleagues with him to serve as his political staff.

Much of Boal’s work deals with the notion of “embodiment,” which is to say how the people involved in the public art become the art themselves. Some of these ideas can be seen in the methods of GH, which we saw in class last week, in which he creates situations that are specifically designed to create anticipated responses, teasing out flaws in our society.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines

Computer Lib/Dream machines is a book by Ted Nelson. Actually, it is two books. The two books are bound together, back-to-back, in the same way as some magazines or clothing catalogs. One can read one of the books, close the cover, flip the book over, rotate it, and read the other book. It is ironic that this clever technique was used for a book about new media, which is inherently about pushing the envelope.

The more famous of the two books was Computer Lib, which was published in 1974. In the book, Nelson railed against the idea of central computers, and, much like Enzensberger feared could not happen, Nelson advocated for more individual, decentralized computing.

Dream Machines, the other book, was more about new media as opposed to just technology. Nelson, although he was a computing pioneer, did not care too much for the specific technology, but rather, the ideas. Nelson advocated for using computers as a method of advancing new media, open-source, collaborative development, and lastly, as a way to empower others to advance. He seems like he would be an influential in the life of Richard Stallman.