New Media Reader

Introduction #1

• computer as expressive medium
• computer medium draws from many formats
• Borges – imprisoning labyrinth
• Bush – challenging maze
• rich interplay of cultural practice and technical innovation
• potential of the computer: interaction, largest medium and most information, dimensionality
• Eliza – illusion of life through rules of behavior
• 1980s – first personal computers – word processing – interactive design – everyday tool
• “work with our myriad talents to expand our media of expression to the full measure of humanity”

Introduction #2

• new media field takes shape in 1980s
• new media was more recognized in other countries because they had time to reflect on new technologies
• 1990s – new media was more prominent in US and the field matured
• technologies overtake art
• radically new history of modern culture
• cyberculture = social networking, new media = culture and computing
• distribution and software
• new media = “mix between older cultural conventions for data representation, access, and manipulation and newer conventions of data representation, access, and manipulation
• computers provide faster execution of old algorithms
• key cultural role played by digital computers and networking in global society

The Garden of Forking Paths

• 1941
• a hypertext novel? = story read in multiple ways = he invented it, but this was not one
• written before computers
• smaller than typical story, a “fiction”

As We May Think

• Vannevar Bush
• before WWII, groundbreaking analog computing projects
• “military industrial complex” – “iron triangle”
• after Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings:
• vision of how technology could lead toward understanding and away from destruction
• book describes voice interaction, wearable information devices, and wireless data connections
• “memex” – mechanized private file library
• memex was envisioned as a means of turning information explosion into a knowledge explosion
• Doug Engelbart later used the idea of the memex to create the mouse, word processor, the hyperlink, and “concepts of new media for which these groundbreaking inventions were merely enabling technologies”

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

• Alan Turing
• 1943 – built British Colossus computers that worked to decrypt encoded language
• “Turing Test” – can a computer, communicating over a teleprinter, fool a person into believing it is human?
• actual human-computer dialog, using language, can take place – 1950s billing systems could act as scribes
• Turing’s idea of a verbal computer inspired early programmers to forge into new media, “pushing computing into a territory beyond that of numbers and calculation
• computing machinery could be engineered to operate on language

Men, Machines, and the World About

• Norbert Wiener
• cybernetics during WWII
• his work brought about words such as “cyborg” and “cyberspace”
• cyberneticists = “communication and control in the animal and machine”
• WWII project = the system of a bomber, anti-aircraft gun, and the human generators of each
• Wiener was into the “social responsibility in computing technology

Man-Computer Symbiosis

• Joseph Car Robnett Licklider – leader of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
• he promoted computer science education, time-sharing systems, interactive computing, and computer networks
• the network he envisioned soon became the ARPAnet – eventually the internet
• speech recognition, graphical input, handwriting recognition

“Happenings” in the New York Scene

• “Happening” = performances and events organized by Allan Kaprow in 1950s and 60s
• they broke down distinctions between creator and audience – “idea of interaction”
• increasing responsibility of observer, abolishing audience, artists remaining organizing force
• “reversibility”
• anti-hierarchical formation of art

The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin

• William Burroughs – cut and paste editing
• computer approximated randomness can be used by the author as an intermediate step in composition
• entire book created by computer
• or maybe computer was loaded with templates that created a draft and then was edited to finish by a human editor
• cut up method (randomness) is used today by computers to help users create poems

Augmenting Human Intellect

• Douglas Engelbart – created computer interfaces – mouse, window, word processor, etc. 1960s
• helped create internet, computer supported cooperative work, video-conferencing, mixed text-graphic display, structured programming editors, used remote procedure calls, and invented the hyperlink
• one of the great inventors of the 20th century, although largely unknown
• story told in “graphic vision” – narrated in second person
• basic outlines for his ideas and starting points of his work

Sketchpad

• Sketchpad system created by Ivan Sutherland
• graphical ancestor of today’s human-computer interaction and computer graphics
• first direct-manipulation interface
• laid foundation for object-oriented programming and graphic user interfaces
• “dynamic media”

The Construction of Change

• In London, Roy Ascott was remaking art in view of Wiener’s cybernetics
• founding document for the fusion of procedural technology and aesthetics/design
• artistic interest in conception, information, behavior, and interaction = cybernetics and art
• “telematic art” = artist creates a system for communication and collaboration between physically dispersed individuals
• art as an investigation of behavior, of creating situations for exploring behavior

A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate

• Ted Nelson – “hypertext” = underpins multimedia computing, electronic literature, and the WWW
• “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper”
• “hyper” = connotes extension and generality (hyperspace)
• complex, reconfigurable, linked structures of information, which can be manipulated at a granularity much smaller (or larger) than the page

Six Selections by the Oulipo

• a group of people, a “knitting circle,” where procedural effort produces “potential literature”
• both analyze and synthesize constraints (eg. lipogram and palindrome).
• computer-mediated textuality, producing custom poems in ways that give the reader and enhanced role in the process of literary creation
• “clinamen” = deviation/error in system “clinamen can make the text a true work of art”
• role of author can become extended to readers who take part in interpretation, configuration, and construction of texts

Two Selections by Marshall McLuhan

• “the medium is the message”
• culture is moving back toward tribal configurations
• typographic technology caused a shift in Western thought – “electric” or “new” media
• shift from book culture to electronic media culture

Four Selections by Experiments in Art and Technology

• E.A.T has had pivotal role in advancing possibilities of technology and art since the 1960s
• artist and engineer as true collaborators
• “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”
• although bad press because of things people thought went wrong, like bad audio (which was actually a new technology – wireless)
• it was an inspiration for the whole new media field

Cybernated Art

• Nam June Paik – first video artist
• used TVs like John Cage used pianos – in manipulation
• coined “information superhighway” and created satellite broadcast artworks
• Paik’s place in video art history was co-produced with the pieces that now make up that history, in a process that reveals our culture as much as it reveals the nature of video art

A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect

• 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference – “publish or perish” = “demo or die”
• it was a live public demonstration of interactive computing
• ARC was creating tools for users to express and share concept structures
• WYSIWYG
• user-friendly systems
• users creating tools, sharing tools, altering tools –> turned to aggressive move against software piracty
• Engelbart’s primary goal was for users to work together –> turned intothe internet

From Software – Information Technology

• Computer exhibition at the Jewish Museum, 1970
• Organized by Jack Burnham, directed by Karl Katz
• Visitors were invited to operate computers, many of which had technical problems (showcasing that annoying dimension that computers sometimes have)
• The exhibition was so plagued with problems, from the computers, that it shut down and the director was fired
• The exhibition was not to create art, per se, but to show that computers “will, in fact, be instrumental in redefining the entire area of esthetic awareness.”
• The exhibition got visitors to really look how computers work, along with their technical problems and all, and see how complex, yet useful they can be

Constituents of a Theory of the Media

• New Left Socialism – Marxist concepts:
• base = the forces and relations of production
• superstructure = political systems, religion, and the media
• Enzensberger takes aim at the media business – “the consciousness industry”
• “a superstructure that operates to perpetuate an unjust society by convincing us to accept that society”
• Enzensberger proposes tearing down the old media and starting with a “new fundamental organization of media”
• The Internet could be seen as a new type of media that is breaking down the old form of media…allowing for a citizen-based new media…one that is not run by the corporations and those “trying to convince us to accept society”

Requiem for the Media

• INTERACTION
• “there is an inherent structure to media technologically“
• The problem, for Baudrillard, is not in who transmits, but “in our very underlying model of communication – which is reproduced in the media, in political life, and in economic life”
• Baudrillard see a new media as “joint production through genuine interaction”

The Technology and the Society

• Flow = primary organizing principle of television
• Raymond William = Television: Technology and Cultural Form
• cultural determinist view = technology’s effects on culture
• Internet is moving toward a model of “social production and embodiment
• Internet continually grows

Computer Lib/Dream Machines

• Theodor H. Nelson
• “the first personal computer book
• was published shortly before the first personal computer
• predicted that personal computers were coming
• his most essential message was not about computers, but media and design
• he believed computers would enable new generations of media
• the idea of Xanadu – international hypertext publishing – the Internet

Theater of the Oppressed