Pseudo Experience

McPherson’s paper “Reload” was particularly interesting to me. One of the things that she emphasizes is the idea that the Web (and more specifically, the Web browser, and even more specifically, some websites) provides an experience with a sense of control that in itself is a pseudo experience. McPherson refers to this experience as “liveness” and when surfing the net, we have a sense of control through movement.

The cursor, or the pointer, is a “tangible sign of presence implying movement” and “seems to embody our trajectory, an expression of our movement and our will.” McPherson goes on to say that this movement only feeds our obsession with immediate gratification. When surfing the Web, we are constantly bombarded with articles, links, and pages dedicated to things of a “current” and “breaking news” kind of nature. We also complain when a page takes too long to download (“nine seconds??? I have to be at work in three seconds!!!”) but as McPherson says, “even the waiting of download time locks us in the present as a perpetually unfolding now.”

“…Web references the unyielding speed of the present, linking presence and temporality in a frenetic, scrolling now. We hit refresh. We feel time move. We wait for downloads. We still feel time move, if barely. Processors hum, marking motion.”

However, McPherson notes the Web’s sometimes “marked inability to keep up with the present, recycling older stories in order to take advantage of the vast databases which underwrite the Web, old content repackaged as newness.” I myself have definitely experience this. Just recently, I was reading the New York Times online and clicked on what I thought was a new story about the climate conditions for the Olympics in Beijing, but it was actually a several month old story that I had already read. This recycling of old news by way of accessing “vast databases” of archived information brings to mind Bush’s idea of how our archives should be properly used, a way of moving forward by being able to access older ideas and build upon them (“a record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.”). But I don’t think this is the way in which Bush envisioned the information being “consulted;” instead it is being reused and not to a point where it is truly useful. McPherson goes on to say that “what is crucial is not so much the fact of liveness as the feel of it.” Does repackaging these old stories help us move forward? Are we really moving forward as long as we “feel” it?

Word

Fuller’s piece resonated with me in large part because it addressed the visual layout, “innocuous” aesthetics, and semiotics behind the construction of the most popular word processor. Ever since Windows 95, I have felt somewhat imprisoned by Microsoft Word’s asceticism (proclaiming, “Here is the whitest page and the most imposing emptiness of a flat background, all bathed in the dead glow of the monitor”), as though its end is to discipline and assimilate me into a “default” writing environment, as well as its simultaneous barrage of icons, options, sounds, and that “Mr. Paperclip” jerk, all always present even if not all on-screen (proclaiming, “Here we are, the tools you never knew you needed, so that you can make countless superfluous transformations to your boring text”). What are the immediate consequences of this? For one, an unpleasant environment (as though flatland alone isn’t bad enough). Furthermore, MSWord’s layout relegates the typed text to the status of “just another series of images on the screen,” as does the fact that the open document is just another “window.” Additionally, the layout forces the user/writer to adapt her mode of working to suit comfortably the processor’s static form. This directly hyperrealizes the act of writing itself. Ultimately, these problems trouble the way one conceives of and approaches writing on a computer.

Of course, functions like deletion or copy/paste make things easier to the user. They undoubtedly help to put forth a new kind of writing consciousness different from the one effected by the paper & pen model. They have rewritten the act of writing. I don’t think, however, that this necessarily results in better or faster writing. Even here, advantages are questionable and certainly not revolutionizing.

To directly relate this to Fuller’s piece (the text is ironically situated in a grey mass that levels it with the superfluous surrounding icons and options [in this case links screaming “HotSpot—Leipzig”] even more obviously than MSWord does), Fuller reflects the personal qualms I mentioned by noting, for example, that Microsoft “overcompensates… rather than tries to develop [MSWord’s] potential” (6). Although he is referencing an outdated version here, the newer versions are just as liable for this kind of criticism. 

The Internet and Navigable Space

As discussed in class and in the reading by Manovich, the Internet and computer programs in generally are constantly represented as some form of navigable space. In films like Tron and novels like Neuromancer we see computers as containing a secret world made up of physical space that affects the way the computer functions. Why does this interpretation seem so permeating? The idea that something can contain so much information and media without actually taking up any space at all is somewhat mind-boggling. The contents of the computers do not truly take up any space in themselves. Everything can be reduced to code, to text, which takes up no space other than the digital space on a page, which itself is coded for. It becomes very confusing. Therefore computers are posited as actual physical spaces in order to reconcile this dilemma of perception. It is a lot easier to think about the Internet as some great expanse containing sites that we travel to, rather than something that exists only in code.

            This ties back into the assertions of MacPherson’s article about mobility and the web. The Internet is represented as a navigable space because we like the idea that we choose where we are going, and that our travel through the Internet is an act of freedom. The reality is much different. We are not moving anywhere, and we are quite limited in “where” we choose to go. Perhaps this is the reason why games such as Doom and Myst were so popular when they initially came out. These games realized the navigable world behind the screen that many people had been searching for this whole time. They proposed the idea the computers could contain navigable space and that the user could move through this space (relatively, and less so in Myst) freely. These games opened up a type of interaction with the computer that had not previously existed. They brought the illusion of moving through space on a computer to more literal terms.

Why Kittler is Wrong

I strongly disagree with Kittler's argument that software doesn't exist without its hardware counterpart. Programming has existed since before hardware to run it on has (consider the mathematician Ada Lovelace, known as the 'first programmer'.) I argue that computer programs are simply a completely logical description of an algorithm, or a set of tasks. A piece of software written to be executed on computer hardware could just as easily be followed by a human. The fact that the 'tower of languages' exists and 'hides information' from users is inconsequential-- code can be written, interpreted, and by humans at any of the 'levels'. I will give examples of averaging three numbers in both assembly language and Java (Assembly is all the way at the bottom of the tower and Java is way up high):

Assembly Example for Averaging 3 Integers

         .data
avg:     .word    #integer average
i1:      .word 20 # first input
i2:      .word 13 # second input
i3:      .word 10 # third input
num      =     3  # nb of nums

         .text
__start: 
lw $s1,i1
lw $s2,i2
lw $s3,i3
add $s0,$s1,$s2
add $s0,$s0,$s3
div $s0,$s0,num
sw $s0,avg
done

Java Example for Averaging 3 Integers

public class AveragingNumbers
{ 
     public static void main(String [] args)
     {
          double average = (20 + 13 + 10)/3;
     }
}

Whether or not you understood these examples doesn't matter -- you could learn how to read and execute these simple programs in your mind in 15 minutes.

So then if a human can read and execute the instructions given above, then why doesn't the software exist?

Florian Cramer has perhaps a more elegant (though very much related) argument against Kittler's:

The Perl code of the Dada poem can be read and executed even without running it on machines. So my argument is quite contrary to Friedrich Kittler's media theory according to which there is either no software at all or at least no software without the hardware it runs on:4 If any algorithm can be executed mentally, as it was common before computers were invented, then of course software can exist and run without hardware. - A good example are programming handbooks. Although they chiefly consist of printed computer code, this code gets rarely ever executed on machines, but provides examples which readers follow intellectually, following the code listings step by step and computing them in their minds.

Concepts, Notations, Software, Art

art and virtual space

In the Navigable Space article Manovich talks about how software designers use art and architecture as inspiration for their creations of virtual 3-D space. "Given that new media are most often experienced, like paintings, via a rectangular frame, virtual architects can study how painters organize their spaces within the constraints of a rectangle." (Manovich) This is a very interesting point to make. I feel that usually the space created by virtual architects is very rigid, and mathematic. Not extremely abstract, like many of painters he mentions (de Kooning, Pollock) It is the way that these painters fill that rectangle that is important. I never thought of a video game as a painting. Millions of pixels creating this image in incremental frames. It is a completely different way of viewing this space. Manovich also talks about some of Le Corbusier's work, and how one navigates through space. Corbusier's whole deal was that a building had to be easily moved through, with no distractions, ramps instead of stairs, no ornamentation, well lit. However Manovich then talks about the installation artist Kabakov who holds a totally different view of space as Corbusier. Kabakov is quoted saying "the reaction of the viewer during her movement through the installation is the main concern of the designer... the loss of the viewer's attention is the end of the installation." Corbusier feels that his clients interaction with his art is going to be an unfocused thing. They are going to be caught up in their own lives and even forget about the architecture, that is why he makes it easy to move through. Kabakov wants his viewer's attention and focus, not for ease or speed, but so they take in the whole piece. Which of these is better for the virtual navigable space? It depends I feel on the purpose of the space. A video game is a simulation of reality, like Charles Baudelaire's flaneur, we want to escape our world, but still have a sense of security. We want to delve into this other reality and forget our lives for a few. Depending on the game, one would prefer to move quickly not noticing lines of text or little details. However some games like Myst rely on these minor interactions of the "hand" and certain objects that draw the gamers attention. If you loose focus you are going to be wandering around for a while aimlessly. The important thing to note about this portion of the text is how influential art has been on the creation of navigable space. And how artists and designers play with this idea of space, and objects in space to further understand our own conception of it.

hey, digital cults, alright.

In reading Snow Crash this week, I was preoccupied with placing myself in a world like the one described—a futuristic setting with a dual existence in reality and the Metaverse. While some of Stephenson's conceptions seemed outlandish and far-fetched at first, I found most of them easier to buy into as his preternatural ability developed to trace society in 1992 through to the future in when Snow Crash is set. (Example: “…the Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles.” p 351) I don’t believe Stephenson to be psychically predicting anything with this novel, but I did pose myself a series of questions in an attempt to imagine myself in this reality.

What would my personal avatar be like?

How could you develop an avatar to express emotion?

How can religious faith be expressed in numbers?

What level of technological proficiency will be basic common knowledge?

How could I reconcile two self-identities?

What would the difference be between human memory and computer memory?

What will be the Government’s role in digital/Metaverse regulation?

Though a lot of these questions hold no real weight in my self-identification now, they are interesting to think about as you read through Snow Crash and relate its reality to our own.

Where can I get Vitaly Chernobyl’s record?

Dasein?

The first semester of my freshman year I wrote a couple of research essays about computers and the internet, and came across several of this class's readings in the process. That was back in the innocent days before I knew what semiotics and postmodernism were. I remember reading "It Looks Like You're Writing A Letter" and some other stuff in Fuller's Behind the Blip. I was kind of bothered by the line

“the radicality of Word lies instead in its absolute refusal of 'Dasein'—the instantaneous being-there and fused-at-once-with-tool-and-act supposedly experienced by craftsmen”

It seems rather to miss the point. McPherson and Manovich have a better conception of things (particularly McPherson--Manovich's technical art stuff really doesn't convince me, though I guess I'm not much for visual art)--the new technology is a virtual space into which we project our consciousness. William Gibson talks about the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace, but it's not just the internet as public meeting-place--things like Microsoft Word as a bundle of functions have evolved into something much more intricate. If the computer is our new, virtual world, Word is simply that world's typewriter, almost a bit outdated except that we haven't come up with something better yet. Barthes has it that when we encounter another text--which will by nature be an amalgam of others--we function as our own amalgam of various texts, and pool together like drops of mercury. Pleasing visual metaphors aside, I see no reason why 'Dasein' is being absolutely refused by the new media--rather, we still haven't quite figured out how craftsmanship works in the digital world.

Freedom in video games

Well, I'm glad we finally got to video games, my area of expertise.
I was frustrated by Myst not only because of the slow movement and long loading times but because, as other people have mentioned, it's incredibly restrictive. In fact, in almost every way, it' s no different from yesterday's text adventure games. This game, and every other, can only give feedback for things the programmers foresaw users might want to do. So if you want to punch the professor or whoever for telling you to adjust the frequency again, you're out of luck.

Advertisements for these sorts of games will mention vast worlds and limitless choices, but in every case it's an illusion; you've got to hew to the plot. It's unfortunate, because no other medium forces its "user" to experience it in a single way, but everyone who plays a particular game will remember it in just about the same way. Frequently, it seems like the player is fighting against the game itself, not against the enemies.

I guess this sort of thing is more pronounced in games like Myst, where the player expects a certain degree of interactivity. No one's frustrated by their inability to interact with a specific object in Doom, for example, because Doom is straightforward and honest about what you can and can't do.

Dos: Shoot enemies, activate switches, pick up ammo and health.
Don'ts: Everything else.

On another note, I came across a couple of perfect examples of the "media parasitism" we've encountered and spoken about several times. Neither of these sites features original material, but each provokes a completely different reaction from the original and, in fact, from the other. And, I think it's safe to say, both are superior to the source material.

Liveness, Mobility, and Myst

Myst and the Web have almost nothing in common. McPherson states that the Web attempts to create liveness (much like television does) and mobility. Myst attempts to immerse the player in aliveness, with mobility as one enabling factor. In a way, they both embody McPherson's idea of "lean-back interactivity," providing small moments of interactivity made to feel like spaces of control and volition.

Cinematic cutscenes in Myst lend limited liveness to the game and its narrative. Portions of the game that aren't full-motion video simulating live action are made live--or alive, rather--only by the user's actions. Other character speak directly to the screen--directly to the player. The omnipotent Hand is the only piece the player sees of the way he, as the protagonist, is represented in the game. The hand acts as proxy for the player's body, mind, and free will, whose actions are subject to many restrictions. The only way for the player to customize his presence (visible to himself) in the game is to choose one of eight colors for his hand and a gradation of transparency. It seems that choosing, say, a blue hand, or one that is completely transparent, would remove one furthest from the game. But that self-transparency is what immerses the player, alive in absence.

No matter how transparent one's navigational Hand is in the game, its actions rely completely, again, on the context of the software. Most of the time, clicking to signal that one wants to interact with the game, the hand will wave a little, floating onscreen, or knock and tap around on a surface, effecting no change to the conditions in the game. Thus, any agency suggested by immersion and aliveness is severely limited.

freedom is as freedom does.

Freedom is a big deal on the Internet today. In her article “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” Tara McPherson details the way in which web sites do their best to give web surfers freedom. “If early television promised to bring us the world, on the Web, our own volition in relation to this travel gets foregrounded. Microsoft asks, 'Where do you want to go today?'” The implication is that we Internet travelers could go anywhere we choose. We can blaze unique trails through the web of hyperlinks, experiencing websites as no one else ever has before. These days, with the explosion of Web 2.0 sites, we can even create and destroy the content of the web as we see fit.

Or can we? McPherson calls this freedom an “illusion.” Our abilities are much more limited then the web site designers would like us to believe. We are only able to go places and change content that they allow us to. For example, we are not free to get rid of the advertisements that run alongside the pages we “create” on Facebook. We do not have complete control over the layout of our blogs on Blogger; we can choose where we'd like the “Blog Archive” to appear, but we cannot remove it entirely. In creating our blog posts, we can only use basic HTML tags. If we want to add more interactive features to our blog (animations, pop-up windows, etc), we are out of luck; Javascript and Java applets are out of the question.

So it appears that we must be skeptical when a web site is presented as a place of limitless user freedom. In reality, our “freedom” is under their control.

Narrative, Audio, Space

Manovich's discussion of the narrative space of games and the nature of computer graphics reminded me of a game I saw recently, Everyday Shooter. Its an abstract to-down shooter game; think Asteriods on hallucinogens (with bright colors, trippy music and synesthesia to boot!). The game's minimal aesthetics and reliance on simple forms and bright colors are reminiscent of modern and contemporary art, entailing a welcome escape from photo-realism and absolute representation. Interestingly, in the game, which is fundamentally 2D, rather than space being the primary form of narrative as is the case for the games Manovich examines, the length and content of the levels is determined by the musical accompaniment. Each level is as long as the song which plays behind it.

The possibility of an audio based narrative in digital media opens up a whole new narratology undiscussed by Manovich, albeit one less ubiquitous and "new" media-y.

The Futility of "Cyber-Space" as an Actual Space

(Note: Doom... GOD. The game was published in like, what, 1993? I understand that Doom is probably the single most famous (or infamous) computer game in history, but GEEZ. If I could get a dollar for every Doom reference I've seen...)

Anyway.

"If the World Wide Web and the original VRML are any indications, we are not moving any closer toward systematic space..."

Honestly, I don't think we will. The argument can be made (one which Manovich touches upon) that technology was, and still is, not up to spec, but I don't think that we will ever reach the point where "cyberspace cowboys" navigate the web like "a new Wild West." Here's why:

We're too used to the interface. The distinction and categorization of navigable space vs. aggregate space has already been made. "Chatrooms" are simply isolated internet conversations. A "homepage" is still nothing but a series of hyperlinks. Think back to the old delusions of the revolution of "Video Phones." Although the argument can be made that video chat exists, it is most certainly not the norm; we have, thus far, stuck to the voice-only format of the telephone. We've been using the browser interface for almost 20 years now. According to Moore's Law, the exponential growth in computing power between then and now should have been more than enough (note that in Neuromancer, discussion can be heard of "Three-Megabyte" flash drives - considering that over 1.25 terabytes of data is sitting in my room right now, I think we've beaten expectations in that respect); so why haven't we made the jump?

The one exception I can think of at the moment are MMOs - Massively Multiplayer Online games. There aren't just just MMORPGs, mind you (WOW fans, eat your heart out); I'm talking about various games which use navigable space: Internet Poker is a bit of a stretch, but there are internet-linkable sports games, strategy games, - ironically enough, even space games (See EVE Online). You don't even need a computer for many games out there; the mini-computers known otherwise as your Xbox 360 and PS3 have online and computing capabilites rivaling even that of the most powerful desktop.

(Funny story: there actually was an online version of Myst, called Uru Live. It has since failed to garner a financially viable user base. The game goes offline on April 4, 2008.)

INTERACTIVITY/USING

This week has made me think a lot about the love people have towards technology. Throughout high school, when considering career options, I always assumed that during my lifetime there would be some kind of apocalypse rendering all technology useless, therefore making my skill set to be a necessity amongst the tribes of future (such as a doctor, and an engineer), and this often downplayed my desire to work with computers and multimedia. As bizarre as I may sound right now, this was a legitimate fear of mine.

But now I'm beginning to think that there is no possible way humans could ever go back to a time without technology. Our desire for it has become too great. Upon viewing Tron as a child, I instantly longed for the world inside the computer (as I'm sure Gibson did, seeing as Tron came out in '82 and Neuromancer '84). Games such as Myst definitely have a way of making us become enveloped in the digital world, whether we desire it or not.

And yet cyberspace can not and should not ever exist as a digital world. Using the Internet would be inefficient, and the world would be impossibly huge to contain all the data that exists on the Internet. Outside of gaming and entertainment, I don't think virtual reality could never exist as a functional tool.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we will always long for cyberspace because we can never have it, and this desire will continue our need for technology no matter what the circumstances are.

I was very impressed by the visual interface of Myst. I'd never played it before and was really expecting some rudimentary pixelated albeit charming thing like Oregon Trail. Although it was very visually appealing, I think that ultimately the beauty of it got in the way of it being a game. I was annoyed that it was a game, since the actual game part was much less enjoyable than the narrative exposition. It made me think about how almost all video and computer games now are 3d, as if being 3d is better, and how I'm not at all impressed or excited about it. 3d nowdays seems to be really popular, with children's animated movies having been all but replaced by the likes of Ratatouille. Yet the only games I'm ever really find comfort in are like, snake, super mario bros, simple things. I was thinking about the desire of having an interface cover up all the scary and confusing incomprehensible code underneath it. What does it mean when you have no interest in better disguising, more realistic thus less intrusive interfaces?

On Space and Freedom

Professor Chun said something in class on Wednesday that I found particularly interesting: new media "spaces" are not experienced as maps, but rather as tours. As a relatively experienced videogame-player (albeit not always a very good one), this seemed incredibly true to me. One of my favorite things to do in videogames is explore; to have the ability to do almost anything you want, when you want to. Obviously there are games that this doesn’t work with; games like Halo and other cinematic first-person shooters often follow distinct plotlines, and it wouldn’t really make sense to "explore," as you’re basically reenacting a set plot. In this sense, these games are tours; you can move about freely and "do what you want," but to progress through the game, you need to do the right thing. You’re being led on a set path, rather than forging your own.

However, I argue that all games follow a set path, no matter what the developers claim. Manovich quotes Myst developer Robyn Miller in his essay on navigable space: "We are creating environment to just wander around inside of. People have been calling it a game for lack of anything better, and we’ve called it a game at times. But that’s not what it really is; it’s a world." And it is a world, in some sense. But not as much as Miller would like to believe; although you can "wander around inside of it," and even have variable outcomes based on your actions, you’re still following a set path with a definitive ending.

We could examine other games. If anyone remembers the release of Fable for the Xbox, it was heralded as "complete freedom" where you could be as good or as evil as you wanted with your character. What resulted was a good game, but severely limited by a set path you had to follow (also, it only took 10 hours to beat). I recall reading someone’s review on a message board that had a line that emphasized the lack of freedom: "you can do whatever you want, as long as you follow the fucking path."

The Sims might also be seen as a world of freedom. You control a person and all aspects of their life – they eat, work, sleep and bathe on your command. But it is still restricted to the game design; you can’t play with objects in the game in ways that haven’t been programmed. The closest we may get to a new media space that is truly free is Second Life, where you really can do just about anything – as long as it obeys the rules set by the game.

But this suggests an issue with reality; do we live in a map-like space, or a tour-like space? If we say that games like The Sims, and even more so, Second Life, are tour-like because they're limited by rules, then so is our own life. We are limited by laws, expectations, and requirements, and especially by simple laws of nature. What really constitutes freedom in any of these cases?

As an added note, I think it’s interesting that the difference is illustrated by a map versus a tour. After all, when you look at a map, you’re most often looking for a path from one point to another, whether you’re hiking through the mountains or driving to a friend’s house. And how is that much different from a tour?

Also, was anyone else bothered by the frustrating navigation style and long loading times in Myst IV? I mean, it was innovative for the time of the original, but static positions connected by paths are terribly annoying to navigate through when you compare them to modern 3D navigation schemes.

Adam Smith on the Internet

McPherson presents the rather terrifying idea that corporate content providers uncomfortable with the vast freedom of the internet attempted to flex their controlling muscles by co-opting and limiting a user’s experience on the internet, citing the examples of MSNBC and AOL. I recall when my grandma subscribed to MSN as her ISP and email provider, but the web browser they had her install wasn’t even internet explorer. There was no address bar to be found. They seemed so reluctant to allow her to experience what it was she was actually paying for. Everyone used to have AOL, and now it’s (as far as I can tell) horribly outdated and unfashionable, even, to have AOL: a controlling limiting gateway to the internet. Almost like the invisible hand of the free market, these ridiculous aspirations of the power hungry higher ups are stifled by a collective notion and pressure. While my grandma may not have understood her disadvantage, plenty of knowledgeable people fought on her behalf with complaints to MSN and AOL, and these companies are forced to progress and allow users to achieve what they know is possible and allowed by the internet.

I remember when I used to make terrible websites with stolen clipart and animated gifs demonstrating my vast portfolio of Pokemon cards and was thrilled to learn how to code frames in html. My dad, one of the few people who cared to visit my site, often complained of the limitations and frustrating aspects of frames: by opening new html pages within an internal frame, thereby pulling the rug out from beneath the mobility of links and clicking, one could not bookmark what one saw. This was a tactic I remember MSN employing: you could access the internet, but often it was trapped in their frame, ugly sidebars prevailing all over the place. This often led to infinite loops, too: If, for example, the MSN page allowed you to navigate to Google within a frame, and once you were done searching you navigated back to your homepage, msn.com, that would open within the frame and existing nav bars, including a new, duplicate set of frames and nav bars. Just like when a model poses on a magazine cover with a copy of that exact magazine in her hands, creating image within image, etc. (Almost like a mirror-effect in a funhouse. What might this be saying about Lacan’s mirror stage!?) Anyway, due to some equalizing, just, freemarket factor of the internet (maybe protocol?) frames have been lambasted to death and have become a severe no-no for any self-respecting web designer.

Anyway, maybe the internet is better at taking care of itself than people give it credit for? In terms of McPherson’s observation about transformation but no change, it seems to me that on a finite, individual level that can be problematic, but on the infinite scale of the internet this cannot be a problem. In a way, the internet defies the first law of Thermodynamics. Web sites can be Created AND Destroyed.

The Data Dandy and gargoyles

While reading Manovich's “Navigable Space”, one particular section caught my eye in its similarity to a type of character and place in Neal Stephenson's “Snow Crash”. Manovich talks about the flaneur and the explorer as types of new media users then quotes Geert Lovink, “The Net is to the electronic dandy what the metropolitan street was for the historical dandy.” This bears a striking resemblance to the Street created by Neal Stephenson. The Street is basically the manifestation of the virtual world where users congregate and move, meeting other users, buying, selling, living. It IS the internet and we, the users, are the “dandies”, just strolling through, being a part of it, engaging with it. Another interesting thing is the similarities between the data dandy in Manovich's article (“A perfect aesthete, the Data Dandy loves to display his private and totally irrelevant collection of data to other Net users.”) to the gargoyles in “Snow Crash”. After all, isn't that exactly what the gargoyles do? They collect as much information as possible, no matter how relevant or irrelevant, and makes it available on the internet. They are like the Data Dandy in that they are a non-identity; they are only comprised of what they do, which is constant recording and surveillance. This is even illustrated by the amount of equipment they wear, that they are covered with so much equipment that they perhaps, don't even look like human anymore and therefore, are called gargoyles.

Myst

As my first experience with Myst, lab this week was frustrating to say the least. However, it was not merely the fact that I didn't know what to do, or how to solve the puzzles (or even how to find or get to the puzzles) and thus, was not making much progress; it was also the limits and controls over how I could navigate the world that frustrated me. I found myself wanting to click on certain things, pick them up, inspect them, or walk to certain places, but these were not any of the choices I could make in the game. While it seemed like I had a lot of freedom to move about and explore in the game, I could really only do so in the ways specified by the program. There were only certain objects that would have any effect if I clicked on them; there were only certain places I could stand, sections of the space that I could go to. I felt like I had all these choices, and thus all this freedom, yet, as we have discussed in section/class, my choices were actually fairly controlled and limited. Even though, as the user, I was controlling my experience and my progress, the game itself controlled the ways in which I could control my experience.

I had a great time reading the Manovich article. The most intriguing part for me about it was the relationship he pointed out between physical media, in the form of visual art, and digital media. This point stuck out to me mostly because of its direct correlation to the visual art class I am in right now. We just finished studying the early sketches of both Georges Seurat and Alberto Giacometti. Our project for the unit was to create a charcoal drawing in which you only use value to define shapes, not lines. This concept is sort of hard to grasp, in the sense that “everything is everything.” (Not in the cheesy Lauren Hill sense, hah.) To quote Manovich, these painters tried “a dense field that occasionally hardens into something that we can read as an object,” (p.55) This is similar in the digital world in that there is an impossibility of representing things and spaces as separate entities. I’m really interested to see the future of digital space. Besides 19th and 20th century art, what will be the next thing to influence space in the digital world?

haptic and optic perception in myst and installations

I enjoyed Manovich's 'Navigable Space' article. The idea of haptic perception vs. optic perception seems key for understanding different spaces. I thought about this division while I was playing Myst in lab this week. Clearly the world in Myst is built up from many individual sections of space and separate things. This is hard to ignore since you have to wait a second or two for the next section to load or to zoom in on a specific useful object. As a result, movement and exploration through this virtual space do not feel very continuous. However, the game does a good job of creating the illusion of continuous space. As you look around in the game there are many details to create this illusion. You can look into the distance and recognize other areas you've explored and the game even adds some blurriness to your sight depending on what you're focusing on to give an added sense of depth.

One of my favorite parts of this article was the section on installation art and Kabakov's methods for creating engaging installations. Manovich ties this discussion back into the haptic/optic division: "Kabakov 'directs' the viewer to keep alternating between focusing her attention on particular details and the installation as a whole. He describes these two kinds of spatial attention... as follows: 'wandering, total ('summarnaia') orientation in space--and active, well-aimed 'taking in of the partial, the small, the unexpected." I'd never thought about spatial perception in this way or articulated this divsion but certain installations definitely guide you towards using both types of perception. I think the pieces that can pull this off, and really make the viewer experience the piece in both ways, are often the ones that are able to immerse the viewer and make it feel like its own separate world to explore. I think part of the reason this is a successful strategy, at least for me, is that this dual perception is how I take in a lot of the world. I tried to be aware of how I navigate space this week and it was interesting to notice the combination of haptic and optic. Upon entering a room, I'll often get a feel for the overall space an how it's filled. I will also, of cousre, focus on individual parts of that space and objects that grab my interest or seem useful to me.

Linear Myst

I'm also one of the kids who first experienced Myst as a child, 10 years old, at a family friend's house. But my attraction to the game has never been for the puzzles, for the intellectual stimulation, or for the mysteries of the island. The frustration of staring at an impossible (for a ten-year-old, and still impossible-seeming) puzzle for an hour, and not being able to progress, and the frustration of wandering around the island, over and over again, in circles, madly clicking on everything, waiting for the scenes to load, always have detracted from what I find to be the real pleasure of the game: The movie-like experience. Myst, at it's best, is a movie where you control the pace of the action. With an online walkthrough in hand, you can progress smoothly though the puzzles, enjoy the plotlines, and have a satisfactory narrative experience without getting bogged down in the problem-solving.

So that's just what my partner and I did in the lab, after 30 minutes of frustration. We grabbed the "Revelation Walkthrough" from fisicx.com, and blasted through as much of the plot as we could in the remaining half-hour. We restored the electricity, and saw the waterfall turbines come back to life with a roar, we were knocked out by a green flash/explosion, and got to use the astronomer's chair to look at the stars.

Cheating Myst makes the experience linear (you just follow the instructions, in order), but oh-so-much-more enjoyable.

from interactive television to the internet

McPherson's essay got me thinking about why so many features of television have made their way to the internet while internet features on television seem to be fading away. Increased interactivity through things like pay-per-view and home shopping networks paved the way for DVR's and internet TV, but these all seem to be left by the wayside as viewers begin to spend more time in front of their computer screens than their television screens. As a previous post noted, McPherson's essay is a few years old and we now seem to have the faster connections and better graphics capabilities to allow other websites, the progeny of Pseudo and DEN, to provide similar television programs and other "interactive" content on our computers much more easily. But even as the market for things like internet TV is becoming ever more popular in the United States, I am interested in finding out a little more about these technologies in other countries. TiVo ended sales the UK in 2003 because business had declined, but now they have announced that they will begin providing service in Australia sometime in 2008. It might be interesting to discuss in section how "interactive" and "lean forward" technologies as well as content relate to the internet and television and specifically how the relationship between these two media, in terms of the markets for interactive technologies and programming, has changed over the past several years, both in the US and elsewhere.

How much autonomy do we want?

Having experienced MYST and the discussion over autonomy on web surfing, I start to wonder if people really want complete freedom and full control over Internet space. MYST was designed to give people a lot of control and freedom over first person’s action, however, I felt annoyed by the freedom I was given, the possibilities of every movement and its insignificance toward the whole plot. Examples as opening of the drawer, coming in and out of the plant house…etc. I wish the game could be more direct which leads me through the story. Same idea applies to the web surfing, too much freedom could confuse people easily of where they want to go and what they want to see. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo established this framework which directs us to the next step. This framework keeps us on the right direction while giving us enough choice and freedom.

User participation in the neo-Fordist economy

After describing her three modes of Web experience, McPherson goes on to explain that these experiences are in fact largely illusory. One illusion she discusses is the feeling of actively participating in the production side of the neo-Fordist economy. McPherson writes, “Rather than being subjected to capital, the worker is now incorporated into capital, made to feel responsible for the corporation’s success” (207). It’s unclear whether McPherson is referring only to employees of a company, but her assertion can be applied elsewhere. Consider online enterprises such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. These are the types of businesses profiled by Time magazine in their 2006 Person of the Year, “You.” These companies all rely on user-generated content. All of these websites have employees like any other business, but it is the customers who are contributing most of the material.

This much we already knew. What’s interesting is when we consider McPherson’s comment about being made to feel responsible for a corporation’s success. It’s one thing for employees to feel this way, but now even average customers sincerely feel like producers as well as consumers of a single product, even if that product is owned by News Corp. After spending time on websites like Facebook, one begins to feel like part of the team. I’ve sometimes felt that the successes of Facebook as a business (more users, more profit, etc.) are somehow a tiny victory for me. And what’s brilliant—and maybe just a little scary—is that Facebook et al don’t need advertising to tell me to feel this way; rather, the feeling of participation and responsibility is inherent in the structure of the website and business. This seems to add a bit of a twist to McPherson’s argument about these experiences being illusory, since by adding content to a Web 2.0 site like these, one really is making a unique and substantive contribution to the business.

2002? that's ancient history

After reading the first page of any given assigned reading, I inevitably need to look up the year the author was writing... it really drives home just how quickly things are changing on the internet. Today it's hard to imagine the internet without video sharing sites but McPherson in Reload, only six years ago, is basing her entire argument on an internet where video was still relatively fringe despite what hype she says TV executives were running about it. McPherson argues that TV and the web are fundamentally separate media because of mobility scan and search and transformation; and that somehow they had to apply to video on the web. However in practice the most popular video on the web is in fact material from TV. Interestingly, the navigable space of the internet is merely what happens between these segments of non-participatory entertainment. It would seem that participatory entertainment/narrative currently falls more into the video game area of online material, and that mildly participatory, mildly online TV 'experiences' are simply less popular? That is to say, participatory beyond just the commenting system on video sharing sites. The idea of the worker being incorporated into capital rather than subjected to capital definitely has come in to play though. I guess my point is that it's difficult to interpret a theorist in the context the theory was written without some parts seeming ridiculous because of one's own context, and it's especially interested when dealing with a media that changes contexts so quickly.

impressions of myst

When I was six or seven, I beat the original Myst for the first time. My memory of playing that particular game is very vivid, and the feelings that I get when I imagine the worlds I was sent to explore are so heavy and clearly defined that they outweigh almost any memory of any real place from that period of my life. I wasn’t able to beat the entire game without any help: the three puzzles which I was unable to solve are burned clearly into my memory as frustrating failures. One involved playing piano. Being completely musically incapable, I had to have my friend’s older sister to decode some notes for me. The world of Myst became my virtual playground with puzzles more complex than monkey bars and landscapes more awe inspiring than play structures.
Needless to say, playing Myst IV was a very nostalgic experience for me. Interestingly enough, however, what I found most nostalgic about playing the game was simply watching the animation of the Cyan company logo swoop down across a white landscape of cones and prisms before forming into a letter C surrounding a gold orb. This image brought back the many, many times I had sat in anticipation, staring at this image and linking it to all of the wonders of the world locked inside its software. Looking, back I am surprised at the degree to which the logos of software companies seemed to define the experience of the game to me. I saw Cyan as a kind of god, broadcasting the glory of Myst to my home computer. Likewise, my enjoyment of Dreamwork’s The Neverhood lead me to a quasi worship of the moon and the acorn. It is in places like Dreamworks, where little boys threw acorns from the moon, I thought, that worlds like The Neverhood are possible. I wonder if, to some extent, I still revere these corporate idols who produce my media, but simply am not as acutely aware of the fantasy they are spinning in my head.
Another thing I noticed during the loading screen was that Cyan is now subtitled with the word “worlds” implying that Cyan is a producer of worlds. Indeed, I would be doubtful of this description had not Cyan succeeded in planting worlds as vivid as the one we live in deep in my memory. I find this posting to be too much involved with my personal experience. However, it is useful to have a forum to unpack my childhood memories of new media interaction.

contentment with illusion revisted

This is an amendment to the post I wrote earlier:

I’d like to try to crystallize my thoughts a little more. What I mean is that because of computers, we have become accustomed to calling simulations reality. By that I mean that we consider a document in MS Word a document before we’ve printed it out. And I’m wondering if this tendency to consider things that take form only in our computer interface “real” objects allows us to see other things that “seem” to exist (ie: continuity) in our interface as reality as well.

The power...of...Writing.

There was once a time when the ability to write was something that sacred. There was a time when people lost life or limb for a simple word, a time when reading was such a divider in our world and perhaps it does still separate some people from others. It’s so interesting how this community puts so much into the ability of reading and writing, yet now it seems some people are losing the ability, through the computers that were intended to improve our ability to write. With such tools as spell check, thesaurus and others people in the community aren’t really using as much brain power as once before to write. Computers are taking the job over; our machines are beginning to take over the tasks and thusly becoming a superior. We build machines to help us, yet somehow we’re allowing the machines to replace our own though processes, dumbing ourselves down. Often times, in sci-fi movies we think of superior beings as floating entities, finding no use for their bodies, because of their massive brain power and intelligence. We definitely set the standards too high; us humans will never get to that point of intelligence if continue to just let machines handle all the difficult things. Perhaps, instead of simply teaching the machine to think better, we should begin to teach ourselves as well. If not our machines will continue to grow, and humans will become the obsolete race and maybe we all will find ourselves stuck in some reality called “the matrix.”

why are we content with illusion?

I was struck by Manovich’s discussion of aggregate vs. systematic space, and in section I’d like to discuss the tensions between the two, especially concerning its reflection of contemporary society. There seem to be several points that don’t quite mesh––which I guess is a sign of fragmentation in itself.

Computer games, it is safe to say, are an example of aggregate space. Myst certainly proved this point––you cannot even move through it except as a set of discrete spaces in which you can “stand.” But the space, when you are not interacting with it, certainly looks quite convincingly connected. And we seem to be content with this illusion of continuity. Manovich says as much. “If we are to apply the evolutionary paradigm… to the history of virtual computer space, we must conclude that it has not yet reached its Renaissance stage” (257). But then he continues, “If the WWW and the original VRML are any indications, we are not moving any closer toward systematic space: instead, we are embracing aggregate space as the new norm” (257).

However, we are not actually embracing aggregate space. We believe that because of the web, the world and everyone in it are more connected than ever before. We feel that because computers are multi-media machines, different art forms are more connected than ever before. Different perspectives, information––in short, The Individual and The World. Haraway suggested that a cyborg world would be all about breaking down boundaries. The interface is supposed to create a seamless connection between the user, and the computer.

So the question I have, I suppose, is why are we not rushing to create a less controlled society in which things actually are systematic rather than aggregate? Rather than only seeming so? And because new media already does what pre-Renaissance art did not (it simulates continuity), does this content with illusion come from our habituation to new media?

"Why don't they ever bring back or remake good shows, like 'BJ and the Bear?'"

I think a lot of the drawing power of TV is based on the fact that it lacks a sense of “control” or perceived control, what with the rigid scheduling and structured output of seasons and arcs and so on. There’s something to be said about the longing and wait one must go through in order to finally get to see the season finale/premier of their favorite show. I can’t really argue with the idea that the Internet is a far richer experience, in terms of the amount of information and entertainment it provides, but TV – in its various forms – isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I find it strange to think that a lot of people are still attached to a seemingly ancient mode of passing along information or just random content, especially considering that the Internet is so widely used and accessible. Broadcast companies do provide webisodes and exclusive content on their websites, but this feels more like a supplement to their normal programming. Episodes are thrown on the web only after their aired on TV, and even then, the streams aren’t perfect and may disappear after a short time. This kind of frustration exists with television, yet less as a deterrent and more as a tease that keeps you coming back for more. I feel like the fact that you have more “control” or a fluid experience with the Internet is in fact true, but this doesn’t mean that TV is less superior, the two just seem to be providing a different experience.

Ideology of personalization

In Lecture on Monday, one of the definitions of ideology (Althusser’s) was a “representation of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence, a necessary way of relating to the real.” (this is a rough citation from lecture). On this note, many of the articles this week seem to point out a common ideology of personalization and individuality about new media. Tara McPherson shows this personalization as a both a corporate marketing tool and a real part of the experience of surfing the web. She describes the web experience as a the feeling of individual choice in navigating ever-present spaces. Yet McPherson also notes that Microsoft appropriates this feeling when it asks “Where do you want to go today?” (203). In fact, all three of her principles: volitional mobility, scan and search, and transformation, all are partially dependent on an "free individual" ideology. Manovich, whose concept of navigable space seems very similar to McPherson’s first two principle of volitional mobility and scan and search, delves into this ideology more explicitly. In computer games, Manovich says that “the dominance of spatial exploration exemplifies the classical mythology in which the individual discovers his identity and builds character by moving thorough space.” (271) He also characterizes web browsers, which are un-coincidentally named “navigator” and “internet explorer” as privileging “a single user navigating through and unknown territory rather than a member of a group…”(273) These articles really opened up to me the extent to which computers posit their users as individuals: the personal computer, my documents, etc. Could this be an ideology in the Althusser definition, in that “customization” helps people relate to their machines? Mcpherson says herself that “The web as a mediator between human and machine…” (201)

It would be interesting in section to discuss how this trend in new media that was referenced in several articles relates to the larger push towards customization in advertising and the media in general. Is the move towards, for example, TV commercials which address spectators individually and separate them from the masses, and niche markets in magazines part of the same trend? Is it simply a continuation of a traditional mythology of individual exploration as Manovich suggests? Or, is the prevalence of this ideology outside of new media a sign of the influence of software structure and ideology on society as a whole?

Convergence, c. 2008

In Part I of “Reload,” McPherson discusses the corporate “rhetoric of convergence” surrounding television and internet in the late ’90’s, when media execs proposed the idea of “lean back interactivity”: the Web user is presented with an array of options, just enough that he is sated by the illusion of empowerment, but not so many that he is overwhelmed or confused. But McPherson argues that “‘choice, ‘presence,’ ‘movement,’ ‘possibility’” are actually so native to “the forms of the Web” itself that redemption from corporate control is possible.

Today I happened upon Adobe’s promotional “Broadcast and Media Solutions” Web site for Flash. Apparently, “lean back interactivity” is obsolete. Welcome to “lean-forward.”

The “Next-generation TV” page begins with an alert to the shahs of broadcasting: “Your viewers are restless.” It seems that we are becoming more difficult to control, but, fear not, we can be appeased with “‘lean-forward interactive experiences” that can “take advertising and even existing content models – sitcoms, weather reports, news, dramas, documentaries, even commercials — and enhance or extend them.” Better yet, some lean-forward interfaces will “put the viewer in the story as an active participant” or cater to us “based on personal preference.” It seems that, sooner rather later, we will actually be able to “click and buy Jennifer Anniston’s sweater while watching an episode of Friends,” as McPherson scoffs. Except not Jennifer Anniston’s sweater – maybe Katherine Heigl’s lipstick. Or Tyra Banks’ earrings.

Adobe gives some interesting examples of its technology in action, one of which is HBOvoyeur.com, a new project by the television giant. HBOvoyeur is a multimedia brand/public artwork/Web site that situates us, the user, at a window in our New York City apartment with a pair of binoculars. We open the blinds and peer out into the not-quite-accurately-depicted city (some people at HBO have been reading their Manovich), choosing from any of five different NYC addresses. The image zooms toward our chosen destination and the walls of the buildings evaporate and we watch fictional narratives unfold as silent films. We peer, quite literally, “behind closed doors.” “See what people do when they think no one is watching,” HBO purrs, enticingly, in its publicity materials.

I watched the “W. 41st Street” narrative, a six-part episode (if episode is the right word) about a serial killer who always paints a portrait of his next victim and mails the painting to law enforcement. We can see into the killer’s apartment and the neighboring one, from which three (FBI?) agents are spying on him. (Spoiler alert!) At the story’s end, after having dispatched the spies, the killer turns his binoculars in our direction, presumably becoming aware that we have seen everything. He deserts his apartment, gun in hand, to get us. When the story ended, I discovered, to my surprise, that my nose was two inches from my computer screen. I was literally leaning forward.

It’s hard for me to hold anything against HBO, with its well-deserved reputation for unparalleled storytelling – apparently, the Sopranos team had something to do with HBOVoyeur. The site serves as a commentary on of-the-moment concerns surrounding the Internet, and a very thoughtful one at that. I plan to watch the rest of the stories in the future. But I imagine that pretty soon, we will find ourselves experiencing episodes of more, if not all, of our favorite TV shows in this hypertextual (hypervisual?) manner. Instead of tuning into ABC on our televisions each Thursday night for Grey’s Anatomy, we will go to ABC.com and be placed in a virtual Seattle Grace Hospital. We will navigate the halls and watch snippets of narrative in whatever order we please, buying as we go. Moreover, the possibilities for "lean-forward" experiences increase exponentially when we consider "reality TV." In the near future, we will enact our “volitional mobility” under the aegis of corporate media broadcasting itself. And remember, none of this is possible without the (proprietary) magic of Adobe® Flash® technology!

Conscious Control

This week has reminded me of a conversation I had with my older brother over winter break. We essentially discussed the illusion of control in our everyday lives (how we got to this topic off something as bland as who was going to make the salad for dinner, I do not remember) and how that relates to the internet and television. Television, not through texting or input, gives us the illusion of control by giving us something appropriately named “remote control.” Just the connotations that come to mind by using the word control in this sense brings questions to mind that do we actually control the media on TV or does it control us? I would argue that the TV controls us, but confuses us by giving us those limited number of choices of what to watch as many other people have already stated. Also, we always know in our minds that if we don’t find anything good on TV, we can just boycott it altogether and shut it off, yet why do we find ourselves channel surfing for long periods of time, not consciously thinking about what we are doing? In order to have complete autonomy, we need to train ourselves to be conscious and make conscious decisions about everything we are doing, only then will all outcomes and answers open up to us, for us to have complete control and autonomy over our desires.

Now when we take this kind of idea and apply it to computer games such as Doom and Myst, the two examples Manovich used in his article, it is interesting that I find Doom relinquishes the autonomy that Myst can give to the player. Doom eventually turns into the player reacting on quick instincts and thinking in order to get out, whereas Myst would embody the conscious decision-making process about all moves and puzzles better. In order to liberate ourselves, we need to become conscious and open up all possibilities instead of resigning to the false autonomy of the TV and internet.

"And what do you think we should do, MILDRED?" ---

In this semi-anonymous forum space, I'm going to be honest and admit that I had a hard time following Fuller's and Kittler's arguments. I did, however, enjoy Tara McPherson's essay on the Internet and television. 

Right off the bat, when McPherson discussed television execs' ideas to make TV more scintillating through "little snippets of interactivity to enhance the broadcast experience" I immediately thought of the scene in Ray Bradbury's famous novel "Fahrenheit 451." The broadcast network/the government because now it's all one entity, promotes a special programming event in which the characters in the show directly ask Mildred, the protagonist's wife, for her input on what they, the characters in the show, should do next. After the show ends, Guy (her husband) points out that the actors weren't actually asking Mildred specifically, but that the name Mildred had been inserted into the script, and the actors directed to address the line to the camera to make it seem like they were talking to her. 

We haven't quite reached this weird sci-fi junction yet, but as Julia and Gem pointed out, we are being seduced by little snippets of interactivity like text message or telephone voting that satisfy viewers' desire for control, or at least make the viewer FEEL that s/he is in control, when really, as Deleuze and Galloway argue, we're not liberated. We're just on a longer leash. 

Human Desire in Software

One point that came up in lecture this week was on how software keeps users from dealing with more complex problems so that the users only experiences signals from the complex noise of code. This concept that the producers of software think that there is a human desire for simplicity in technology is played out through the illusion of chocie and control within this limited system. Tara McPherson’s article “Reload: Livenes, Mobility, and the Web” brings forth the idea that human’s need a certain degree of hope of transformation in order to deal with our current existence within the digital age. Yet is she completely correct in saying that we, as users, need the internet’s illusion of transformation through the click, browsing or is this not necessary for a sense of current subjectivity? Have we been trained by software to have these desires or are they intrinsic to human nature? TO further complicate this McPherson talks about an older medium, television, that has previously trained us. McPherson is optimistic about technology activating human desire, but I cannot get past the programmers behind the software who make the decision to activate specific desires. This brings me back to the last point of section last week: where is there a space for resistance? Mathew Fuller in “It looks like you’re writing a letter” writes how word parasites, corrals and rides our desire for autonomous control. Here lies my question: if programs leech out our desire for autonomy through the illusion of control and choice, then how can an argument be made for these programs activating our actual human desires? 

No Station for Old Viewers

I'm not sure if I'm completely grasping McPherson's argument. I'm unclear if she is saying that the Internet is as restrictive as broadcast television. On page 202 she expounds on a quote from Bob Stam, stating, "If television, in the words of Bob Stam, obliges the telespectator 'to follow a predetermined sequence' exhibiting 'a certain syntagmatic orthodoxy,' the Web appears to break down the preordained sequencing of TV, allowing the user to fashion her own syntagmas, moving from link to link with a certain illusion of volition." It sounds as if she believes the 'freedom' that the user has on the Internet is stifled, and almost disappointing, and comparable to the 'freedom' a television viewer has. I think she fails to give credit to the amount of user generated content on the web - this whole idea of "Web 2.0", which provides the user with far more freedom than broadcast television ever could. Any teenager with a camera and some good (or bad) ideas can develop a fan base online. The medium of the Internet is far more 'free' than television because of the seemingly limitless number of channels (websites) from which one can broadcast.

She also hangs on the example of larger websites, such as MSNBC and AOL.com. On page 206 she states, "For instance, both MSNBC and AOL work as portal sites which make it hard to leave their confines, functioning as the kind of locked-in channel television executives have long dreamed about." She makes it sound like there is something about these websites that actually makes it more difficult to leave - to browse away from - which seems a little ridiculous. The attractiveness of the interface or content (I guess the interface is content) is what maintains users connectivity to their website. The quality of content is also what keeps viewers tuned in to certain stations at certain times. However, when a television viewer has 100 channels and nothing on, he will remain bored of that medium. When an Internet user feels as though he has exhausted all digital resources (which is sort of impossible...), he can always create and contribute. The 'liveness' of sites like MSNBC is also under scrutiny. While she may have a point in the case of MSNBC, I don't think she's rightfully attributing it to the Internet as a medium. It should be blamed on MSNBC's size as a media corporation. I think this "illusion" of "liveness" isn't an illusion in some cases. Aggregates of content (like digg, google/yahoo news and others) can link to breaking news stories released on many different sites, which are often local news sources who have the small size and agility to release stories more "live" than ever before.

The stigma of Internet "users" and television "viewers" is also an important one. McPherson may argue that the "users" of the Internet are, in fact, more passively "viewing" the content of the Internet with the illusion of activity. However, I believe that these "users" are far more active than their couch potato counterpart - far more active than McPherson seems to give credit.

Surfing Just Sounds Cooler

Along with choice and control, or lack thereof, when it comes to television and the internet, I think responsibility is another feeling that comes into play. When we’re sitting around vegging out, it doesn’t matter what we watch, or how many channels we flip through – we don’t have any real effect on what is going to be shown on television (gimmicky online polls and texting aside). You are responsible for nothing, and can just (try to) enjoy whatever you can find.

Online it's a totally different story. There is power in perceived anonymity, and people will read what you have to say. This can be dangerous (Megan Meier was mentioned earlier) or totally harmless depending on what you write, or who you choose to be. Even if you’re just an observer, reading news and looking around, there are still little electronic footprints made wherever you go, and these can always resurface. The internet ‘remembers’ where you’ve been, but TV doesn’t care.

I feel my last post was slightly incomplete.  I feel I should also bring up the fact that while the web is incorporating television, television is also incorporating weblike features with ondemand and tivo features that let you control when and how you watch whatever it is you are watching.  Even radio is evolving with the emergence of Sirius and other satellite radio companies.  Once again though radio stations now stream on the web, this has not somehow made regular radio obsolete.  In cars TVs and radios come standard, and granted their are cars with on board computers, but I have not yet seen one, so they must enjoy much less popularity.  I feel all these medias are evolving and while they are all becoming more similar, it may be quite some time before they merge entirely into one unified unit.

Do We Want Control?

Though agreeably the web does offer more control, there must be a reason why television is still in popular use. Sure, there are more and newer programs and that is an obvious factor, there is no loading time, (but there are commercials), and the image is usually bigger and clearer on television than on computer. These reasons aside, i believe there is a larger reason television still enjoys so much popularity. I believe people don't always want to be in control, they love the randomness and boundaries of having someone decide what is going to happen for them. People love roller coasters and other amusement park rides just for this reason, they have no control, they simply must relinquish their desire to control where they are going and let the ride move them as it (or its designer) will. Though in many situations people look for more control, I don't think it is a general rule that people like being in charge of every aspect of their own lives. We as a species I believe are entertained and intrigued by having to deal with the unexpected and even the routine things that are out of our control. There's something to be said for the absolute passivity of television, the going with whatever is on and just having to do absolutely nothing. No start-ups, no web searches, no loading, no clicking and typing, just power on and watch. 

I do realize the web offers a much more interactive and malleable format, that is to say you can watch exactly what you want to when you want to (for the most part), but due to this need for interactivity, i don't see programs on the web doing away with television within our life time. Maybe I'm just naive and disagreeable, but it seems to me that each medium has advantages and disadvantages, television didn't do away with radio, and I believe that the internet will never completely do away with television.   I won't say either is better, and I don't want to have to decide.

Perceived Control

When reading McPherson’s “Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” I thought about my own experiences with the television and with the web and compared them. Although she states, “this is not to imply . . . that the Web is indeed “better.” Rather, TV and the Web do reference each other,” (200) I definitely believe that the web is far more superior. I’m aware of the limitations of the web, but I believe that it gives the user what it wants – the feeling of choice and control (imaginary or not).
Not only does the web offer everything a television does (like “webisodes” on broadcasting websites like NBC, ABC, etc), but it also brings more to the table. One word to sum up why I think consumers like the web better than the television would be “control.” The words McPherson brings into her essay are “choice,” “presence,” “movement,” and “possibility," but I believe all four of those words can be categorized as CONTROL. TV doesn’t give that sense of control and creativity to the user: “with the Web, we feel we create the sequences rather than being programmed into them.”
The web is personalized. You make it what you want, you use it for what you want. You experience what you want from it. You feel like you can change things and maybe even make a difference. You’re in control of how certain websites look, what web browser you use, and what email site you use. Meanwhile, tou have control of accessing the information – you can access it on your own time and aren’t constrained by a TV schedule. Thus, you receive what McPherson calls “immediate gratification,” assuming you don’t have dial-up connection. Immediate gratification is possibly the most important difference between television and the web. People (consumers) want to feel like they are in control, and the web supplies us with that, even if it’s not actually there.
McPherson’s sensation called “volitional mobility,” also gives us a sense of control. People want to feel like they are changing or impacting something. While we can’t really make changes when we sit on our couch and watch TV, we can surely make changes on the Internet, giving our feedback and asking questions about a talk show. The cursor represents our movement and our presence on the screen; it almost symbolizes our connection to the machine; it reinforces our perceived control in cyberspace. Television can not supply the user with this sense of control. People lose themselves when watching the TV; on the Internet, you believe that you are part of a community, have your own identity and are aware of yourself.

Bravo, TV!

In the McPherson reading this week, I was particularly interested in the author’s discussion of causality and the internet. On page 202, she writes, “…unlike television which parades its presence before us, the Web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the movement.” As I read this passage, my roommate was watching a Project Runway rerun in the background, and one of its promotional clips advertised the possibility of text messaging a vote for your favorite designer. It occurred to me then that this principle (audience participation a la American Idol) is a television example of McPherson’s “volitional mobility.” When we choose a singer/designer/model that we would like to win and vote online or by phone, we are engaging with television in the same way that McPherson suggests we surf the Net. By clicking on a link, I am directing my browser to a new page, but I did not forge the path to this page; it was predetermined by the site’s author or constructor. Similarly, I don’t really think that my text message is going to decide the outcome of American Idol; I think that the network decides, and then allows me the illusion of participation. McPherson refers to this as the “experience of choice (or its illusion) within the constraints of Web space and Web time.” This would seem to imply to me that McPherson’s text is completing its cycle- our “passive” television-watching informed the development of internet interactivity, which is now transforming our engagement with television. I am reminded of Leyla Harrison, an X-Files fanfiction writer, whose 2001 death prompted X-Files writers to create a character in her name, based loosely on her fanfiction interests. The scope of “Web space” seems to be expanding as “Web time” collapses; our media seem to be vying for our attention and participation. This article also highlighted for me the extent to which Web browsing (and now, it seems, also TV-watching) has become a forum for individuals to be alone together. McPherson writes that “There’s a sense of presence with strangers,” and, indeed, our sensation of mutability and change derives from the fact that other people are constantly transforming cyberspace. Like “socializing” in a chatroom, texting the Bravo network or creating a body of fanfiction has become television’s response to Bob Stam’s diagnosis of TV as adhering to “a certain syntagmatic orthodoxy” of disconnectedness.

While reading the Deleuze article I become interested in the idea that with freedom comes added control and even new dangers. The whole idea of a transformation into a 'society of control' was very intriguing to me and something I'd never thought about before. It makes sense that it's a completely new kind of control: less about physical barriers and confinement. It's a control that exists all around us. People have brought up all kinds of examples. This bit from the Deleuze article grabbed my attention: "...in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could particpate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements." (Page 4) I was talking about this with a friend and he mentioned a pretty interesting article he'd come across in another class. It's about 'supervised injection sites', which are clinics set up in some cities in the U.S. and Canada with the goal of making injection drugs safer for drug users in the area. The article talks about how although these sites have valid goals and some positive results, there are many negative aspects too. It describes SISs as "one element of socio-spatial 'exclusion' of marginalised populations" and as "powerful surveillance and discipline sites." According to the article, these sites are used to push drug user populations away from certain areas of the city and make them less visible to the general public. It's an interesting example of something that initially looks like an added freedom and a positive change but is also about control in many ways.

Rhizome/Rhizomatic Network: Conflicting Ideologies

This week's reading called for this somewhat lengthy rumination.

Deleuze says that after WWII, society lost its disciplinary and sovereign property. That is, it ceased to enclose people for the specific goal of production as the power structures of the centralized and decentralized networks eroded. What Deleuze implies is the emergence of a distributed social network, a milieu “that propagates through rhythm, not rebirth” (Galloway 34). Sites of enclosure—schools, factories, familes—are in a relationship of crisis to this newly emergent global network, rhizomatic, anti-hierarchical and without a center, because they are in a process of transformation in order to suit it. However, there is a distinction to be made between the true rhizome as it is described by Deleuze and Guattari and what I will refer to as the “rhizomatic network” that society is now embedded in.

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has an anti-memory because it does not rely on an ontological representational model, and so it does not reproduce mimetically. This elicits the pertinent question: what is the agent that differentiates, that propagates differentiation, in the rhizome? Although it stands in opposition to reproduction, it still operates by ceaseless repetition—can repetition (and metonymy) be designated as its paradoxical origin?

While the rhizome has no clear sites of power, can’t these sites appear based on, say, simply the use of language to name and to designate (which stands in opposition to the rhizome’s anti-memory and which is vested in a human subjectivity that operates not on rhizomatic but on representational models)? Language as a “General” (Galloway 34) informant or site of meaning in this sense is counterpoised to the true rhizome. Language penetrates the rhizomatic network, on the other hand. And infiltrating and malevolent kind of power and meaning is bestowed upon the corporation, as Deleuze notes. The rhizomatic network still rests on an ontology (though it’s reformulated from that of the disciplinary and sovereign societies) and on a representational model. The network reproduces mimetically—the school, family, etc. is reformulated to be based on the values of the corporation.

The rhizomatic network seems like what would be an approximation of the true rhizome (because of it dispersion and decenteredness) had language and representation not marked it. Is it even possible to posit that this network, ideologically opposed to the rhizome, will one day become a rhizome? The network is a tightly coiled serpent, rich with meaning. A drastic shift in social consciousness, to say the least, would only begin to uncoil it.

Anyone could have written this post.

Galloway's explication of DNS really piqued my interest in the rest of his article. His initial description of DNS calls it the system "responsible for translating Internet addresses from names to numbers," hosted on "a single computer, called a name server," (47). From this, DNS sounds a lot like a centralized network, with input from the user travelling from the user's host server to DNS and back. If this is so (or even if I am misconstruing the way DNS works), what is the value of encapsulating centralized and decentralized systems within a rhizomatic whole?

On the subject of rhizome, and on page 47, Galloway shows the example of rhizome.org being interchangeable with its IP address: "rhizome.org <--> 206.252.131.211". Click on the IP link and tell me Galloway doesn't have a sense of humor.

Galloway

I thought it really very interesting when Galloway talks about protocol and how it affects the hierarchy and coding within the internet.

“The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, describes the DNS system as the ‘one centralized Achilles’ heel by which [the Web] can all be brought down or controlled.’
“If hypothetically some controlling authority wished to ban China from the Internet (e.g., during an outbreak of hostilities), they could do so very easily through a simple modification of the information contained in the root servers at the top of the inverted tree. Within twenty-four hours, China would vanish from the Internet.
“As DNS renegade and Name Space founder Paul Garrin writes: ‘With the stroke of a delete key, whole countries can be blacked out from the rest of the net. With the ‘.’ [root file] centralized, this is easily done…Control the ‘.’ And you control access.’”
(Galloway, page 10)

It’s fascinating that such a powerful community as the Internet has such a pivotal “Achilles’ heel” that leaves virtually any information vulnerable to a higher authority. How unbelievable is it that all information concerning an entire nation as large as China can be removed from the entire Internet in the space of a mere 24 hours. It’s also interesting to note the reason why such a thing is possible with Internet protocol.

“These regulations always operate at the level of coding…protocols are highly formal.”
(Galloway, page 7)

This formality of protocol at the base level of coding allows for such a simple deletion of something like a period. When reading this, I instantly thought of my experience trying to use the most current OurTunes. Yes, yes, yes. I know. It’s illegal, but I still use it. Anyway, with the Itunes 7 update, OurTunes became defunct and the programmers for OurTunes were predominantly college students who didn’t have the time to get around the update’s new rules. Finally, someone took up the cause and figured out how to download music from other people’s libraries, from what I believe is a sort of mirror program. Ecstatic to find a working OurTunes again, I immediately tried to get it to work. Unfortunately, this version is not quite as user-friendly as the older versions and I mistook the area where you designate how you want the files named for a search bar. Needless to say, my files downloaded as some pretty funky things. This is what is originally in the file name place: %R_%a-%t.%e-mpeg. When re-entering the information, I forgot to add the period after the “%t” and the files downloaded as corrupt files. No kidding, they file names weren’t formatted properly. Anyway, it really is unbelievable how something like a “.” can affect protocol and coding.

accessibility as usability

I believe that accessibility is the final aspect of usability, and that there should not be laws governing web accessibility. Those laws could hinder the cause of wider web accessibility rather than help it. The current minefield of (mis)information, rules and half-cocked legislation is frightening developers, and should not over-ride the platform for greater creative flexibility. Education and advocacy would be far more successful in the long-term than legislation. The web will become more accessible when users stop tolerating inaccessible sites. For example, look at the miserable attempt to curtail spam by law. These companies keep sending unsolicited email through every loophole they found, and that is only because there are people respond to it. Once they stop responding to these Emails, the spam business model will die out.

deleuze.

I thought it was interesting the way that Deleuze refered to Guattari's electronic card systems, that one would be able to leave one's apartment, etc etc., when I instead think of my electronic card (my Brown ID) as letting me in to places. I think maybe this has something to do with the way Deleuze is thinking, a lot about enclosure, being enclosed, and that the greatest horror of this system of the electronic card would be gettin trapped inside a place instead of being unable to get into it. Wouldn't you rather be some place than no place?

It got me thinking that I kinda wished Deleuze had gotten more into talking about exclusions in his essay. I found all of what he had to say extremely interesting, and I would just be curious to see what he would have to say about exclusion as opposed to enclosure.

Maybe we can say, this is one of the problems of modernity--exclusion. I don't know if I'm contradicting what Deleuze is saying or something, but it seems to me that exclusion is a new control, one of the new ways of enclosing people. We work all our lives for fears of exclusion, from like, you know, high school to making sure we're in the right economic class (I guess that's what Deleuze meant by "no longer man enclosed, but man in debt"?) Also people are getting more paranoid about security and personal safety, I feel like there's been a change in the way think about open public spaces. Even when we are in public spaces, we still tend to be held back by invisible forms of enclosing ourselves, by letting our fears, hold us back from openly interacting with other humans, even if they are strangers.

This kind of goes with a line in Deleuze that struck me the most, that the factory was a body that enclosed, but the corporation is a "spirit, a gas." I think that's really interesting, that we are being held back or enclosed or controlled nowadays less by physical constraints, the physical weights, the burdensome machinery of the factory, but rather by intangible, imaginary shackles. We work in offices now where the worst of our problems will probably have to do with a piece of paper, and yet it seems that there is something so much worse now about paperwork than the fatal dangers of heavy machinery.

The idea of the Internet as a source of control is a very interesting one. The classic example is that of searching Tiananmen Square on the Chinese version of google. Nothing related to the protests that occurred there will appear. Here is a comparison of google.com and google.cn that illustrates this http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-01-27-n42.html It is obvious that the Internet can be used for control, but the scope of the Internet’s control is limited. The Internet is not a utopia of freedom, but it is almost infinitely malleable when one knows the proper methods. Essentially, what I am referring to is hacking. Thought the Internet does not make all information relatively available to everyone it still holds the promise that all information can be accessed with a bit of intelligence and finesse. I’m certain that images of the Tiananmen Square protest have been uncovered on the Internet somewhere in China by someone. Every source of control will have its dissidents; the Internet especially.

            It’s this exact characteristic of the Internet that prompted my surprise at discovering that the Internet was essentially a military invention. Truthfully, I don’t know a great deal about hacking or the technical aspects of privacy on the Internet, but from what I have gathered it seems information is always vulnerable if the right minds are put to work finding it. Ultimately, this is true for all sources of information and communication, but the Internet seems to extend this ability to everyone. The promise of the Internet is not that of infinite freedom, but perhaps it could be that of infinite accessibility. 

convenience and effort

Prior to reading Galloway's article, I hadn't really thought much about the actual structure of the internet, so learning about protocol and the hierarchy of servers, etc. was rather illuminating. One of my first reactions to this reading was to reflect upon the ways in which I use the internet, apparently giving away my personal information a little too freely in buying things online and even with my e-mail. I realized however, that when I really think about it, the convenience factor of the activities through which this information is distributed weighs more for me than would the piece of mind I might achieve by avoiding them. I do this same sort of thing when I go to the grocery store or to the pharmacy. I have a Safeway Club card and a CVS card and I guess I don't really care if they are adding to their profile on me every time I buy anything, as long as I can save a few bucks in doing so. As Mr. Wingtips mentioned in his post, convenience and patience play a major role in our interactions with the internet, and of course in many other aspects of our everyday lives.

Similarly, if we are willing to put forth a little more effort, it isn't too hard to get around some of the controls and protocols set upon us. In a few sections of the article by Galloway and in several of the posts on this blog, I found hope that loopholes can be found within the systems that structure our lives and that we might still enter the back door even when the front has been locked. This also reminded me of finding one such loophole myself, in downloading music from iTunes. Even though some songs downloaded from the standard iTunes still have locks against sharing and editing, these can be bypassed by burning the songs to a cd and then importing the songs from the cd. So again, I suppose it comes down to a matter of weighing convenience and effort when using the internet and other technologies to do what we want to do. I think that most people who really want to do something will find a way to do it.

no one has ever written this post before

At one point in his book on protocol, Alexander Galloway takes a moment to impress upon the reader the importance of one particular protocol: DNS (Domain Name System). DNS is the distributed system that transforms the web addresses that we humans type into our web browsers into IP addresses, the four numbers that designate the physical location of the information requested. What impresses Galloway about this system is its scope. Every single web domain, regardless of content or place, has a number that DNS can retrieve for you. In his words, “it is the actual construction of a single, exhaustive index for all things. It is the encyclopedia of mankind...” (50)

But I believe that Galloway goes too far in his praise of DNS. He declares the protocol to be “the most heroic of human projects...DNS is not simply a translation language, it is language” (50). An impressive method of organizing information, yes. But DNS is not language. Language is more than just a table of one-to-one correspondences. If it was, human speech would be limited to a set of predetermined phrases. However, I can write a sentence that has never been written before (such as “the perplexed purple penguin drove John Bolton to the movie theater last night”) and any native English speakers will comprehend. This is because languages are infinitely productive. DNS, however impressive its vocabulary may be, is not.

Control Societies and Science Fiction

I was particularly stuck by Deleuze’s brief article on the topic of control societies, and how his conception of the future of society compares with the views of science fiction authors.

After reading the article, and gaining further understanding from Professor Chun’s lecture, I’m under the impression that the effects of a control society on major groups/networks within the society all follow a similar theme. Where in disciplinary societies there was threat of punishment as the measure of control over society, control societies do not even require threat. Rather, the control is in data, in knowledge of all aspects of society. In disciplinary societies, crime is deterred by the threat of punishment; in control societies, crime is prevented by all-seeing cameras, automatic alarms, automatically locking safes and cash registers, fingerprinting databases, and networks with data on all known criminals. In disciplinary societies, work is required by locking workers in factories and office buildings, and firing those that do not comply. In control societies, work is meant to be fun, and be a part on one’s life – something that never really ends. Everything you do is work; you keep up on recent articles by those in your profession; you eat breakfast lunch and dinner with coworkers (even in the office, like at Facebook); you spend free time with coworkers discussing work; you stress about work before you go to bed. In disciplinary societies, school is required by herding kids into schools and punishing truants. In control societies, school is much like work – it encompasses the entirety of your life. And the control is maintained by the people that it is meant to control, by instantly accessible data about how not attending school, or not becoming a CEO, will reduce your potential income tenfold, so you’ll never look like the famous people you always see on TV.

All of this is kind of a rewording of Deleuze’s article and Professor Chun’s lecture. I know. The thing that I find interesting about all of this – aside from the fact that control can, and will, be entirely maintained by the people who are being controlled – is that science fiction novels that focus on societal control don’t seem to picture the future as a control society, as in Deleuze’s vision.

The Matrix emphasizes apparent freedom masking control, with appears on the surface to be a control society, but is not. The apparent freedom is just that – apparent – and even those that free themselves are still only living in apparent freedom (this is referencing the latter two Matrices, that is, until Neo frees everyone. Sorry if I ruined the ending.)

Books like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and 1984 by George Orwell envision a world with complete control over people; though people may convince themselves that they are free or happy – and they may be happy – there is no freedom in these stories. Similarly, the laughably bad film Equilibrium envisions a world of complete control, with no real freedom. The comic-book-turned-film V for Vendetta also has this vision.

However, books that aren’t entirely concerned with the future of control often have better depictions of Deleuze’s control society. Neuromancer takes place in a world where there is a free flow of data and knowledge, where everyone if free but control is imposed. Snow Crash takes place in a similar world, as does another of Stevenson’s novels, Diamond Age. Margaret Atwood also pictures a world like this in the novel Oryx and Crake.

The really interesting thing about all of these novels is where the control society progresses from the present. All imagine a world where nations are no longer really sovereign, and where companies and corporations essentially rule their own nation-states. Work, school and punishment all converge in these nation-states; the company really is your life.

Protocol Education

Reading Galloway’s Protocol in conjunction with Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” gave me a framework with which to think about how systems of “enclosure” structure our lives.

One of my points of reference was my experience working at a primary school last spring as a teaching assistant in a kindergarten class. What struck me then was the relative absence (from a five-year-old’s mentality) of what I’ll call “cultural IQ” – the little cues and procedures that basically function to get us through the day. Looking back on this in the context of Galloway and Deleuze, I can understand the operation of a kindergarten classroom as, essentially, a way to teach children the protocols that will structure the rest of their academic lives and beyond.

For example, five-year-olds always forget to put their names on their work and must be constantly reminded to write their names on everything they do. Eventually, this “identification protocol” becomes completely intuitive. All activities are concluded with a “clean-up protocol,” and interactions involving adults are characterized by a forced politeness, etiquette. (Also, because the school was bilingual, the children had to learn when to speak in French and when in English, but obviously this isn’t generally the case.) This sort of protocological training underlies every aspect of a kindergarten classroom.

I hope this doesn’t sound facetious – perhaps it’s an extreme example, but I really do find it interesting that the learning of protocols seems to be so central to primary school education. In retrospect, I also realize that, though the children who were most adept at following protocols were the easiest to teach, those who refused to obey protocols – those who behaved spontaneously, without regard to the conventions of behavior – were the ones I liked best.

NETWORKS

It is obvious to me that there is a huge paradox between freedom and control with concern to networks. It seems that in order to gain more freedom, we must give up more information about ourselves. If this were expressed to an extreme, would that mean that total freedom also entails complete exposure? I can't decide whether this is a good or bad thing. Having all one's secrets and vulnerabilities out in the open seems dangerous, if not confining. But, just maybe, this is liberating in itself; that is, not having the burden of concealment. One could further examine the inverse of this statement. Is total privacy control? How can it be? If one never gives up their information, then what can society hold against them?

I'm also very interested in the concept of networks. One great example of networks in use includes programs allowing illegal downloading. BitTorrents, which use no centralized server to retrieve information, are nearly impossible to track down and stop, since every user is a seed towards the file (very similar to the rhizome), while programs like Kazaa and Napster, which used a centralized network, were easily ended. I think these examples strongly support Galloway's arguments.

Echelon

From Galloway's Introduction to Protocol:

"The process of converting domain names to IP addresses is called resolution. At the top of this tree are a handful of so-called "root" servers holding ultimate control...

There are just over a dozen root servers located around the world...

'With a stoke of the delete key, whole countries can be blacked out from the net. With the [root file] centralized, this is easily done... control the "." and you control access.'"


Scary, no? Although the global communications network is, in a way, decentralized, we now live in an era where control can be administered anytime, anywhere. The "monuments of power" which were once prevalent have been replaced with mysterious entities such as the FCC and NSA.

The concept that "freedom makes control possible" is very prevalent now. Bank transactions, personal information, pictures detailing who we know, where we live - are all laid out in a tangled, but still comprehensible network accessible to anyone with enough skill to decipher the code.

There exists a system whose existence has been acknowledged, but whose exact nature has yet to be determined (and, for the sake of security, likely never will). The ECHELON system is a "signals intelligence" gathering system spread out over several countries, including the United States. Ultimately, almost any form of communication can be intercepted - radio, cell phone, etc. - but the Internet, itself a wide-ranging electronic network, makes the job almost too easy.

Is this a little scary? Of course it is. How do I feel about it? Honestly, more apathetic than I should. The system has been attributed to a number of uses, from the grand purposes of stopping terrorists and drug dealers, to the seedy intentions of corporate espionage and data mining. Ultimately, the nature of power is dependent on the individuals in charge - the fingers grazing the so-called "delete" key.

Just a little something to think about.

society and control

I don't fully understand or agree with Deleuze's argument. She seems to dislike the direction that the world is moving because it is moving towards a more institutionalized, capitalistic society. A society that captures the young and teaches them that they must be competitive to be successful, if they want to make it to the top they must be better "trained" than the others. My issue lies with this idea that the factory workplace was more communal than the modern day corporation. In some aspects this may be true, but I have a hard time believing that it wasn't a competitive environment, with the majority working towards benefits of some form. The whole "imprisonment" by technology, how codes restrict us, how we are growing to dependent upon machines is also a point contention for me. What I feel Deleuze neglects to see is that computers and technology are freeing in many ways. Yes we may be dependent, but at the same time they make us more independent. They allow us to connect to any location in the world, communicate with anyone. I feel that there have been control mechanisms in nearly every society since the beginning of time. I can think of numerous societies that were more confining and controlling then most modern day societies. One point I do agree with Deleuze on is that peoples privacy is more easily invaded with technological advances. However that's the price that is paid for having the freedom of the world at your fingertips. The essay kind of seemed nostalgic in many ways to the early 20th century, when life seemed simpler. Life may be more complicated now, but the fact remains that in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century people rarely left their towns, and stayed in the same place their entire lives. Now we have the ability to experience the world, any destination is a few hours away. We certainly have broadened our horizons.

The cards in our pockets

In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze discusses the mechanisms of control in a control society. He refers to a city imagined by Felix Guattari, where an electronic card is used to grant access through various barriers. He notes that “the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position” (7). Writing in 1992, Deleuze makes this scenario sound futuristic. I don’t know what the technology was in 1992, but we certainly have such control systems today. Right here on campus, our Brown cards are used to grant access not only to physical places like dorms and dining halls, but also to services, like laundry. Wherever the master computer is, it can do more than decide what rooms we may enter and when. Regardless of whether the information is used or not, surely someone has access to data on where we go at particular times. Deleuze makes all this control sound scary, but I don’t think there is anything sinister about the Brown card program or similar systems. I admit that it gives one pause to think about how much a little sliver of plastic can do.

But computerized mechanisms of control have their weaknesses. In Neuromancer, Wintermute expresses frustration with the difficulty he has getting through traditional mechanical locks. This is not an afterthought; figuring out how to access mechanical systems is a major obstacle for Wintermute. Might it be that as computerized control systems like our Brown cards become increasingly common, non-computerized mechanisms will gain a new kind of strength?

Censorship, Protocol and Control (and Bill Gates)

Bill Gates was recently quoted in a speech given at Stanford University as saying: “I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet. You cannot control the Internet.”

Really Bill? The same article goes on to point out the blatant fallacies, conflicts of interest in that statement: “This seemed rather a curious thing for the Microsoft chief to say, considering that his company (along with Google, Yahoo, and others) has cooperated with China's censorship efforts. The entire Chinese Internet experience, in fact, raises questions about whether Gates' beautiful vision is true to the facts as we know them. Certainly the country is doing a pretty decent job of "controlling the Internet.”

As many of the posters have pointed out below, the internet is not simply the Utopian, boundless freedom that it (through the notion of cyberspace) is often posited as (Even in William Gibson’s version of cyberspace, Case is damage by his former employer in the “real world” for the grievances he carried out in the digital one). Through his discussion of DNS tree structure (one of the two main protocols which he claims make up the internet) Galloway highlights the very concerns which posters have raised below and which have populated much of the contemporary discourse on censorship. As Galloway quotes Tim Berners-Lee, DNS is “the one Achilles heel by which [the Web] can all be brought down or controlled.” This is going on right now, through the internal firewalling of China and the cooperation of American companies.

As Gilles Deleuze claims, “Control societies operate with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers.” In fact it might even be argued that beyond China trying to “control the internet,” the very nature of the internal is control. Users can be track, personal information can be mined or stolen, “criminals” can be found (Just ask any of the 12 Brown students who were sued by the RIAA for illegal music downloads).

That said Galloway’s work is of the utmost importance because it examines the fundamental structures of the internet. If we live in a control society, it is certainly an utterly complex one, one in which the power for protocol can empower the user with a sense of control while simultaneously enacting structures of control (and perhaps even discipline).

Omnisentience, or something like that?

I had been vaguely aware of the origins of the internet, but I never knew it got started so that American computing could survive nuclear attack on a centralized hub. It's an organic sort of evolution, spreading a sort of consciousness (functional autonomy, at least) throughout the system. The rhizome comparison is interesting, but I rather feel that this is an entirely new phenomenon--one that defies analogy in a fundamental sense. We have no conception of anything like a mass mind, or at least nothing I can think of--the best I can do is to point vaguely in between a rhizome and an anthill. But the internet is gradually becoming more and more inseparable from "the system," which, though only possible due to the advanced technology that holds it together (computers, satellites, telephones, etc) only exists as "the system" in our heads.

If we look at the military origins of the internet as an organic action, an inevitable movement towards self-protection and perpetuation--the internet as subject rather than object--its continued expansion into other areas of the system takes on an interesting form. Society requires stability, and the division into three kinds of social systems (sovereign, disciplinary, control) seems neat enough. "Control" as I read it refers to the integrity of the system--I'm all for raging against the machine and so forth, but I don't think there's anything inherently "wrong" with the way the new technologies and the new social order force us to be in the system at all times. We're not used to it, and it's reasonable to feel our acquired sense of privacy disturbed, but I can't see the concept of privacy lasting all that much longer (I mean, a century or two, sure)--in a way it seems counterproductive. The nature of the system is to keep track of all its parts, because as technology progresses that's all that's required to maintain its integrity--eventually we'll have global wi-fi coverage or something like it, and by then we'll all walk around with iPhone supercomputers or something like that, and then the system will be omnipresent. I'm thinking that if we don't all blow ourselves up, a sort of global consciousness is inevitable. We can only think about it as "control," as though we'd be herded around by a sort of cyborg overlord, but I think the concept would be much more complicated than that--it's been a long time coming, but I think this new technology will force society as a whole to reconsider what autonomy and the self really mean. It's all happening commercially, of course, and we're not going to have a technological utopia (at least not for quite a while), but I think the cowboys are done for--more Snow Crash than Neuromancer, I mean.

government censorship in the news

Over the past week there has been a lot of news of wikileaks.org, a website which anonymously collected released documents from 'whistleblowers' on governments and companies. After one bank sued the website, a judge ordered that the site be taken off the internet! This restriction of freedom of speech is interesting for many reasons:

Firstly, this sort of behavior is "unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes" (globalintegrity.org). This disregard for freedom of speech is surprising to see in the United States.

However, regardless of the fact that such behavior shouldn't occur in the United States, such restrictions are useless because they are completely ineffective! The judge ordered that the domain name wikileaks.org be taken down by the internet service provider which hosted it, but because there are a number of servers throughout the world where wikileaks is actually hosted, the site itself is still alive (and probably thriving due to all the media attention.) The domain name simply is a easily memorable address that you can type into your browser, but you can still access the site through other addresses and even a number of IP addresses. If you'd like to see the site, check out this list of mirrors at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#External_links

How does this relate to protocol and control? Due to the structure of the internet, the governmental policies which our government would like to enforce on the internet is impossible. Real control is in the protocol and the protocols being used (simply by convention) are not aligned with the governmental policy.

Ironically, such policy has the opposite effect. People only want to view restricted content more. I disagree with one of the below posts which argues that the annoyance of restrictions let the oppressors win. I think that people are more likely to want to see what they're not supposed to. I was a lot more likely to view and read wikileaks after I found out that our government tried to shut it down.

Control and the Internet

I found Professor Chun's opening of this week's lecture intriguing, about privacy and control on the internet with the article about Yahoo helping to “jail” a Chinese writer. Because the internet is a global entity basically, how can one country decide what should and should not be available through it? How do laws transfer over from one country to the next? The internet seems so free: information is perpetually being received and disbursed, lies perpetually told, truths found out, facades created. It's hard to imagine any group actually being able to confine and control the internet unless they have control over every server in the world. In a way, the internet is like the media. It can be squashed down and censored but there will always be small subsets that will rebel, that will go underground, defying the rules. Information, if important enough, will always eventually leak out.

Panopticawesome.

The idea of moving from a sovereign to a disciplinary society being analogous to the dispersal of control from a vertical hierarchy to a horizontal system as described by Galloway got me thinking about the Panopticon even before he mentioned it himself. The Panopticon (as I will begin to freely lift information from the wikipedia article at random) was a prison surveillance cell system that bordered on the psychotic paranoia inducing.



This idea is appealing to Galloway who would defend against critics of the system who cite issues of privacy and notions of Big Brother. These same arguments come up against the very nature of networks and the internet, and Galloway shuts the protest down from the get-go: the co-dependency of each user and each machine on a network is not a vulnerability that can be exploited or avoided, but is rather a necessary, fundamental aspect of the entire system. By logging in and accessing information we are knowingly or not volunteering information in our ‘possession’ and about ourselves. It is an opt-in system in which everyone clicks yes on the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Agreements that the majority of people probably never bother to read. The result is “a balanced state of a universal ‘participatory panopticon’ in which there is an equiveillance, or equilibrium of monitoring and control structures between parties.”

So are people who uphold strict firewalls stingy? Are they ruining the internet? How about people who run wireless networks but are careful enough to not allow leechers. What about people on p2p networks or torrent clients who set their upload bandwidth to zero? Some (in fact, most good) torrent clients have introduced a necessary ratio requirement, in which one must allow other users to upload as much data as one has downloaded. On less strict p2p networks, other users can notice that someone is not willing to share and cancel their downloads (or make them tortuously slow.) Sounds like equiveillance to me. (Does this make the internet a democracy? Anarchy? I have no idea.)

Self-censorship & control

In an article in The Atlantic for March 2008, James Fallows outlines the ways the Golden Shield Project, or China's Great Firewall, can stop citizens from viewing certain Web sites. He also points out how easy it is to go around the blockages using virtual private networks and proxies. But he concludes that, even if the wall is easy to get around, it's still effective because it's just annoying enough to prevent most people from trying.

I guess that's one thing that frequently gets lost in discussions of how powerful the Internet makes individuals: it's empowering, but still requires people to take inconvenient actions. Galloway writes that Internet "protocols are the enemy of bureaucracy, of rigid hierarchy, and of centralization." The Golden Shield's fecklessness would seem to support that. But how many times have I chosen not to read an article simply because it was loading too slowly? How often can I bear to watch a video over 60 seconds long? Since the Internet's very nature makes it impossible to control, maybe we should worry less about government censorship and more about self-censorship.

"never finished"

This week, I found myself intrigued by Gilles Deleuze's point that “in the societies of control one is never finished with anything”. The idea of never being finished with anything can almost seem frightening at first. I am accustomed to the idea that I am supposed to finish things and that eveything comes to some sort of end, yet here is this idea that we are never finished with anything. I tend to think of being finished with or finishing something as a positive state – finishing my work, high school, an assignment. To me, being finished with something indicated a certain level of satisfaction or accomplishment. But with never being finished with anything comes embracing change or “deformations”. Rather than a segregation into different defined parts, there is coexistence and continuous change and modulation. I think that this idea of things continuing and changing all the time, this “continuous variation”, is what appealed to me in the distinction between societies of control and disciplinary societies.

Protocols . . . just aren't.

Alex Galloway seems to be dealing with an idealized model of how protocols on the web actually end up working. His book wants to elevate the term "protocol" to something like the Foucaultian "discourse" — a big brush to paint broad strokes with. He looks to the decentralized nature of control as evidence that the protocol is democratically formed.

But wait a minute, doesn't that argument work even better for governments (even repressive, authoritarian ones)? The rules are decentralized, spread out through every police officer in every precinct, and every judge in every courtroom across the country. To participate in the events and offices of the government, you must abide by the rules, imposing the control upon yourself. At least in a democracy, the people who make the laws are elected by popular vote. In the monopoly of the web, the W3C makes the rules, and Microsoft is free to embrace them or reject them as it sees fit. If Microsoft chooses not to implement a portion of the protocol, then that portion is effectively dead in the water. Where's my voice in that conversation? I didn't vote for Bill Gates to decide the future of the web, and I don't believe that my passive use of his technologies is really influential on his decisions.

Tragedy of the Internet?

I think what was most interesting this week was censorship and the Internet; in the fact that it is essentially it’s own sovereign “state,” so to say. It is global, so there are no governing factors, such as the U.S. or China. Internet politics and International environmental politics are very similar. If you have read Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” then you know that the environment is a commons, as is the Internet, and the conflict over those aforementioned common ‘goods.’ This is the same as the Internet. However, sometimes laws are tried to be passed in certain aspects of environmental or internet politics, but they do not matter unless there is no veto from opposing forces.

"Tragedy of the Commons" - Garrett Hardin
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243

Failure in a Society of Control

Reading Deleuze the idea of failure in the society of control kept coming to mind. As in where is there a place for failure, or is there a place for failure in a society of control? The concept that one is never finished with work is rather unnerving in this sense because it is double-edged sword. The fact that one may never be finished is freeing and at the same time work has a deadline and an unfinished work is judged as a failure. Therefore, no work can ever be exceptional or definitive. The concept that work is never over implies an infinitely high level of expectation on any work done by an individual and a great deal of stress for any individual. This new power of control is short-term and rapid, but it appears to be able to leave long-lasting effects on an individual. In a society where man is always in debt, guilt becomes a powerful force. Yet the allowance of a continuous and limitless work opens a free space for the individual to work within. However, I wonder how forgetting comes into play here. Is forgetting a means to surviving this overwhelmingly free space of work? Is the deletion of duplicate song files in Itunes not a therapeutic act to counter this anxiety? Does this control not inhibit creativity, as much (if not more) as it allows it?

What do facebook, derrida, and hipsters have in common?

In light of the way the internet is being used today, and the pop culture I see played out right here on Brown's campus, I find this new society of control that Deleuze and Galloway talk about fascinating. I also find it hilarious.

One of the main principles of the society of control is voluntary participation in the protocol, because, as Galloway says, "to follow protocol means that everything possible within that protocol is already at one's fingertips. Not to follow means no possibility." Facebook has already been talked about in relation to previous readings, but I think this social network is an amazing example of this society of control. During college, one doesn't have to make a facebook account. But with invitations being sent out via the network, pictures being posted, addresses being found, and connections being made every and any hour of the day, there are actual implications that affect one's social life should you choose not to participate in this protocol set.

So, here we are, willingly overexposing ourselves. We put a glut of information out for anyone to see (and even if privacy settings are implemented, I'm sure there are plenty of ways around them.) We are allowing our lives to be monitored by anyone who wishes to find out about our movements. It's actually quite chilling to think of how easily someone could track me down based on what is up on that site if s/he wanted to.

Another facet of the society of control, Galloway argues, is that "it is through protocol that one must guide one's efforts, not against it." This statement brings to mind the bricoleur Jaques Derrida talks about in Discourse and Difference who uses the tools available to deconstruct or analyze society. I was surprised neither of the authors mentioned Derrida in their work. Anyway, I see this idea of embracing the protocol to combat control playing out in my own generation's embrace of kitsch, irony, and recycled pop culture in our dress, manner, and activities. Hipsters are too good an example to pass up. One of the better entries on Wikipedia is on The Hipster, and crystallizes all these ideas and practices into one fantastic explanation of this burgeoning "counter" cultural movement.

That's all for now- I have to go put on my skinny jeans, update my facebook profile, download some illegal indie music off livejournal, and participate in the protocol some more.

society/machine connection

My mistake forgetting to post on time - anyway:

Galloway quotes Negri as saying "each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine - with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to diciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies."

This implies that the function of our machines is inherently tied to the function of our societies. I think this relationship is reactionary - a society can evolve to another 'period' only if it can widely recognize and incorporate a new way, a new method, of interaction within that society. Machines have a peculiar set of characteristics that perfectly situate them for this kind of societal recognition: 1) they are ubiquitous, man relies on machine and thus is always in contact 2) the creating, operating, and developing of machines requires the operator to think on the machine's terms, and to think beyond those terms.

So, if the machine world shifts to a new paradigm, society becomes constantly in contact with and mentally connected with that new paradigm, and that society quickly (consciously or unconsciously) becomes aware of and incorporates that paradigm to the functioning of society.

as usual, its more of a spectrum

Deleuze seems to frame a trend of the augmentation of the basic unit for social and life grouping as a negative. He thinks that we will move to a society in which even larger entities that understand even less will regulate our life experience. Humans, as ants, will now have to report back to an even larger, more all encompassing hive, as opposed to the more localized colonies we would have been a part of in “discipline based society.” However, the implications of this broadening of the major societal groups are not all negative. While it is scary to imagine a world like the one imagined by Guattari in which our access would be constantly controlled by remote electronic processes, these are unlikely results of a culture which demands more and more to choose its own interface to reality. The ability to personalize is more and more available with digital technology, and how we are governed by so called “controlling” bodies will also fall into this mold of personalization.

As to the idea that control would come to replace “interior” spaces such as the family and workplace, it seems that what is really occurring is more of a shift in the focus of our positions in the planet. While before we might have seen ourselves more as a part of a work group, etc. we can now much more clearly (with the internet, etc.) visualize ourselves as members of a much larger entity. The desire to be involved in mid-sized groups like schools, prisons, etc. will not disappear, we will just have the option to focus on our identity in the context in which we most desire to. Maybe with new weapons we can even become kings of our own colonies.

Invisible Cage (like the Matrix)

How free are we living in such a society? While we are giving the illusion of freedom, there seems to be an invisible structure around us, locking us and limiting us in somehow. We all believe that we are given free will, the ability to choose and think for ourselves, but then we become consumers and then we become puppets for the corporations. Corporations become invisible handlers of us, considering that we become so dependent on such corporations such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and many others. I’m sure the internet appears to be a great tool, yes it indeed proves useful; information at your fingertips. The internet is also a great tool for the corporation to have control over the information we think we have free access to. It’s slightly startling to know that corporations such as Google have access to our information. While we have access to free information through the internet, they use the same tool to learn private information about us. They’ve flipped the switch on us, and now, instead of us using technology, the corporations are using technology to use us. Not only to their free access to our information, but also through our dependency on the machine. The corporations have become transparent in their control. At least the actions of the educational system and the armed services are visible to us, while we remain ignorant and unaware of the actions taken by the other corporations. As Nick Castillo mentioned the matrix, I’d have to agree with the relation of the corporations to the matrix. When the control is invisible and when we’re ignorant it’s much more difficult to escape such a grasp.

illusion of continuity?

To generalize, one of Galloway’s main themes is the protocol of continuity. From pages 64 – 69 he lists the techniques that the Internet uses to “create a pleasurable, fluid experience for the user.” (64) This idea seems similar to a lot of other theorists we’ve read who talk about the transparency of interface and its pleasurable illusion of causality in HCI. I wonder however, how this pleasurable continuity fits in with the digital (separated, discontinuous) aspect of the Internet. Galloway gives a good example of this with the technique of “prohibition against low resolution” on page 67. This technique basically exists to produce a whole, continuous picture, concealing the digitized pixels that actually make up the image. It seems also that the “objects” which Galloway defines as the form of the internet are also digitized: “pure positives…heterogeneous elements…radically independent from context…” (74). He continues to say that “different objects are understood as such due to their irreconcilability, their separation within a machinic process.” I am interested and would like to discuss in section if or if not Galloway’s argument reconciles the discontinuity/continuity of form and protocol. Is continuity simply an illusion (like causality) that exists solely for the pleasure/ease of the user, and which masks the true discontinuous and digital form of computers?

In a way this reminds me of a lecture a few weeks ago (Feb. 4) where P. Chun spoke about the desire for historical continuity in Vannevar Bush’s essay—his assumption that historical gaps or discontinuities were accidental and should be avoided by developing memory-aiding technology such as the memex. I don’t think it is accidental that this has come up again—perhaps computers and the Internet have fulfilled with their protocol some sort of natural (or cultural?) desire for continuity of actions and thoughts.

As an end note, Deleuze writes on p 6-7 that “the disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.” It would be interesting in section to talk about how continuity fits in to Deleuze’s societies of control. How does this connect to Galloway’s idea of continuity of protocol (or perhaps the illusion of it) and the internet?

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy.”

It seems like a lot of us were a little intrigued by Deleuze’s article. When I was going through it, it was forced to dwell on the idea that the Internet, no matter how expansive and liberating it can be, is still a very potential form of control in society, varying degrees of control of course. The Internet is very much a form of real estate, where money can be made, it only depends on who’s willing to utilize it. I’m not sure if Julia meant this when she posted, but Google really is a corporation with a corporate mindset. I’m not trying to say that all of the Internet is just a front for money to be made at the expense of those trafficking websites, blogs, and the like, just that like every other form of media we have in our lives, there’s some way to turn it against itself. There’s a lot to be learned from the Internet, but there is also a lot of hidden dangers that you can inadvertently stumble into if you aren’t used to navigating through the whole mess. Does anyone else see the web as an enclosure? Also, did anyone end up going to www.superbad.com after reading Galloway?

I just.. don't get it.

Maybe I am just too inexperienced in theory or deluded from living in our little university bubble, but I was confused and taken aback by Deleuze’s claims about the future of family, schools, and hospitals. At the end of the Historical section, he states, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” after giving an example of the crisis of hospitals. Is he saying for the general population to look for new ways to arm themselves against the future corporations, or to look for the new weapons of the corporations?

I’m still unsure about what a ‘society of control’ means. If an example of moving towards such a society of corporations is the creation of a nationwide health information network, then in that one aspect it seems to be a more productive means of helping those who need it (the sick, injured, pregnant, etc...). In this way, lumping every ‘dividual’s’ personal medical history together in one ‘bank ‘ would lead to safer and faster treatment and more efficient hospitals. And that will be good, right?

Re: Don't be evil

After reading your post, Andrew M., something became clear to me about Deleuze, CODeDOC, and Pold/our discussions of interface. I think that what frightens Deleuze about a company’s “soul” is, at least in part, the seductiveness of an interface that seems to be tailored to the individual. At first I couldn’t understand why Deleuze would wax nostalgic for the days of factory-like impersonality, until I began to think about Google. Perhaps Deleuze recognizes a trend in “society” that we have been examining in new media: when the interface of a set of code is sufficiently fluid, we forget that we are not controlling the essence of the code itself, but just the manifestation of that code at work. In an operating system, I am not opening a folder when I double click an icon- the code is opening that folder. Perhaps even more perversely: when I “friend” someone on facebook, I’m not making a friend- I’m sending out chunks of code. As is evidenced by our means of referring to our interface actions, however (I opened the folder, I friended her on facebook), we as a society are not actively differentiating between interactions with interface and interpersonal actions. The good news for Deleuze, though, is as you say: our gut tells us something about interfaces in society that we don’t perceive as quickly in cyberspace. When Google tells us “Don’t be evil,” the first thing we do is become suspicious. We know how multinational companies work, and we know about their primary interests. Google is not an inherently “moral” company- it’s a corporation. We also know that Google didn’t tailor our homepage to our specifications out of concern for our interests- they wrote some code that allowed us to choose which things we have highlighted. The fact that we know this instinctively, though, speaks to the difference between a company’s “interface” and an OS’s. Perhaps we are more gullible online, but that is not a prescription for our non-digital lives. Furthermore, our digital lives, it seems, are becoming increasingly transparent. I loved the CODeDOC display. I loved it that I had to scroll through (and even read!) the code before I could see the interface, and I loved it that one theme could elicit so many different kinds of code writing, linguistic creations and interfaces. If huge corporations are transparent to us, and digital art is becoming more and more transparent, then I think we might be out of hot water.

Re: Don't be evil

After reading your post, Andrew M., something became clear to me about Deleuze, CODeDOC, and Pold/our discussions of interface. I think that what frightens Deleuze about a company’s “soul” is, at least in part, the seductiveness of an interface that seems to be tailored to the individual. At first I couldn’t understand why Deleuze would wax nostalgic for the days of factory-like impersonality, until I began to think about Google. Perhaps Deleuze recognizes a trend in “society” that we have been examining in new media: when the interface of a set of code is sufficiently fluid, we forget that we are not controlling the essence of the code itself, but just the manifestation of that code at work. In an operating system, I am not opening a folder when I double click an icon- the code is opening that folder. Perhaps even more perversely: when I “friend” someone on facebook, I’m not making a friend- I’m sending out chunks of code. As is evidenced by our means of referring to our interface actions, however (I opened the folder, I friended her on facebook), we as a society are not actively differentiating between interactions with interface and interpersonal actions. The good news for Deleuze, though, is as you say: our gut tells us something about interfaces in society that we don’t perceive as quickly in cyberspace. When Google tells us “Don’t be evil,” the first thing we do is become suspicious. We know how multinational companies work, and we know about their primary interests. Google is not an inherently “moral” company- it’s a corporation. We also know that Google didn’t tailor our homepage to our specifications out of concern for our interests- they wrote some code that allowed us to choose which things we have highlighted. The fact that we know this instinctively, though, speaks to the difference between a company’s “interface” and an OS’s. Perhaps we are more gullible online, but that is not a prescription for our non-digital lives. Furthermore, our digital lives, it seems, are becoming increasingly transparent. I loved the CODeDOC display. I loved it that I had to scroll through (and even read!) the code before I could see the interface, and I loved it that one theme could elicit so many different kinds of code writing, linguistic creations and interfaces. If huge corporations are transparent to us, and digital art is becoming more and more transparent, then I think we might be out of hot water.

Don't be evil.

Reading and rereading Deleuze left me in quite the state of confusion. I wasn't sure if he was in favor of his observed societal changes, or warning the motivated "young people" to question that which they study and pursue. Or perhaps his warning isn't a judgement of the direction modern society is heading, just an observation of inevitable changes; maybe he's merely stating 'it is what it is'.

One such change is mentioned in the first paragraph of the third section, labeled Program.   The society imagined by Felix Guattari with the control element of absolute location is almost here. Anytime digital information is used - credit card, cell phone, wireless internet - the user's position can be tracked. The idea of the 'barrier' in Guattari's exercise is the fundamental difference. Our society doesn't have this (I'm assuming physical) barrier between "one's apartment, one's street, (and) one's neighborhood". This would more likely follow the model the reformed prison system, which is described as using electronic collars to limit the convict's location. What our society does have, however, is "what counts" according to Deleuze. "What counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position - licit or illicit - and effects a universal modulation" (Deleuze 7).   This new 'barrier' is a reinterpretation of our privacy. That, I believe, is one of the fundamental differences between this generation and the previous - the notion of privacy. Our willingness to sacrifice our privacy is exemplified by the ease with which we type in our credit card, social security and phone numbers to an online form. We keep journals analogous to private diaries that are made accessible to anyone with an internet connection. We even readily post our likes, dislikes, photos, videos, scholarly publications, code etc. We openly communicate and collaborate with strangers via the internet and yet we are much more hesitant to do so in real life than the previous generation. Google Maps have captured candid shots of people's (and people on) private property - and only a few are calling out against this new sharing of information. We, for the most part, embrace (or accept) this new system of control - we can take advantage of it, manipulate it, and even control it to a certain degree. The conveniences and benefits of this digital system will more often outweigh its negative effects on privacy for the younger generation because the younger generation has redefined the idea of privacy. Furthermore, the idea of ownership and copyright will also have to be redefined, as the video "The Machine is Us/ing" implies.

Another reaction I had when reading was the idea of a corporation having a soul, and this being "the most terrifying news in the world", and how it relates to contemporary corporations. One relevant example is Google, whose motto is "Don't be evil." Although this is a sort of dig at competing tech companies, who have been put on trial for being evil, this motto is also a reminder of what Google is capable of. They could most certainly "be evil" with all the information they've catalogued - all the searches saved and websites crawled. And yet, with their infinite source of fodder, my gut is telling me to trust them. 

Evolving technology

I found it very intriguing how Deleuze defined and compared the relationship of different social phases and their native technologies. Control societies are associated with computers and high tech machines. A lot of people are so afraid and/or threatened by the power of the computer and internet (although I agree with Galloway and believe that the internet is controlled and centralized), but I believe that as we change and adapt to the settings of our society (economy, culture, and politics) so do our machines and computers. When we evolve, so does our technology.

Deleuze stated on page 6: "It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts." This reminds me of what Manovich wrote about the media artist in Generation Flash. The media artist uses samples to assemble parts, just like the markets that Deleuze refers to. It's still unclear to me whether or not Manovich dislikes these media artists.

Regarding Galloway's introduction to his book on page 24, what is the difference between "vertical corporation" and "horizontal meshwork?" I don't understand what that has to do with the internet and protocol.

A New Era? Probably Not

In spite of Gilles Deleuze's insistance that our society is at a turning point emerging from its days as a disciplinary society to a society of control, I still remain skeptical. It seems to me that for my entire life, humans have been at the forefront of some great era just on the verge of a brand new society. Granted things are changing a lot more quickly than at other times, but are the changes occurring now really the start of some radically new form of society? It's easy to look back and give a name to an era, and it's not so hard to imagine an era of the future either. On the other hand I think it's quite difficult to pinpoint the present into an era, but when historians right the books of the future I doubt there will be some great distinction between now and the next couple years. Though I'll probably end up eating these words, many changes occur more slowly than those looking ahead into the future would predict.
Another interest point I found in the article was how he described corporations having "a soul" as the most terrifying thing. I wasn't exactly sure what was meant by this or why it would be so horrible. While some of the situations of corporate control of everything (realized in Snow Crash) can be quite frightening I think this article does a little more fear-mongering than truly necessary. Predictions of the future tend to take trends a little to far, and underestimate the backlash to certain patterns (like corporate ownership of more aspects of life).

A few days

The trouble with wild, abstract theorizing about life and art is that one tends to feel silly in retrospect. This is a problem with a lot of pop postmodernism—I heart Huckabee’s makes fun of that sort of thing, in a friendly way. But it must be said that it’s a lot of fun, though often incoherent.

The notion of code presents the opportunity to reach new heights of speculation. Theory, up to a point, allows us to assign a “real” ontological value to signifying constructs like those expressed in code, even though they may not exist in our physical reality—or rather it devalues physical reality up to a point, so that “reality” is an adjustable term, because all terms are adjustable. The term “code,” for example, refers in computing (to drastically oversimplify something I probably don’t understand very well—I just took some Q-basic and MS-DOS in middle school, and I’ve forgotten that quite efficiently) to a sequence of distinct values employed by the machine to transform a given input into a desired output. Anyway, let’s say that within the bounds of this blog post, that’s basically what code does. Nothing happens without a motive force coming in at some point, whether it be fingers on a keyboard/mouse or dropping a coin to make a Rube Goldberg machine start working. These can both be interpreted in light of code—a keyboard applies to computer code, obviously, but can’t Nature’s less obvious functioning be interpreted in terms of code as well? With a given START position of “above the ground” a piece of rubber, which is a reasonably definite term, will fall UNLESS it’s a balloon filled with helium, or some similar inanity.

That example was pretty bad, but if we accept that anything can be interpreted in light of code, human existence takes on an interestingly malleable form. We are, after all, walking processors—receiving floods of information, picking through it, and responding, based on both built-in and modifiable code. Saussure and his ilk proposed a world that was entirely made of language, as far as it affects us—but that’s an insufficiently complex view. It’s also made out of funny things like cells and organs. If we maintain, however, that the I is fundamentally separated from the “real” world by our physical existence—that is, that the construction of consciousness can only encounter reality through a mediating interface—we can wonder whether the code of the flesh could be unlocked, and every nerve impulse understood in relation to the whole machine. Whether the interface could be upgraded, or modified. Human language is a kind of interface, and it’s all we can use to understand our bodies—God’s interface, to put it one way. Computers are amazing because they’re the most complicated code we have consciously come up with. Now we can propose that there is a code of reality, and a code of language subordinate to it (which is the one we think in), and now a code of computers, the most complex code entirely subordinate to language. Doesn’t it seem like there would be significant correlation? I try to talk about these things and sound schizophrenic.

Two weeks, give or take

While reading Bush's and Nelson's respective works about the future of information technology, I was first struck by the amazingly prescient (particularly in the case of the former) nature of the texts, and second by the extent to which we have integrated ourselves with machines since the time of these writings. Bush seems to be more of a theorist, while Nelson is almost too interested in the technical details that would enable his operating systems (so to speak--although I suppose those are the people who wind up creating the machines in the end), but they're both limited from our perspective by their overreliance on the physical existence of information--Bush wants to use tiny cards or something, and Nelson's ideas suffer from a blocky sort of outdatedness. On page 1 of “A File Structure...” Nelson acknowledges that the interface of a computer functions as a “multifarious, polymorphic, many-dimensional, infinite blackboard,” but on page 93 he notes specifically “it is the man’s job to draw the connections, not the machines,” as a curiously irrelevant aside. He continues “The machine is a repository, not a judge.” Nelson is to some extent (how much I don’t know) a tech guy, so it’s only natural that he sticks with the behind-the-scenes view of computing for the majority of the essay. Indeed, at the time it was written there really wasn’t much else to the science. It seems, however, that if the computer functions in everyday life as a sort of magic blackboard, it hardly matters who has “[drawn] the connections.”

Information has come a long way since it was a series of cards (now it’s tubes), today it has a sort of liquid existence in the minds of those who manipulate it on the internet—which in turn has become a machine that fulfills all the functions Bush and Nelson ascribed to the computers of the future, likely more powerful than they could have imagined. Nelson ends his essay with a bit of restrained philosophical speculation, aware that the computer is in an important way a human model of the divine machine that is the brain, and Bush anticipates direct interface between the brain and machines. I think perhaps information technology is describing an asymptote approaching the impossible limit of the mind—as time goes on, the line between information in our minds and in our computers will become invisible or close to it, and then computers really will extend the true reach of our thought. That would be pretty cool, anyway.

restriction in interfaces

Our physical senses make up an extremely complex system that lets us interact with the world, taking in and interpreting vibrations in the air, light, etc. Any digital interface is an attempt to extend this natural one so that we can take in other types of data and interact with new environments in new ways. Digital interfaces, however, don't only extend our capabilities, but also restrict what we can do in a given environment. They often focus on a certain goal or aspect of our perception. They let us feel like we're moving through a space or controlling a sound, for example. They are more specialized then the senses we use to get around the world and this is part of the reason they are restricted. While reading Soren Pold's article I became interested in this idea of the restriction that comes with any interface and how it affects the experience of interactivity. Pold talks about how the game Max Payne "does not aim to fulfill the notions of interactivity," as players simply follow "a plot that is static, in the past tense, linear, and prescripted." While the progression of the game is clearly pretty limited (which is emphasized by the fact that you start at the end of the story and then work your way back up to that point), I feel it's still interactive and that this kind of interaction can be meaningful and fulfilling. There are restrictions built into the interaction, but this seems impossible to avoid. As S.E. Chaloner pointed out in his post this week, any interface will have boundaries.

However, these boundaries don't need to deny interactivity or freedom to participate. One article I read for another class explains this well. In this article, David Rokeby writes about the experience of certain interactive video pieces: "There is no question that people are given a tangible and 'empowering' experience of creativity from an interaction of this sort. This is preciesely because the medium is 'restricted'. Presenting a limited range of possibilities reduces the likelihood that the interactor will run up against a creative block, and allows the medium to guide the inexperienced hand of the interactor, reducing the fear of incompetence." (Transforming Mirrors, page 8) It's an interesting idea that the restriction is what frees people to interact in new ways. This is true for many examples of digital interfaces, from video games like Max Payne to interactive art work like the video painting pieces I mentioned in my last blog post. By definining what the participant can do (such as carry out a predetermined plot or make colored brushstrokes on a screen), these interfaces push the user to fully explore the possibilities of the system.

Disagreement with Hayle

I was very frustrated with Hayle's “Speech, Writing, and Code". While I think that he raises and discusses interesting issues regarding the intersection of long existing forms of communication such as speech and writing with the more recent development of programming, I think he stretches his idea too far and glosses over important details for the convenience of his argument.

For example, on page 54, Hayle writes that "dynamics of concealing and revealing come into play through rollovers and the like, re-creating on the screen dynamics that both depend on and reflect the 'tower of languages' essential to code." Internet roll-overs are hardly comparable to the notion of code concealment that Hayle refers to earlier. Additionally, she says that the more that such 'concealment' occurs, the more "plausible it makes the view that the universe generates reality through a similar hierarchical structure of correlated levels ceaselessly and forever processing code." This is troublesome because Hayle takes a great liberty in her usage of the word 'layer'. The 'layers' of which that consist of real, executable code aren't as many as she makes it seem, and her big idea about the universe generating reality through similar structures is incredibly vague and weak.

I do agree with some of the conclusions that she draws, notably that code will not replace speech and/or writing and that they will all co-exist. However, I feel like this conclusion was obvious and her analysis was convoluted and unnecessary. I suppose I just don't understand why she considers speech/writing comparable to coding as a trans-human channel of communication.

One relevant discussion question which stems from Hayle's discussion of programming language theory and evolution towards the end of the paper is, to what degree does the programming language limit human understanding of how the machine can operate? Humans must create programming languages in the first place, but different programming languages require completely different modes of thinking (consider functional programming in languages like Scheme to object-oriented programming in languages like Java. The concept of a )

Sorry to rant, but I'm a C.S. major and I think her arguments are far-fetched.

connections that fade

In “Speech, Writing, and Code” Kate Hayles discusses platform obsolescence. She draws a comparison between the difficulty of recoding so that a program can be run on a platform just a few years newer and the ease of reading books from hundreds of years ago and still being able to understand them as relevant to the modern world. For me, this elucidated one of the specific failings of the computer to emulate a human mode of processing. While computers are capable of performing one task which they are programmed to do with astonishing precision, following code exactly, they lack the ability to translate the meaning of code or language with any kind of fluidity. Computers struggle when text does not match context. The human mind has an innate ability to execute what amount to a series of “recoding” operations in order to translate into new contexts and see in a different light. In fact, the human though process is defined by connection making. Computers are defined by the execution of connections which have been built into them. Therefore, computers are a reflection of the needs and challenges of the human mind, making permanent the constantly shifting and vanishing connections which exist in the human mind.
Hayles goes on to describe “biological modifications and technological prostheses to impose digitization on … analog processes.” It is fascinating to think of speech and writing as forms of digitization of the analog impulses that inspire them. Through an elaborate series of alph-numeric symbols and vocalizations, ideas are broken down into 0’s and 1’s that have simply evolved to be more compact, to look prettier, and to appeal to what is fundamentally human. What if machine language to evolve in such a way? Is it so far fetched to think that something akin to the “code” language that appears in The Matrix would result? How will the evolution of more advanced computer languages compare to the evolution of the higher forms of human language that we use today?
I liked Manovich’s description of the new computer as a “programming machine.” While I use my computer as a media machine as well, I believe that my primary goal now has become to use it as a tool for creation. Technology has given us the opportunity to be infinitely creative in a world full of effective digital tools and distribution channels. I almost feel spoiled.

Code and Its Role in the World

The readings about code this week were particularly interesting to me. It’s intriguing to see how it is viewed and manipulated, and used for both science and art.

In Hayles’ paper, she mentions that “the more the worldview of code is accepted, the more ‘natural’ the layered dynamics of revealing and concealing the code seem.” (pg. 55) Amazingly, it seems that code and this worldview of it is becoming more and more a part of everyday life. It’s kind of like the Internet and how we experience hypertext; we interact and experience most oftentimes taking it for granted and without realizing it fully. Additionally she says, “The more ‘natural’ code comes to seem, the more plausible it is to conceptualize human thought as emerging from a machinic base of computational processes…” (pg. 55) This concept stunned me. I mean, are we trying to understand the way humans interact and think by proposing that at the very base or “brute” (pg. 54) levels of our computational thinking, we think in code? Are we trying to understand and break down human thought in order to reverse it and create it from scratch (to create AI)?

Hayles seems to argue that code is a partner, and not a hierarchical competitor to the other facets of language, speech and writing. It’s fascinating to think that by creating machines, which operate on the lowest level of binary function but can operate at higher levels that resemble natural languages, we call into question whether humans’ complex thought processes derive from binary code. This appears to liken us even more to Haraway’s notion that we are cyborgs….even that machine and human are not distinguishable.

Additionally, Lev Manovich mentions that theyrule.net assumes us to be intelligent enough to draw our own conclusions. “…we get convinced not by listening/watching a prepared message but by actively working with the data: reorganizing it, uncovering the connections, becoming aware of correlations.” This is a new level of hypertext which allows for more interactivity. I think it’s saying that we take the information we are looking at, whether it be code or hypertext, and it’s becoming more common for the general public to understand it.

To contrast both Hayles’ and Manovich’s ideas that we are becoming more and more aware of code and hypertext is Soren Pold’s paper, and particularly the first section concerning “The Engineered Image.” In this particular section, Pold quotes Don Norman, “If I were to have it my way, we would not see computer interfaces. In fact, we would not see computers: both the interface and the computer would be invisible.” Norman’s idea is very similar to the idea of the Memex; there is no concern for the inner workings of the computer or knowledge of the base level of the language in which the computer speaks.

Sorry about the novel here….but to conclude, I thought “On Software Art” was a very interesting piece. I thought it especially interesting, and relevant to this discussion of code, that they mention how code is often invisible. “By calling digital art ‘[new] media art,’ public perception has focused on zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media, rather than structures of programming. This view is reinforced by the fact that the algorithms employed to generate and manipulate computer music, computer graphics, digital text are frequently if not in most cases invisible, unknown to the audience and the artist alike.” I thought it also tied in really well with CODeDOC and how it attempted to reconcile the fact that the audience and artist are often unaware of the code at the base level of digital art and media.

Digital Art, Ethics

It seems to me that digital art is clouded in a mystique that complicates its relationship to the user/reader/spectator and brings up a host of ethical questions. That nagging, conscious acknowledgement of the presence of a hypotext (to use Moulthrop’s term) in my mind when I look at something like a simulation of a garden in the CAVE befuddles my relation to the visual output. There is an obvious feeling of being manipulated, with interactivity increasing this sense even more because it threatens to eat up at least perceptual reality (of course, being conscious and somewhat paranoid of this limits the totalizing force of hyperrealist simulation). The realism of cyberspace that Soren Pold talks about elicits questions of what exactly is “the active and dialectical relationship between reality and representation, the interface entering in front of an increasingly invisible reality” (3). How does one approach the fact of extreme mediation in this relationship? How can one not feel threateningly consumed by a barrage of perceptual stimulations, and should this even be a goal? In light of questions like these, how can one truly appreciate the aesthetic value of digital art? These are issues that I can only leave unresolved for myself.

New Media Interfaces and the Lemur

After reading Soren Pøld's article on interfaces, I was left thinking over whether I generally regard the interface as an aesthetic form with its own art, or only as a passive tool, an instrument that allows me to connect with my computer. Pold mentions how powerful the role is that software-hardware combinations play in the creation of digital art and cites the influence of products by Steinberg and Roland on electronic music. (33.) Having used several such pieces of software and hardware myself, I realized that I thought of them mainly as tools and rarely considered their aesthetics. As Pøld notes, programs like Auto-Illustrator challenge these “traditional conceptualizations of user, object, and software,” (34.) but Auto-Illustrator feels to me more like a piece of art that can be played with than a functional tool. Manovich, in his article, makes something of a call to fill the “untouched space completely open for experimentation and creative research—using programming to generate and/or control figurative/fictional media.” (pg. 216.) While the Flash art that he discusses seems to head in this direction, I was interested to see if there was anything I could think of that utilized both an aesthetic and a pragmatic approach to the interface.

I was reminded of going to a Björk concert this past summer where the stage was covered with several widescreen monitors. I soon realized that these screens were displaying the interfaces used by Alan Pollard and the other backing musicians/technicians to help create Björk's unique live sound. The monitors were displaying brightly colored, simple geometric forms that the moved around with their hands to control synthesizers, drum machines, equalizers and other effects. After the concert I did some quick research and found that the band had been using “Lemurs”, specialized audio/media control surfaces designed by JazzMutant. According to the product website (http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php) the Lemur is customizable, and allows the user to “design the appropriate interface that will precisely fit your needs, fit your hands and your idea of how a controller should work.” The site also reads, “At last, you can create your own interface, fitting your needs, whatever the software is you wish to control. For that purpose, the Lemur comes with a workflow optimized interface editor running on your choice of MacOSX or Windows.”

This sort of product seems to be a step forward in the development of both interface aesthetics and functionality. It still remains, however, within the field of music, which Manovich notes (pg. 218.) is still the most culturally advanced in this regard. It was exciting to visit the Cave to have a taste of some similar innovations that aren’t so specifically music oriented. But as Manovich also notes, right now most programming investments of this sort are “only possible in a commercial game company or in a university.” (pg. 216.) I am eager to see, therefore, what new sorts of dynamic interfaces, both artistic and pragmatic, the future will bring.

Up Next: Hollywood Coders' Strike

Cramer and Gabriel's short piece draws much-needed attention to coders as artists worthy of compensation for literally building the tools that other artist/coders depend on to make their own work. The implications of this attention reminded me of the implications of the Hollywood writers' strike (R.I.P.). Now that the writers of movies like 300 will be compensated for residuals and post-release sales, will we hear pleas from the team behind Maya and other 3D imaging/animation software for their cut, too? If digital media is used more and more for commercial purposes, what rights do programmers have to compensation for the work they do to make the creation of such media possible?

On the subject of "reading (into)" code, as Steve mentioned, I found the CODeDOC installation fascinating. Examining the styles of coding and commenting, it's easy to see the complexities of the grammar and syntax of the languages each artist used for his or her piece. One of my favorite parts was reading the comments on each piece written by all the other artists, especially when they took it upon themselves to respond via code and reworking the original pieces. In a way, Martin and Brad chose to "read into" others' code by writing into it.

Amplification, cause and effect

One of the most interesting parts of Generation Flash by Lev Manovich is where he discusses the amplification powers of computers and digital media. He describes how a slight flick of a joystick can initiate an elaborate sequence of events within a computer game, most of which do not correspond to the user’s input in an obvious way. He writes, “this power puts a computer in line with other magical devices” (213). After reading this, I realized that such amplification is a major part of what makes digital experience so exciting. One hopes that some day, our actions will be amplified in genuinely meaningful and useful ways. Contemporary examples are less than inspiring: I can think of how missiles can be targeted and launched with a few keystrokes, and the best that Manovich mentions is Microsoft Office Assistant guessing when we need help (usually unhelpfully, I must add).

Manovich puts forth another idea that is in conflict with the appeal of amplification. In describing the Shockwave project UTOPIA, he explains, “UTOPIA is Utopia because it is a society in which cause and effect connection are rendered visible and comprehensible” (213). How fantastic: a world where we can understand everything that is going on, where rationality and preference can flourish. But if computers are to offer us amplification, where the consequences of our actions are far more complex than our inputs, how are we to feel in complete control? Amplification and unambiguous consequentiality are both exciting things that digital media can offer, but do they mix well?

Interface Realism as Post-modern Deconstruction

Manovich rather brashly claims that “the software artist makes his/her mark on the world by writing original code.” He seems to insinuate that this “original” act is superior the mere poking of the postmodern media artists attempts to break down and interpret “media” itself. In claiming that “an artist who sample/subverts/pokes at a commercial media can never compete with it,” Manovich erects what I believe to be a problematic binary; original code is good, deconstructing commercial media is bad/dated.

Manovich overlooks that fact that software (an interface for hardware) is primarily a commercial media. A few shining examples aside (Firefox, Linux, etc.) the majority of software is proprietary and developed by large, commercial organizations (Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Facebook…) While the contemporary “software artist” that he celebrates as the new romantic is undoubtedly an important figure, as Pold shows us, the need for critical analysis of the new media of software and interface is still very important and the role of sampling/subverting/poking at media is still paramount.

As Pold suggests at the beginning of his article, the role of the interface is to obscure its own actions, or conversely, as Don Norman explains “the real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way.” The path of commercial software is primarily is towards the intuitive, “What You See Is What You Get” interface; towards the transparency of the very interface that is being created.

Pold highlights three pieces of digital art which break down and analyze the role of interface. These pieces ultimately sample and deconstruct contemporary mainstream software and interface. Here we see the artist as the very postmodern media critic which Manovich wants to claim is obsolete. As an instance of Interface realism, each of the pieces that Pold examines unearths the unseen actions of the interface. Max Payne subverts the FPS genre through meta-narrative, Murder in the Museum subverts it through appropriation; Auto-Illustrator inverts and questions the interface of the traditional image editing software.

Each of these pieces do not act as radical, romantic and original instance of code as a new aesthetic. Rather they are essentially postmodern critiques that analyze the very function of a particular media: the interface.

Interface and Distance with Respect to Artistic Media

It seems that many of the people working with digital media today hold the belief that interface removes the user from the original purpose and intent of the program they are using or website they are visiting. I don’t believe that this is necessarily true. Often interface brings the user closer to the actual intent of certain digital media. For example, imagine a program like Photoshop without any interface. It simply doesn’t make any sense. The art itself is completely removed from the process of its alteration and creation. Code requires the rendering of art to occur sight unseen. The artist/code-writer must wait until he enters the code to see his art. To have to work with a photograph or other artistic media through a code actually represents a distancing from the purpose of art. Using code to create art transforms art into a science, which is somewhat counterproductive. Interface actual brings digital art closer to art in the real world.

Looking at the digital artists on the mycourses page I found it curious how an artist could put such focus on something as technical as code. Code is a restriction to artistic media. As mentioned in a previous blog, code is rigid. It follows distinct rules and patterns. This is contrary to the purpose of art. Art seeks to be original and creative. It seeks to challenge rules, not to conform to them. This is not to say that digital art is in any way invalid. Every artistic medium has its limitations and general rules of use. Code is merely more difficult a medium to subvert, perhaps an impossible medium to subvert. A digital artist cannot truly bend the rules of code. If the code is not properly implemented the artists creation will become nothing but a broken link.

A computer is a much more difficult artistic tool to “think outside the box” with. Quite simply, computers are boxes, and what is created on them must exist inside of them. A truly revolutionary digital artist would find a way around this. Digital artists should seek to find a way to challenge the rules of code, interface, and the computer itself in the creation of their art, rather than focusing on a systematic use of encoding to create imagery. As mentioned in another blog, it was somewhat humorous to view artists critiquing each other’s encoding rather than the final product itself! Perhaps I only find this somewhat preposterous due to my lack of any major experience in writing code, but as an artist (or at least someone who attempts to create art) it strikes me as unusual. The desire to interact directly with the computer is understandable, but what really defines direct? 

Cramer and Gabriel's short piece draws much-needed attention to coders as artists worthy of compensation for literally building the tools that other artist/coders depend on to make their own work. The implications of this attention reminded me of the implications of the Hollywood writers' strike (R.I.P.). Now that the writers of movies like 300 will be compensated for residuals and post-release sales, will we hear pleas from the team behind Maya and other 3D imaging/animation software for their cut, too? If digital media is used more and more for commercial purposes, what rights do programmers have to compensation for the work they do to make the creation of such media possible?

On the subject of "reading (into)" code, as Steve mentioned, I found the CODeDOC installation fascinating. Examining the styles of coding and commenting, it's easy to see the complexities of the grammar and syntax of the languages each artist used for his or her piece. One of my favorite parts was reading the comments on each piece written by all the other artists, especially when they took it upon themselves to respond via code and reworking the original pieces. In a way, Martin and Brad chose to "read into" others' code by writing into it.

Digital Media: Unsettling?

Coming from little background in art, culture or critical analysis, this question may fundamentally miss the entire point of what we’re trying to study in this course. But it’s something that has struck me, and I’m curious to know more about. Why is it that nearly all of the media we’ve looked at thus far has been, in some way, disconcerting or unsettling? I don’t mean to speak of The Matrix or Neuromancer, as they seem to be more mainstream than other things we’ve looked at – though they do have their strange, unsettling aspects (the concept of being plugged onto a machine, or, for that matter, being a “battery” for the machine world in The Matrix, and the abundance of strange cultural references in Neuromancer, especially in Chiba and in reference to the Panther Moderns). But Patchwork Girl, in my opinion, is certainly unsettling, with images of a body torn apart and sown together again, and paths of text that can be downright creepy. The same is true for several of the projects we viewed in the Cave; an overabundance of eerie ambient sounds including heartbeats and warped synthesized sound pervaded most of the projects, along with distorted voices that accompanied most of the text. Even the video we watched in class, Kelly Dobson’s "Blendie," is kind of strange to watch (I feel this is best emphasized by the most recent comment on the video on YouTube: "Survivdall: (2 Months Ago) wow. i stopped after 27 seconds, thinking I was watching a scene from the exorcist. (lol)."

I think this is an interesting question to bring up while we’re on the topic of interfaces and code in class. Pold criticizes the concept that interfaces should be purely utilitarian or eliminated, as they hide users from what’s really going on. I agree with this; there is an enormous aesthetic value to interfaces, even when they’re not user-friendly – in many ways, they’re more fun when they’re not as intuitive. However, the examples Pold gives fall victim to the same eerie-ness. As anyone who’s played Max Payne should know, the game is creepy in many ways (I vaguely remember a dream sequence when you direct Max through a maze of clouds that gradually get red as he reaches a room to find a dead baby, while creepy music plays in the background). Jodi’s work doesn’t sound as unsettling, though does strike me as somewhat strange. And although Auto-Illustrator sounds like an undeniably cool program, including a “Psychosis” tab in the Preferences window is clearly perverse.

Aren’t there interesting, artistic interfaces that engage the user that aren’t vaguely disconcerting? I think so, but most of them are more mainstream than the works we’ve looked at. In many ways this makes me appreciate Jodi’s Sod and it’s apparent mocking of the world of high art. For example, I’ve been playing the game Super Mario Galaxy on Nintendo’s Wii, which has an artistic interface (in terms of the style of play, with a remote that interacts directly with the screen, much like in the Cave, and in terms of graphical layout) and is also as far from unsettling as you can get. Games like Dance Dance Revolution have similarly artistic-yet-fun interfaces. And aside from games, there are many examples of interface on the internet that are dynamic and not always intuitive, but often have a light tone. The Generative Compositional Engine and AnyMails are a couple of examples I came across.

Back on the topic of my last post, and in connection with my comment on the Wii, (and in response to Ken), someone has found a way to play Rez with their Wiimote. It’s awesome. This is what I should be doing with my free time.

It was interesting to read Pold's take on the FPS 'Max Payne'. I probably pulled a few all nighters trying to beat the game when I first bought it so I have a close, intimate knowledge of what Pold speaks. What he says about the narrative not being something that is freeing, but instead something that is binding and restricting makes a lot of sense. As a more and more infrequent video game user, when I do play, I find it nice to not have to think about what is going to happen next in a lot of the games. The point for me is to escape and be taken into another world, a mindless world. games like 'Myst' always tried my patience, because I wanted to leave my brain behind and just react. The interface between the world of Max and myself is not seamless. In fact the designers of the game play with this transparency by creating blurred dreamlike sequences where you can hardly see anything, completely effecting ones ability to do what they want. Here the idea of an interface is toyed with. An interface is simply there to assist the user in whatever they are trying to do with a program. With video games one is trying to be entertained, that is the main reason why people play video games. So an interface can be used as a mechanism to mediate perception in first person games. A video game is like hypertext in that the reader, or player can dictate certain elements of the programs but not others. You are always going to be bound to the creators in some way. With Patchwork girl you can freely move through the various texts, but you are still forced to go back to the map or to scroll to another text in some order. In video games you become part of the narrative, but the narrative controls you. It is still a program with boundaries, as long as there is an interface, freedom will be impossible. We will always be dependent to some degree.  

Art and the CAVE

Often I find in this class that the digital media we are exploring grinds against most of everything I have previously thought of as art, though in subtle ways. Another blog post commented on the nature of randomness in the creation of poetry in digital media; I don’t think this is nearly as counter-intuitive to poetry and art as one can think. After all, some of Jackson Pollack’s best drip works are random. Other artists have experimented with randomness by throwing darts at balloons filled with paint, spinning a canvas around and spitting paint on it, covering the body with paint and throwing it at the canvas, or many other ways. So I don’t think it’s the randomness in digital media that makes it counter to my concept of art.
My definition of art is simple: a finite piece that inspires the spectator to view the world differently. Fellow freshmen will remember reading de Botton’s book on Proust and hearing about Chardin, the painter who painted peaches rather than palaces, but whose peaches were far more beautiful than any palace. The great works of the Renaissance inspire the spectator to think about perspective, to wonder about their meaning. Avant-garde, abstract pieces similarly invite the spectator to wonder why this is so important, and perhaps reevaluate their perspectives on the world. Film, photography, and music invite us to open our eyes and ears and change. Minimalist art especially comes to mind; an artist I’ve had the pleasure of meeting once put a painted orange 2 by 4 on a stop sign in New York and traffic accidents decreased drastically. People literally looked at the world differently by paying attention to this sign that was out of the ordinary. The bright orange gates through Central Park, New York: joggers would comment that, even though they had ran through this part of the park every day for the past few years, they had never noticed that fountain behind the gate, or that separate trail. Art changes the way we view the world.
My experience with the CAVE, however, got me thinking. I don’t think it applies directly to my definition of art. When the demonstrator showed us the prototype of the six-sided CAVE, a full cube, it made me think that digital media’s goal is to create another world, instead of comment on this one. Cyberspace. Granted, film and written works create other worlds, diegeses, that are not our own, but through their examples we learn and apply to our own. I think, if CAVE and digital media continues on its trend toward creating a fully functional and complete cyberspace, it will spawn a second world completely to its own. It will become entirely reflexive. A virtual reality based on its own set of rules and independent of the one we currently inhabit. And then I think it will cease to be art, and lose its value.
Or maybe I’m just a Luddite.

I feel like Hayles' discussion of the relationship between speech, writing, and code just wasn't all connecting for me. Hayles frequently alludes and almost necessitates the computer as the translator or extension of the human user. Her discussion of speech writing and code is confounded by the variable of the computer as an additional entity, an "add-on" or "plug-in" to human knowledge/consciousness, an additional connection in the speech-writing-code comparison that does a fair amount of conversion [and conversation] independent of the human user. She addresses this problem towards the end, "At the heart of this difference is the need to mediate between the natural languages native to human intelligence and the binary code native to intelligent machines." But I think perhaps she patches this up too neatly, suggests a sort of happy collaboration and mutual understanding between machine and human and perhaps glosses over an inherent disconnect, an irreconcilable difference between man and machine. Hayles optimistically cites machine as "a mind amplification tool," the rise of "expressive medium." Yes there is a trend of object-oriented programming, of "anthropomorphizing" the machine and "computationalizing" the human, but where does this convergence end? To what extent are machines and human compatible? How close can we become until we start to reject each other? People already reject computers very much. Especially the older generations who tend to be intolerant of it, they reject it like a food that makes them ill. How much can man and machine become alike each other until there begins to be friction--until we start antagonizing each other, making each other sick, becoming unable to cohabitate? It's interesting that at one point Hayles says the pastiche of code and English "might be called a creole," bringing up a racial component that she doesn't discuss much at all. But if machines become almost fully anthropomorphized, wouldn't it bring up questions of race, or species, and re-ignite the human inability to coexist with our differences? A fully humanized machine race, with a different appearance (or perhaps not) and a different language.

CODE

First off, I would like to speak about Pold's article "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form" and why I believe Pold's concept of interactivity is is not what it should be. The example used was of the game Max Payne. Because the plot was so linear and did not allow for diversions, Pold believes that this does not constitute interactivity. This is not the case. I think that the game should be viewed more as a puzzle. With any video game, one must make a large number of decisions in order to reach the end goal. By making a choices in the game, the player will either fail or succeed, and sometimes diversions from what one should actually do can still result in a success. This is also true with a puzzle. If the puzzle is not solved correctly, one will fail. So, could one make the assumption that, if a game like Max Payne is not interactive, than a puzzle is not interactive as well? I do not believe this is true. Video games can often stimulate the player's mind whether the goals follow a linear path or allow the player to do whatever he or she wishes. Am I wrong to believe that this is what interactivity is?

Second, I am very curious to understand the "transparent" interface. Pold explained in the article that users want to skip the interface and move directly to the action. My question is how one would do so. Are there any examples of this already?

Last of all, I would like to express my opinion on the concept of code and whether or not the programmer is the artist rather than the user of the program. By saying that someone using a program such as PhotoShop or Logic is actually not the true creator of the work would be similar to saying that someone composing a piece of music on a violin is not the creator. The craftsman of the violin intends the object to be used to create music, and the credit is given to the user. The same is true for artists that work with scrap metal or even paint. The manufacturers should not take credit for the means by which the artist works. Therefore, I believe by building a program to be used by the public, one is offering a medium to be used by everyone for their own works, and therefore should not be entirely credited for the piece. Granted, I do believe it is the artist's responsibility to note how their piece was created. Hopefully by saying this, I am not contradicting myself.

Though the other articles were very interesting and important, I felt most strongly about these issues.

hayles

“In the worldview of code, it makes no sense to talk about signifiers without signifieds. Every voltage change must have a precise meaning in order to affect the behavior of the machine; without signifieds, code would have no efficacy” (Hayles 47)

“Nor does code allow the infinite iterability and citation that Derrida associates with inscriptions, whereby any phrase, sentence, or paragraph can be lifted from one context and embedded in another.” (48)

“…a computer program has only one meaning: what it does. It isn’t a text for an academic to read. Its entire meaning is its function” (48)

Not that I fully understand Hayles argument, but her assertion (taken from Galloway) that “code is the only language that is executable” (or that each signifier directly corresponds to a specific, stable (?) signified) glosses over the question why the computer programs come to look like they do and the reasons behind the logic of their navigability.

“The purpose of the interface is to represent the data, the dataflow, and data structures of the computer to the human senses, while simultaneously setting up a frame for human input and interaction and translating this input back into the machine” (Pold 3).

Digital Poetry and Code

One of the most interesting things I encountered this week in the course was the concept of digital poetry. It first came up while I was experiencing the CAVE, and then again when Professor Cayley gave a guest lecture. During the simulation of the dancer, actor, and musician, it was a strange experience to have someone control what someone else ‘virtually’ was saying. Instead of only using 5-8 phrases, or however many there were, one could program many more different poetic words or phrases into the keyboard. In that case, it could be random in which the words and phrases are expelled in the simulation, creating new poetry every time. Then, during the lecture, when Cayley showed us the ‘speaking clock’ program, the concept of code intertwined with digital poetry was brought up again. Although the pairs of words weren’t necessarily random, they were generated by code to be a certain way.

I don’t know how I feel about such randomized poetry, in which you enter different codes to represent different words and then make them pair up and form phrases at random. I feel it take the creativity out of the art. I just hope in the future such things as poetry and art don’t get phased out entirely.

h-bomb

I don’t know anything about coding. The parallels of programming to brain function are lost on me and I have no idea how google.com translates to zeros and ones. I can hardly write on a blog. As you can imagine, this week’s discussions have been difficult.

In reading the Hayles, I started thinking about the different ways we perceive language. Some is imperative, some is speculative, some is expressive, some is just casual—yet language is nothing without interpretations by the brain. Intention is not inherent in the written word. Coding, however, is intentional. There is neither superfluous language nor room for interpretation. What is represented by the code is exactly what the code is to represent.

So what happens when we attempt to read (into) code? We find ourselves examining the composition of the program, rather than on the interpretation of a written text, in order to grasp its intention. The example used on rhizome.org was the I/O/D Web Stalker program, which displayed websites by their internal control code. For most, these codes are indecipherable but point out the inherent hierarchy of codes that build up to function. But I would offer a counterpoint to this: what happens if you transpose the relationship between code and function? Can code be written for code’s sake? Can it be excised from function without losing purpose?

For those who do not know it already, my example is jodi.org , a piece done in 1995 by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. View the source code. (⌘ U)

The video game controller as interface

I see a number of parallels between the interface, as Søren Pold defines it, and the video game controller.

Pold mentions that even though the interface is a creation of engineers, the engineer's dream is to eliminate the interface. Likewise, the controller gets in the way, and the ultimate goal of video game makers is to eliminate it. This is why the best games have intuitive controls and people often say they forget they're holding the controller. Virtual reality (which Pold discusses) has been tried in video games before, but very poorly, and still using the intermediary of a controller.

The controller is every bit as artificial as the interface, no matter how intuitive a particular game's control scheme may be. My roommate has a Wii, and for all the praise (rightly) heaped on it, it just isn't a very different experience. Why? Moving and pointing a controller, even if it mimics real-life actions, is still a mediated action.

There are big differences, too, though. The controller is largely an input-only device. But "rumble" controllers offer some sort of feedback. And the controller is not dynamic in the same way a GUI is.

Code and the Arts

It seems that the future of the arts has become inextricably linked to code.

This is bad. Code cannot tolerate ambiguity. Code is incomprehensible to all but the initiated. Code is unnatural, inhuman, even. It is turning us into machines.

This is good. Code gives the artist unprecedented control over both form and content. Code is language like any other, one that we may all have a responsibility to learn. Code, like Bush’s Memex, takes care of the repetitive, mechanical tasks and allows us to concentrate on being fully, creatively human.

So which is right? Good? Bad? Or are our times, as the title characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead would have it, “indifferent”?

Obviously, a “good or bad” normative judgment would be not only reductive, but premature. New media is still a nascent art form, and it’s too early to start fitting binary code into “right/wrong” binaries. At the moment, digital artworks are content with raising questions.

The CODeDOC website that we looked at for Wednesday asked artists to create software art in which the code itself was art. I can’t tell Java from C++, so I was unable to derive any sense of significance, or even signification, from reading the code behind the animations. The artists would annotate their work within the code, describing what each block of incomprehensible (to uninitiated me), punctuation-laden text was actually doing, and then the other artists left comments like “I think the Javascript reload is forceful and a little risky.” Excuse me? This seems like commenting on the aesthetics of Ikea instruction manuals. I’d be interested to hear what those who know more than I do (read: anything) about coding think of this.

On the other hand, Mez’s codework was fascinating – the reader can explore the plural meanings inherent in not just whole texts, but individual words. And Pold discusses the intriguing ways in which AutoIllustrator challenges our relationship with code, asking how much “transparency of interface” we’re actually willing to deal with. Press the “Don’t Push This Button” button and you’ve opened a Pandora’s Box of sounds and flashing “gibberish.”

Hayles expresses her wish that code should coexist with speech and writing in a state of harmony. I hope this will also be the case for new and old media artworks. There’s no reason we can’t have both pdfs and books, Mez and the novel, software art and painting.

Serialist composers in the early 20th-century, such as Schoenberg and Webern, claimed that the tonal system of music was outmoded, dead. But rather than supplanting that system, their experiments in twelve-tone composition have come to augment (no pun intended) pre-existing forms, creating a musical language that is richer and more expressive. We should aim for integration of new and old media in the same way.

Image as code

Katherine Hayles talks about code in relation to speech and writing, but why not talk about code in relation to images as well? This might be interesting to look at because as we all saw on Tuesday evening at the CAVE, images (as well as text and speech) can be created from coding. Therefore, we can consider the effects of coding (i.e. creating images/text/speech) in relation to its mode of functioning (i.e. using writing to create code).

Images are not simply organized color pixels, but are also groups of things, such as letters grouped to form words. Words as we see them and read them are images because of their wholeness and unity. This can be more clearly understood when looking at advertisements. The sparse words juxtaposed with the images become images themselves because they form their own entity. Words are also images because they only make sense when read from a vantage point that takes into account all of their constituents, just like an image only makes sense if all its parts are visible and read together.
Therefore, writing which creates code to produce text, speech and images, is a form of imagery in itself.
I do not think therefore, that images are solely a product of coding, but are on the contrary inherent in its functioning.

syntax error

In reading Speech, Writing, Code, I found Hayles’ point that “in code the breaks are much sharper and more complete than with either speech or writing” particularly interesting. Our understanding of text is much less rigid and more flexible than that of a computer. If there is any error or irregularity in the code, or it is too outdated, a computer will not understand it. On the other hand, we, albeit through some effort, are able to decipher the meaning of a text riddled with syntax errors. I was somehow reminded of the e-mail and instant messages that some of my friends write. There would be punctuation marks inserted into the middle of sentences or of rather interestingly spelled words, or representing certain letters of those words. While I think that for them, there was a certain aesthetic appeal to the punctuation that would break up the text and the odd spelling of words that could draw attention to them, I thought these messages also really brought to light how much more forgiving we are in terms of syntax errors or irregularities. Even though the text may be a bit on the mangled side in terms of spelling and grammar, unlike a computer which would just not be able to execute the code, we can still figure out what is being written and communicated through the text.

The Future of Media

I got into a debate with my eager-to-argue roommate about the future of print media. Neither of us seemed to legitimately believe the point we were defending, and both wound up as reciprocal devil’s advocates. While both of us share a love for books (including their content as well as their materiality [trophies?]), I posited the idea that in spite of the current rate of ‘hyper history’ and the frequency of obsolescence, the infinite nature of digital information itself is so immune to decay that acidic, non-archival, materially costly media simply cannot last (I forget who said that the cost of paper is going to go up...) Sure, Adobe could go out of business, .pdfs could go out of style, and a hundred years from now people will be baffled to see the file extension, but you sure as heck better bet that Wikipedia will be able to tell you all about it, the ancient Acrobat Reader setup .exe (as well as the Windows Vista emulator software on which to run it) will be available from some p2p file sharing network on some historicist’s harddrive or some torrent tracker, as well as everything that everyone bothered putting on the web. Hard drives may crash, but it is becoming increasingly more unreasonable not to have so many periodic backups to so many infinitely accessible places that the abilities of the internet will become the means by which we can create a truly indestructible, everlasting time capsule (until the world’s electricity goes out at once and every hard drive simultaneously reformats.)

My roommate argued that no e-book reader could ever approximate the experience of reading a real book, or even mitigate the discrepancy to the point where even a portion of the population would accept it. I returned the idea that our expectations for the experience of ‘reading a real book’ come from our conditioning and past experiences, and for people in the future (maybe even already,) our standards are far more influenced by the interaction we’ve had with computers. While I couldn’t comfortably say that word for word I’ve read more from screens than paper pages, that doesn’t seem far off. Not only will glowing back-lit screens begin to seem more natural, the genre of novels and other lengthy books could very well begin to fall out of fashion in correlation to the strain on the eyes from prolonged screen-gaze, and instead the majority of our informational intake will come from other faster place (like blogs?)

In the same way that the internet has exploded the opportunities for independent music artists who no longer have to rely on record labels and distributors to produce and proliferate their music, our access to literature is not dictated by publishers. Not only is it more wide spread, but it is more instantaneous, and while that is not always a desirable thing, the option is open. Though an author may not choose to post his novel in progress on his blog chapter by chapter (or even letter by letter in a live chatroom!!), the possibility is there, and is waiting to be fully utilized and expanded.

Some people seem to have been disappointed by the not nearly ‘realistic’ CAVE (I initially thought that I was,) and unimpressed by the currently available, meaningless(?), computer generated poetry, but it seems that this is the way things must inevitably move (according to pretty much all of the readings this week,) and will necessarily advance and progress in such a way as to provide an expanse of content and material for viewers to experience and alternately discard as garbage or embrace as brilliant as we have come to do for the current popular media.

Fire up the Meaning Generators!

Professor Cayley said a phrase during yesterday's lecture, a phrase that I've heard him say before, about using computer processing to "generate meaning." It usually goes along with its complement: "to generate meaning and affect." The affect, then, being the emotional impact of a work of art, and the meaning being the conceptual impact.

While generative poetry and prose seem to stake a good claim to being able to generate affect, I find meaning to be a much more troubling issue. Algorithmically chosen words and phrases can fall into a pleasant poetic jumble, calling up unexpected images to establish a mood. Here's an example of some text generated by the Markov Chain algorithm, running over a number of poems:

Rights went wild with sweetened whipped cream around you, Sisters in the other matters entirely local. In Antarctica, during storms, The Aurora Australis. The legend becomes fact. We stand silent.

Our minds fairly comfortable with assigning an atmosphere to a fairly incoherent work. But meaning? That's a different story. Generating a coherent thought, much less an argument, much less a narrative, is orders of magnitude more difficult. Does anyone know of a reason, grounded in neuroscience or philosophy (or some discipline that lays claim to cognition) why that should be the case?

Seeing is believing

In Manovich’s The Language of New Media the first principle of “new media” or what we know as digital media is numerical representation. At its core all objects, all software, even the interface can be represented by numerical data. This is a direct result of the mode of communication man has developed with the computer: code. Unlike other systems of communication, Hayles points out that it does not function like language. At the simplest level, the alternating voltages result in binary code, for which “the system can tolerate little if any ambiguity.” Halyes also points out there is nearly no way to therefore talk about signifiers without the signified. Unlike language, in code the relationship of the signifier to signified is non-arbitrary.
And yet as concrete as code is, our daily interaction with computing machines constantly hides this most basic fact. For the most part, users do not see code, and I believe there is a direct desire not to see the code. To see the code is visceral, it shatters the illusion that the machine is a world that the user can control. Also, because code is concrete, it hinders the greater ideological principles of personal computing, interactivity and freedom. To counteract, this man developed the interface, specifically personal computers today can be traced back to the Mac GUI of 1984. I think that it is was a bizarre development, because eventually, as Soren Pold makes clear, the interface goes beyond its engineering roots. It stops making the machine simply invisible and creates a higher forged reality and level of perception. Strangely enough, as graphics and screens develop, the GUI increases its illusionary qualities causing us to head into what Pold calls “an increasingly invisible reality.”
Even the media we interact with on a computer, which in itself is simply code, is not really what it seems and as seen in the other articles what we call “art” in the digital age is somewhat misleading. This is because in the age of the “interface culture” (Pold) everything is “camouflaged” (Cramer/Gabriel) by the graphical representation we see. While seeing is believing in the “interface culture,” what we may believe is not entirely real, because as Cramer and Gabriel point out “the algorithms employed to generate and manipulate computer music, computer graphics, digital text are frequently if not in most cases invisible, unknown to the audience and the artist alike.” In the age of the “interface culture,” one does not only have to call to question the ideology of the text, but the code, which forges it. Another aspect is what does this mean for ideology? As more and more all forms of culture and past media are digitized, forged into a numerical representation will our underlying cultural principles adhere? While Manovich seems to believe that film is the precursor to the digital, I find this hard to take. Despite that in both, one appears to see the medium, and that both hold some temporal aspect, the computer is not safe to accept at face value. I feel that the computer as a media machine is something beyond all prior forms of mass media, something that must be scrutinized to show exactly what is at work.

Code, The Cave, and Interface

So... the Cave. Amazing.

It wasn't exactly what I was expecting; when I first heard of this “virtual-reality cave,” I pictured what many would have pictured, in the mid 1990s: a large, clunky helmet and unwieldy gloves. But something that the operator said struck me – something along the lines of “… with these lightweight goggles, you’re not enclosed. You’re part of the world.” Something to that effect.

John Cayley spoke about how modern society sees so much graphical and audio manipulation in new media, but not text. The first piece that we saw in the cave (the title of which escapes me) illustrates the kind of possibilities that he’s likely referring to. I saw words literally fly off the page, the “driver” attempting to re-attach them to the story; words simultaneously latching onto different sentences and others, drifting off into oblivion…

The fact that this entire experience was done without the aforementioned “VR Helmet” was part of what sucked me into it in the first place. Not knowing the interface was even there allowed me to just fall into the world presented by the Cave. Had I been forced to don a ten-pound reminder screaming “THIS IS NOT REAL,” the Cave’s amazing immersive capability would have been woefully (and literally) weighed down by a clunky interface.

Speaking of interface… I had a look at the Cave Writing GUI. Not bad. There were controls and easy settings for each parameter, integrated multimedia import – apparently, the interface was easy enough for a 1^st-semester “Cave writer” to create an entire program the night before a final. I also got a look at the hard code, which our operator was using to run the program from the same Linux-equipped terminal. It looked like a strange mixture of DOS and HTML – the only two other text-based headaches I’ve had to deal with in my limited sphere of computer knowledge. I think the code there was XML; still, it was fairly incomprehensible. Such a factor shouldn’t limit one’s creativity. I’m glad to see that the GUI is letting individuals overstep those boundaries. (Granted, the GUI only offers limited functionality to its users compared to hard coding, but c’mon. It’s still cool.)

On one final note, going back to Rez, the synaesthesia-emulating Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox 360 (in HD!!!) video game, where you play a hacker trying to restore functionality to a computer, Eden: If you look closely at the upper-right hand corner of the screen, you can see code being processed simultaneously with your actions. Attacking enemies, obtaining power-ups, even changing levels – all have commands attatched to them. Makes you wonder how much less fun the experience would be without the game itself, which, in essence, is just a physical representation of the act of hacking – if you will, an interface.

I gotta get back to playing that damn game.

Machines modeling after/ as models for human thought

I think that one of the most interesting things about computers is what they are made to imitate and what they are made to explain. The people who make computers are, in a way, modeling them on the human brain to better understand the human brain. What is thought? What is consciousness? How can we give these to a machine, creating “artificial intelligence”? Yet, while we strive to make a machine that acts the way the human brain acts, we also assume that once it is made...it can then teach us more about the human brain. It's interesting how Katherine Hayles notes this, “Humans, who have limited access to their own computational machinery (assuming that cognition includes computational elements...), create intelligent machines whoe operations can be known in comprehensive detail (at least in theory). In turn, the existence of these machines, as many researchers have noted, suggests that the complexities we perceive and generate likewise emerge from a simple underlying base; these researchers hope that computers might show us, in Brian Cantwell Smith's phrase, 'how a structured lump of clay can sit up and think.'” (Hayles 41) Isn't this then, an oxymoron of a sort? How can you model something on something you don't fully understand and then hope that the result will make you understand the original object?

What actually got me thinking about this was discussion section last Friday. Some people started talking about Google Street View and face recognition software, as if face recognition software was something that would occur in the near future. Yet, I don't believe this is true at all. Last semester, I took Intro to Cognitive Science where this issue was actually brought up. The fact is that we don't even really know how the human brain recognizes faces. It isn't one set area of the brain. There were experiments which tried possible ways that a machine could recognize faces to see if the human brain worked in that way but I think that, in the end, it was just too difficult. There are too many parameters. Because a machine is a machine...it needs to be told what to include, what to exclude, all the parameters. If the lighting changes from one photo to another, the machine will not be able to tell that it is still the same person. Angles, shade, position...it all matters. Therefore, I don't really believe that machines and computers should be modeled on human thought processes and then used to understand the brain. They belong in their own separate categories especially because we have not yet reached the point in understanding ourselves that we can produce something imitating humanity.

slow down, you move too fast.

John Cayley, our guest lecturer in class this morning, used the term “hyperhistory” in reference to the rapid rate at which all things technological evolve these days. Indeed, it seems almost impossible for the hottest iPod/video game console/laptop/PDA to not be labeled “outdated” within a year and “obsolete” in about five. The codes we use to control our hardware are just as frequently updated. If a person refuses to update their technology, they can continue to function in their own computing environment, but, as N. Katherine Hayles puts it in “Speech, Writing, Code,” “they are increasingly marooned on an island in time, unable to send readable files or to read files from anyone else.” I can make all the birthday cards in Print Shop 2 I want, but if I want to send one to my grandma who's running Print Shop 20, I'll have to print it out and give her a hard copy.

I think Hayles' comparison between code and language then is especially interesting. She brings out the point that the changes in code are much more abrupt than in spoken language. We might find it easier to read Dan Brown than Shakespeare, but we can understand them both, despite Shakespeare's language being 500 years old. However, there are other interesting contrasts. Code is much more unforgiving of errors than language is. It doesn't matter if you mistype one character or the whole program. The machine will not accept it. As Hayles puts it, “regardless of what humans think of a piece of code, the machine is the final arbiter of whether the code is intelligible.” The human processing of language is more sympathetic. I (and probably many of y'all) have been forwarded several copies of an email that goes something like this:

Subject: I CANT BELIEVE I CAN READ THIS!!!!!1
Message: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae...

I think a really fascinating contrast can be made between the relative stability of code and human language on a computer. Imagine that I created three files over the last 20 years. First, in 1988, I enter the text of Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Address in an unformatted text editor in the old text-based operating system MS-DOS. In the same pure text editor, I write code for a program that will display the text of that address one word at a time in the BASIC programming language. In 1993, I type the text into a document in the WordPerfect word processing software in Windows 3.1 and add some boldness and underlining. Now, in 2008, I want to access all three files on my brand new Windows Vista laptop. Unless I have the right converter, the WordPerfect document will not open in any of the word processors on my computer, so that text will be lost. The text of the other files was unencoded, so I'll be able to view their contents. The BASIC code will be useless unless I somehow manage to find a program that runs on Vista and can interpret the obsolete language. The pure text of the address, however, will be exactly as legible when I double click on it today as it did when I first entered it in 1988.

experiencing digital art

Having experienced the CAVE, Patchwork Girl, and John Cayley’s “Speaking Clock”, I rather feel bothered by the inconveniency of manipulation. I can’t help but to wonder what is the real intention of creating digital art, do viewers really enjoy and appreciate this new form of media? Taking the CAVE as an example, Soren Pold has mentioned in Interface Realisms that “In the dominant perceptions of VR, the interface should be all encompassing and three-dimensional, and the user should be surrounded by an immersive, total simulation. The interface would thus simultaneously disappear and become totalized.” Program writers have always tried to bridge technology with text, and giving the viewer a unique experience. However, in the cave, from the viewer’s perspective, I did not have this encompassing and three-dimensional feel. The program writers get more enjoyment from the process of writing the code and creating the digital art then the viewers. The viewers, therefore, will not able to appreciate the work if he or she did not engage in the process of creation.

Digital Art as Realism?

Reading “Interface Realism: The Interface as Aesthetic Form” I wondered about the use of the word realism to describe the dominant representational mode of the interface (page 3). I questioned this use because the word realism is rather broad, attached to previous art movements, and may be a dangerous term for such a discussion on new media. Pold explains that culture, aesthetics, and art influence computer programming and instruments, for instance Auto-Illustrator, but those influences of mediation are unseen, and therefore not discussed. This lack of discussion comes from the ingrained understanding that the machine is a tool for a use or purpose. What I am trying to get at is if looking at digital art as a form of realism successfully breaks apart the machine into its engineered use and societies influences? If not, does it creates a new myth of the machine that covers over societal influences? Lev Manovich discusses the political implications within digital media that are invisible and how making those links visible in digital art is extremely powerful. If this is the case, then using the term realism must work towards making visible the invisible.

Embodiment and the Hierarchy

People use this new language to communicate with our machines and teach them different tasks to repeat and build on to create something. Humans can now inhabit the same power as the forces at work which make our DNA form the way it does, causes atoms to attach the way they do. We have become the analogous forces for our machines and computers through the use of an interface. Throughout history, people have been fascinated with this idea of creation, hence why many have turned to inventing and art, a chance to play god for just a little while and be in total control of a medium. However, when software art comes into the picture, it seems that we enter a more modern view of the god complex. We place all of the pieces in their place and send them on their ways, not caring where they end up; hoping that something will come of it, but not completely disappointed if it self-detonates. If this is considered what the wave of the future is going to be, the new creation, and the realizations which lead to more and important creations of functions and patterns by humans, then it seems that a hierarchy of art is established, with software art as the next platform, the next step up, the new wave of the Hegelian ladder of understanding. This would make sense as the role of the human has become the creator of the process, the creator of the electronic pulses which create action and life. However, why do I find that the more organic arts which embody the human mind, psyche, kinesis, and entropy to be more important and striking to the way humans react, interact, and use the world and materials around them?

Perhaps it lies in the grounding of these aesthetic forms of art in processes which come naturally to the human understanding, our senses and our physical and mental anguish, as we process it in our heads. Embodiment of art seems to be more legitimate in communicating something beautiful and creative to the human spirit. I would risk to go so far to say that ballet, or any other highly, highly, structured dance should be coupled into the same categories as coding, which for the sake of argument, I will call “aesthetic separations.” These highly stylized, other language base forms of expression seem to want to break from the human body, break from the human experience, and break from the organic structure the process of evolution created. This further evolution leaves this organic understanding of things and leaps to a new understanding, which I argue should not be taken to be above more organic types of dance (folk dances, African dance, etc.) which acknowledge the body and use its own language to communicate, a language which we understand not with our minds, but our visual connections. Writing and speech also are put into the organic arts as stemming from a series of sounds (although mechanically created) that are produced within the human body, grounded in our organic selves.

Therefore, I would argue against Hayle’s arguments about how code surpasses speech and writing, and I would argue that the highly stylized “aesthetic separations” do not achieve a hierarchical stance as the more noble practices in relation to the peasant-like organic arts. Code is created in a language not inherently part of the human body, not produced by the human body, but rather by the electrical impulses created within the machine. The creator is limited by the electronic currents the machine produces; in a way, making the machine the force higher than the actual creator himself. I can appreciate these aesthetic practices and new and exciting and creative, but I would go to argue against the bourgeois hierarchy of these arts. No hierarchy is necessary, as each applies and affects their own reaction mediums. The organic arts appeal to the human experience, whereas the artistic separations appeal to the human mind and mechanization out of the acknowledged organic self.

language and code; synapses and transistors

Hayles uses notions from Saussure and Derrida to formulate ideas about code and how a computer handles signifiers and signifieds. The crux of her argument is that digital computers 'rectify' signifiers by virtue of their electronics - all noise between 0 and 5 volts is translated to either on or off, and thus signifiers in the digital world are absolute. To me this begs the question of what happens when we extend this reasoning to the function of the human brain as a computer? Rudimentary understanding of the brain is that of a neural network of synapses firing and neurons communicating - a system which can be viewed much like the communication of transistors within a digital computer; however, while noise in a digital computer is "rectified into unambiguous signals of one and zero before they enter the bit stream" (46), noise in an organic brain is a fundamental aspect of the communication. Synapse communication is analog, with a huge variety of information conveyed through frequency - thus data in the brain is not rectified, language communication is subject to noise, to subjectivity, to interpretation.

Another question this notion of analogue vs digital computing seems to lead to is one that Hayles also brings up when she mentions that "as the system builds up levels of programing laungages [...] they develop functionalities that permit increasingly greater ambiguities" (46) - i.e. even though the digital system is founded unambiguously, is the end result - the user level result - any different to the standard ambiguous world which Saussure lays out? A vinyl record is at it's root an infinitely analogue (ambiguous) store of data, and a CD fundamentally digital (unambiguous), yet after all the level of abstraction between encoding and listening, isn't the resultant experience equally ambiguous, equally plural?

If all of our actual uses, presentations, of digital code live in the real of the abstract, what does it matter that we can 'peer through to the source?' The end result is the same.

Art, Time, Code

In “Interface Realisms”, Pold discusses a program called Auto-Illustrator - a crazy cousin of Photoshop that is only semi-controlled by the user. I’ve never played with it, but it sounds like fun. He brings up an interesting point though, that goes along with all the new rules, or lack of rules, regarding authorship and copyright in the realm of new media. He asks “Who is the designer? The user or the author of the code?” This is a difficult question for me to wrap my head around, because there must be programmers, artists in their own right, to create these interfaces, but users will certainly create images that the original designer couldn’t have imagined. This strange collaboration inherent in most forms of new media was exemplified in some of the websites as well.

After perusing some of the strange offshoots of the Mez website, I found that the most coherent page I saw was a collaboration, although I’m not sure who the authors are or what exactly is going on. There is a line somewhere in the middle that says “explode the myth of individualized artistic ownership and requirements of chronological progression,” that fits with the spirit of new media, and also brings up another question about the realities of virtual dimensions. As we saw in the Cave, (fairly) real seeming 3D space can be created from code, but Lev Manovich posed another question about this space - “What about time in new media?” (at the end of the Doom and Myst section). Can we also trick the brain into experiencing a false sense of time as well as space? What if this could fool the body into aging slower, or train us to react faster? What would it feel like to experience a different pace of time? Or would we notice at all, since according to special relativity even if we were traveling at near the speed of light we’d feel the same (but everyone else would be in slow motion). It’s such an innate sense, the passing of time in discrete and measurable blocks - could computers really make us believe anything else?

Regarding code, I think that as with any language that few know fluently, it introduces a new dynamic where there is a great reliance on capable programmers. In “Speech, Writing, Code”, the sense that I get when Hayles is discussing the computer’s interpretation of code on p50 is that the writer of the code is, hierarchically speaking, below the computer. Since the machine is the one that says “No,” or “Error,” it is the programmer that must go back and change things - even though humans designed computers in the first place, we become slaves to the original design until it is altered from the inside out. Furthermore, many of these talented "code monkeys" work for large companies and are told what to create and how programs need to work, so they are also under another set of human bosses who control their paychecks. It seems unfortunate that the ones who have the patience and clever expertise in programming software are seemingly on the bottom of the ladder.

Finally, I think it’s ironic that code was developed to be beautifully logical and simple, yet when most of us look at a source (at least the first few times), it just looks like a cat walked across the keyboard. But appreciation comes with understanding, and even the teeny experience I’ve had makes me incredibly thankful for those who can code.

Interfaces Are Mere Restrictions of the Mind

I really enjoyed reading Pold’s essay on interfaces. After reading Pold’s ideas they do indeed bring in mind the problems with interfaces. Using the very computer I’m typing into right now, makes me think what the technological world would be like without interfaces that hide the complexities of technology from us. Perhaps through such technological advances, humans themselves could evolve in their understanding and communication with machines. The exposure of the machine’s codes and data would definitely push the human understanding of machines somehow. As long as such complexities of the machine are hidden away from humans, there is a constant restriction on humans, a restriction of their understanding for the technological world. If we’re to link machines to their users, then the interfaces need to become “transparent” putting us into direct contact with the machine. This way we’re strengthening our comprehension of the machine, learning something more about the machine’s language and also developing our own communicational processes. Interfaces are indeed created to make computers, and other devices, more accessible to us, yet limit growth. Programmers could probably break down technology, but majority of society remain ignorant, because of the restrictions called interfaces. Perhaps we should be making the complexities of machines, bettering our thinking-skills, understanding of machines and technological-evolution.

"James Joyce Saves the Day" or ""And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?"

At one point in Wark’s article, he mentions Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” as being a sort of “precursor” to “the emerging world of codework,” in the sense that Joyce’s text is incredibly saturated with neologisms and composites of pre-existing words that create a language that is both frustrating, yet interesting to read throughout an entire novel. The entire concept of codework and hypertext and their functions were somewhat fuzzy for me, but Wark’s comparison to Joyce sort of allowed me to think about the whole mess in a less confusing way. I wasn’t altogether sure how to think of a codes and hypertext as a language or text, because of their ability to open up several different “permutations” and links to god knows where. But suddenly, at the mention of Joyce it all made sense. One word or a few words can read one way on the page, yet they can mean something [or many things, often times] entirely unrelated. And what’s more important is that it takes a great deal of effort to get through Joyce’s words to their actual meaning, something akin to codes/hypertext. This is something I can understand/appreciate, especially when given something like
o
|:__::::::::::_Ñ
Ñ|_::::::::::_Ñ
Ñ|_:::::::
:: : :: :
or
>+<
][][][][][][][in][Form.ational Sauces
>+::drenching wurds with cauls of gritty re:][d][wined rims & gra.][k][nit.e longing
>++< hearts of c.hun.king stone
::shifting l][iquid polyvalent][ucre melts gigabyting fronts
>+.+.< removable feldspar ][s(ta][c][tic)nakes & jacob][ladders
::whole twitching N.titees d][cl][own.loading l][m][uddite dust
][][][][][][]
][][][][][][][][][][][=][
<=>

Granted, the first example is a bit much for me, but the second isn’t as trying. Thanks to Wark and his Joyce comment, I can sort of see where codework is trying to reach out past the typical ::type type type:: of a keyboard or typewriter or whatever. At this point, I’m sort of left agreeing with Saussure and the arbitrariness of what we read/hear and what we conceptualize.

familiarity and unlimitation

When Manovich considers “remix culture,” he considers the sample verses the whole of the text. “[W]e still need art. We still want to say something about the world we live in and our lives in it… We need to accept that for others our work will just be a set of samples, or maybe just one sample” (page 210). Everyone possesses this need to create art, and now that the tool is available, everyone can––easily––and does. And in this “remix culture,” they do so by borrowing that which has already been created. From Manovich’s perspective, this is intertwined with our desire to personalize having become possible by using the computer as our tool. Every image, film clip, song––in short any text in any medium––we can personalize, make our own, by using the computer as a tool. Thus the computer becomes the enabler of this innate human desire to make art.

The flawlessness of the freedom and the uber-human nature of this relationship with the computer are called into question by Pold’s discussion of the interface as a mediator between the tool itself––the hardware––and our impression of what reactions our actions have. In his discussion of functional realism, he explains that Auto-Illustrator shows that “functionality is dressed up as a mere tool in ordinary software… [and] points out that mainstream software is limited in its potential for creativity because it has to stay within the range of the tool metaphor” (section 32). (The interface itself is fairly inhibitive––because it must be intuitive, it cannot break with traditions and form new ways of interacting with the machine (ie: the file folder icons)).

This idea raises the question that the way in which we use the computer as a multimedia tool actually limits the possibilities of the computer. This is not the only way we are limiting ourself by traditional definitions––Wark describes the limits we place on writing by considering it “text.” Bush suggested a new language to improve communication with machines. But a fear of becoming less human, losing touch with our non-virtual roots, seems to be a major impediment. I, personally, felt very uncomfortable with the idea of a new mechanic language, and Auto-Illustrator makes me uncomfortable as well. But perhaps in order to take full advantage of the computer we need to embrace the idea that it is not just a tool for the manipulation of familiar, material media, but its own medium that and not necessarily a mere tool for our use.

Artistic originality and distance

Manovich makes the distinction between the three types of artists, traditional artists (painters, sculptors, etc.) media artists and software artists. According to Manovich, software artists are new romantics/modernists because they construct art originally, using the building blocks of code. He writes on page 211 that software art goes back to the computer as a programming machine, rather than a media machine, since artists use a programming language, rather than fragments of already constructed media, to create their art. Obviously for Manovich the originality of a work of art depends on the originality of the medium and its potential to create “from scratch.”

So programming and code enable the artist to produce not just a reaction to already existing media, but “an original and subjective view of the world.” (211). This seems problematic to me because of the layered structure of code that Hayles discusses in Speech, Writing, Code. “Programming languages operating at higher levels translate this basic mechanic level of signification into command more closely representing natural language….different levels of code consist of interlocking chains of signifiers and signifieds, with signifieds on one level becoming signifiers on another. “ (45) In the case of the artist, if we interpret programming or code as made up of signifiers that signify commands to the computer, these commands must go through this process of “interlocking” signification to then produce the desired result in the binary code/voltage level that will then be rectified (converted) back into the art that is displayed in the interface. So basically the point is that there is a huge separation/distance between the programmer-artist and what he creates. Manovich seems to be aware of this separation/layering of the computer and questions the control of users of commercial software and video games which base their interfaces on causality: “The more power we delegate to a computer, the more we lose control over what it is doing….How do we know that a computer amplified our actions correctly?” (214) All this raises the question of whether artistic originality depends at all on proximity to the medium. Though Manovich would probably say that distance is irrelevant, it would be interesting to evaluate from Hayles’ perspective the authorship/artist-ship of text in code and programming. Is the separation of the programmer from the signifiers (voltage, according to Hayles) very different from the separation of the writer from the paper by the pen, or the painter from the canvas by the brush? What role do direct manipulation and causality play in creating an original text?

The Person or the Code? (Again)

Codes seem to be embedded everywhere.  Codes are in our computers, language is a code, our DNA is a code, and even chemical structures for atoms could be looked at as a form of code.  As we dissect our world into smaller and smaller bits, we seek to somehow encode these tiny chunks to make them more understandable.  But what truly exists beneath all these layers and layers of code.  If codes make up our DNA do they define who we are? Can our lives be written out as some enormous mathematical equation.  Where does code end and I began?  It is possible to control whole universes with code (as in Utopia).  I guess I just wonder if codes are how we understand and define things and also how we are defined, which came first the man or the code.

Every day news articles, bank transactions, and even political debates are being put into code.  All our information on the internet accessible only through what Pold described as "dynamic" interfaces, the changing canvas through which we glimpse digital culture.  Its funny how though computers are becoming more powerful, they are doing little to resemble the cyberspace of "The Matrix" or "Nueromancer".   Instead we have the same (though now more brightly colored, and aesthetically pleasing) windows as we have always had to navigate through our computers.  I don't really have a problem with sticking to what works, but I feel some of the predictions we have read about how much the computer interface will change will be far from hitting the mark.

The Person or the Code? (Again)

Codes seem to be embedded everywhere.  Codes are in our computers, language is a code, our DNA is a code, and even chemical structures for atoms could be looked at as a form of code.  As we dissect our world into smaller and smaller bits, we seek to somehow encode these tiny chunks to make them more understandable.  But what truly exists beneath all these layers and layers of code.  If codes make up our DNA do they define who we are? Can our lives be written out as some enormous mathematical equation.  Where does code end and I began?  It is possible to control whole universes with code (as in Utopia).  I guess I just wonder if codes are how we understand and define things and also how we are defined, which came first the man or the code.

Every day news articles, bank transactions, and even political debates are being put into code.  All our information on the internet accessible only through what Pold described as "dynamic" interfaces, the changing canvas through which we glimpse digital culture.  Its funny how though computers are becoming more powerful, they are doing little to resemble the cyberspace of "The Matrix" or "Nueromancer".   Instead we have the same (though now more brightly colored, and aesthetically pleasing) windows as we have always had to navigate through our computers.  I don't really have a problem with sticking to what works, but I feel some of the predictions we have read about how much the computer interface will change will be far from hitting the mark.

Which Came First the Person or the Code?

Interface what? (attempt #2)

Even after reading Soren Pold’s close, 13-page analysis of I didn’t understand what the intertface was. He does define it on the bottom of page 2, but I was still unclear as it what it was exactly that was being discussed.

 

The way I usually clarify murky definitional situations is to pay a visit to dictionary.com. When I typed in “interface,” the site came back with an exhaustive list of entires. I read through the different ones, trying to decide which one best described the interface we had read about and discussed. After I had finished, I decided that the interface in question is ALL of these definitions, and that many of the entries were actually also describing other facets of human-computer interaction that have come up in the Pold, Manovich, and Haley’s work.

 

1.a surface regarded as the common boundary of two bodies, spaces, or phases. I thought this sounded like the computer screen. Although we sometimes tend to thing of the screen as the computer, it’s actually just the visual representation of the functions that are occurring within the machine we’re operating. 

 

2. the facts, problems, considerations, theories, practices, etc., shared by two or more disciplines, procedures, or fields of study: the interface between chemistry and physics. This definition seems to harken back to Haraway and her notion of the cyborg, as well as to the idea that we are the machine/the machine is us that the Professor from Kansas State University was arguing for in his YouTube video.

 

3. a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings. Or even between equipment (like computers) and human beings. I think this could definition could also refer to code for its role as shared language between humans and computers. Perhaps this interconnection is an internet server, the keyboard of a computer, or the touch screen on an ATM, or a videogame controller- whatever medium it is that allows for the human/computer connection to occur.

 

4.communication or interaction: Interface between the parent company and its subsidiaries has never been better. In terms of computers and humans, this sounds a lot like code…

 

5. a thing or circumstance that enables separate and sometimes incompatible elements to coordinate effectively: The organization serves as an interface between the state government and the public. The computer is the ultimate multi-tasking machine. It allows us to download software, play music, type an e mail or essay, talk with a friend via video chat or Skype, play a game of Solitaire, edit photos, create a song, and organize our photos all at the same time if we really want to! No where but outside the digital realm could we attempt all of those operations at the same time, or even, for that matter, in the same space. 

Interface what?

Speech, Writing, and Code

It struck me as I read Hayles that the fundamental difference between code and writing (and speech), is what she said on page 51: "Like esoteric theoretical writing, code is intelligible only to a specialized community of experts who understand its complexities and can read and write it with fluency." Then she goes on to describe how writing and speech pervades on a different level of code, as only "(relatively) few experts can initiate changes in the system," and "no such bridges can be built between Windows 95 and Windows XP, without both massive recoding and fluency in the nastily complex code of Windows programming" (Hayles 51). I feel the comparison of code to "esoteric theoretical writing" is inappropriate. As illegible as code may be to the layman, it is anything but esoteric. It's far less ambiguous and far more logical than speech or writing (in any natural language). The machine's inability to interpret connotation forces the programmer to account for every detail. And let us not forget that code is a human construction - it is the result of our need to communicate with machines. Any fault of the code, such as the irritating distance between Windows 95 and Windows XP files, is due to poor planning (or business savvy planning), which is a result of natural speech and writing. In this sense, one might argue that code in and of itself cannot express connotation, as this would only lead to ambiguity. This would support the idea that code is subordinate to speech and writing. Because of the lack of the secondary meaning, code can only represent a fraction of what speech and writing can.

Hayles continues to argue that "there is no parallel to compiling in speech or writing, much less a distinction between compiling and run-time" (Hayles 59). She is referring to the compilation of object oriented languages, which have liberated the programmer from the clutches of procedural languages. I always interpreted the process of compilation as a sort of translation from one language to another. The upper level object oriented language cannot be interpreted by the machine (the machine, in fact, cannot interpret non-procedural languages). This compilation parses the higher level code, checks for correctness, and then writes lower level code to a file that can be interpreted by the machine's hardware. This is the definition of translation, from one language to another, from human/programmer language to machine language. Is this so different from the translation of the written word or speech to another, natural language? In many cases there exists more than one translation, more than one way to perform the same task. There are wordier (or codier) translations, as well as more elegant (or eloquent) solutions. Furthermore, this language of machines isn't completely unintelligible to humans - someone had to write it, and someone has to maintain it. The language of code isn't as far removed from natural languages as most people believe.

Code's malleability is another important asset. Pixar films feature images created exclusively with code, which serves as an example of code's ability to establish a familiar relationship with the viewer. However, imagine these films without the voices of actors and actresses we know and love? Furthermore, imagine if these voices were replaced with digitally synthesized voices? This organic sound is necessary - anything short of it would be almost offensive to the viewer. Code, in this example, has replaced the camera and lens (or rather created its own). Code however, did not replace the script - it supplements the creative writing with creative coding.

Whether you look at code as some "esoteric", foreign entity, or as a logical means of conveyance, it is a tool in the same vein as speech and writing; they supplement each other, not subordinate.

Creativity

In “Speech, Writing, and Code” I found it very interesting when Hayles wrote about HTML documents and “reveal[ing] code” (pp. 54). Many of my friends and family know how to tweak HTML coding on websites and also use dreamweaver - even those who aren’t concentrating in digital media and computer science. While I read this, I thought how manipulating HTML to construct and hide certain things enhances the feeling of individuality on the internet. People are allowed to add and change HTML codes on blogs and Myspace in order to personalize their site and make it their own. This is similar to what Hayles said later in the chapter on page 60, referring to the computer as an “expressive medium.”
I completely agree how computers often reflect “real conditions of existence.” It’s true: there’s a trashcan on my desktop for me to put in unnecessary documents and objects. On my Mac, there are even “Sticky notes” that stick to my desktop so that I can write little reminders. I’ve got a dictionary, “iChat” for video chatting and instant messaging, iTunes to listen to my music, a calender to schedule appointments -- aside from food, there’s not much more I need to sit for days with just my computer. However, I don’t understand what she means when she says that the machine is disciplining us to become a “certain kind of subject.”
This is also similar to what Lev Manovich writes about in “Generation Flash.” Flash and software programming gives people to ability to CREATE rather than CRITIQUE. This is a very good thing, exercising creativity and interaction between people via flash/shockwave projects. These projects do not force messages (or merely present them); on the contrary, they present data to be analyzed. It reminds me of what Barthes was describing “writerly text,” in ways that it presents a “new rhetoric of interactivity” in which the viewer is “actively working with the data: reorganizing it, uncovering the connections, become aware of correlations.”

The Marriage Diagram

Upon reading Manovich’s articles, I had some difficulty accepting his diagnosis of creativity in the last 50 years. While I understand that Manovich does not want to label ALL artists from the 60’s-80’s as “parasitic media artists,” I’m concerned that he focuses his argument on too small a creative pool without defining the parameters of his category. At risk of citing an instance of “simulacrum” before we have read Baudrillard, I would like to use “Sesame Street” as a counterexample to Manovich’s assertion. Although Sesame Street could be described as an idealized version of a fictional reality, it is nevertheless, the product of media artists in the 60’s-80’s who used the tropes of variety shows and puppeteering to create a new kind of media art. Sesame Street could not exist on paper, as a film, or as an RPG; the Sesame Street that we can identify from our childhood is an exclusively television-based experience. Furthermore, its techniques were new. The characters, jokes, themes, songs, animations- all were created as component pieces of Sesame Street. It was a new kind of entertainment, an exclusively media-based entertainment, and it was original. As Manovich explains it, “an original and subjective view of the world.”

Looking back on this example, it looks a little silly, but I still posit that there were new, original kinds of media art being produced from 1960-1989 that did not rely on existing media for content.

It also occurred to me to examine a little more closely Hayles’ thesis that executable code is different from written or spoken language in terms of the immediacy of its behavior. Code, she posits, means what it does; it is “executable” in a way that English, for instance, is not. She cites as an example a priest’s pronouncement that a couple are married, contrasting that kind of executable speech with the more material one implicit in coding. What I would like to think about, though, is the idea that code can be interpreted as backward-functioning speech. If code is executable, and only has meaning insofar as its function is concerned, then it is defined by its materiality (as we talked about in class today). As Hayles describes, a code becomes a behavior when a voltage of electricity is interpreted as a one or a zero, and this binary becomes the signifier for higher levels of programming code. Eventually, code manifests itself in a linguistic system comprehensible only to a machine and a select, elite group of skilled programmers. At its origin, however, code begins as particles moving through space. Something physical has to happen in order for code to work – regardless of the number of layers of signifiers within a given programming system, language cannot create in and of itself.
I guess a diagram of code working would look something like:

Voltage→ binary (transition from matter to language)→ command 1 → command n → interface (eg. text in English)

In the example of the spoken word, however, this system is reversed. A priest pronounces a couple married. This in itself does not have inherent meaning. But then the couple leave the church, have sex, take a honeymoon trip together, move into a house, have children, cook dinner, open joint savings accounts, etc. The impetus here is not the voltage, but the language itself, which prompts the material behavior. A diagram of the executable spoken word working would look something like:

Interface (eg. pronouncement in English)→ [behavior 1 (eg. Make dinner)→ behavior n →] marriage

in which the bracketed parts of the diagram represent the transition from language to matter- the English language equivalent of binary (for the purposes of this metaphor).

This is perhaps a reductionist reading of the effects of spoken words and the inherent difference between code and writing or speech, but there might be something in the idea that in all three forms of executable language, the commands themselves cannot effect change without material changes.

on your assignment....

a comment or two regarding your assignment.

assignment #1 introduces you to the methodology of "close reading." this intense reading practice--epitomized by barthes' reading of "sarrasine"--grounds much work in media analysis, and the humanities more generally.

it also seeks to get you to interrogate, in a creative way, the claims made by haraway, barthes, bush, nelson etc. on the "liberation" (or modes of survival / control) enabled by cyborg semiologies / hypertext. what differences does starring a text--releasing a text's limited plurality--make? what difference does the ability to make associative links and to create textual systems that change make?

i look forward to reading your assignments!

My last post was on an article from two weeks from now under the same author as one from this week, please disregard it.

-Thank You

Moving Through Space

I found the discussion of virtual environments and space in Manovich’s article to be of particular interest. I was especially fascinated with the idea of Osmose. If the terms of movement were as I understood them to be any amount of thrashing and flailing of appendages causes absolutely no movement in the virtual environment. The only way to navigate is to control your breathing, to think and manipulate a task which is automated from the moment of birth. It seems like it’s asking the user to focus on every detail of their life. What if this idea was taken a step further, the rate of your heartbeat moves you; the temperature of your body propels you through some computerized space? Could one learn to control these conditions too? Though I was unable to find a video link on youtube, I recall once seeing a man bury his head in the sand for hours on TV without having to come up and breathe. Could a video game be able to realize this kind of concentration? It brings to life existential philosophy, to appreciate the fullness of every second, of every moment, of every sensation. I guess when it truly comes down to it I have more questions than answers when it comes to the role of space in how we perceive things and the role of space in perception.
On a lighter note, the discussion of “games” in the article brought to mind more conventional games and how they deal with space. The classic, fun-filled party-game, Twister creates a unique environment, a virtual reality if you will, its own rules governing how one is allowed to move through space. Right hand must be on red, left foot on yellow.
My discussion would be incomplete without mentioning Nintendo’s take on classic games like Duck Hunter, the Wi, which even more closely knits together the fabric of real space and virtual space. The worlds of virtual and real space are becoming more complexly intertwined. The only real applications of this three dimensional cyberspace so far seems to be as means of entertainment.

overwhelmed by the patches

for some reason my mac was having an issue posting, I was forced to use a pc...

I was wondering what exactly the connection between the Memex and Patchwork Girl is? Are hypertexts an attempt of forming associative links between pieces of information such as Patchwork Girl and its many sources? Hypertext is a cross referencing system, drawing connections between different texts. I felt while experiencing Patchwork Girl I was forced to draw more associations myself than the program did for me. For the first 15 minutes I was struggling to understand how one text related to another, or in what order they made sense. We have the map laid out for us, we can see where the texts fall in the grand scheme, however there were times when some just got lost in the chaos.

The Memex is a form of storing information, and mimics the ability of the human mind to make associations between pieces of information. Is this what Patchwork Girl is trying to do? Is Patchwork Girl trying to cut down on repetitive texts? I feel it is doing the opposite, I feel it is using the repetition to drive a point home. There was no real narrative quality to Patchwork Girl, it was all just a bit muddled and overwhelming to me. Each reader is going to have a different experience; each time you read it you create it. There is no set path through the program and the texts. Patchwork Girl is a patchwork, the dotted lines aren’t connecting the pieces for me, and everything seems to be disjointed and askew. Where is Bush’s Memex to come rescue me from my association issues? I feel that the order of the Patchwork Girl is maybe one person’s response to the numerous texts, but like I said, Patchwork Girl is going to be different for each reader.

writerly text and interactive art

While reading Barthes's S/Z, I became interested in the distinction he makes between the writerly text and the readerly text. Patchwork Girl clearly has a lot in common with his description of the writerly text. It has multiple places you can start, it can be read in many different directions, you can move through it forwards and backwards, and it doesn't have a clear beginning or end. The reader shapes his or her own experience of the piece by exploring the thick network of writing and images. I'd never come across any hypertext pieces before and I had a lot of fun trying to find my way through this piece and building the experience for myself. As I thought about what it felt like to experience Patchwork Girl, my mind drifted to other art forms and I found it interesting how much the writerly/readerly division could be applied elsewhere. Many interactive art pieces (such as installations using some combination of video, sound, sculpture, and text) seem to share a lot with the experience of Patchwork Girl. In these pieces, viewers create their own experiences by exploring the installation. Again, there are often no clear starting or ending points and there are many ways to experience it. Of course there are tons of peices out there that let the viewers participate in such an open way. Many more traditional art pieces, such as a painting on the wall of a museum, could be considered similar to the readerly text. In this case there's an established way to view the painting and the viewer "is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject" the piece. (Barthes 4)

One interactive installation artist I was recently introduced to is Camille Utterback. She had a piece set up at Brown a few years ago that some people may remember. It was called 'Text Rain' and was in the CIT. I like a lot of her other pieces more and if you're interested you can check out some videos of them here: http://www.camilleutterback.com/ I particularly enjoy her External Measures series which combines painting and interactive video in really intersting ways. In these pieces the viewers are left to paint the picture themselves by moving their bodies. These pieces do let both the artist and the viewer contribute to what happens on the screen and viewers can shape their experiences, but I don't know if they totally qualify as a writerly text. With Patchwork Girl too, the reader's/viewer's experience has limits and his or her path through the piece is defined in some ways.

writerly text and interactive art

While reading Barthes's S/Z, I became interested in the distinction he makes between the writerly text and the readerly text. Patchwork Girl clearly has a lot in common with his description of the writerly text. It has multiple places you can start, it can be read in many different directions, you can move through it forwards and backwards, and it doesn't have a clear beginning or end. The reader shapes his or her own experience of the piece by exploring the thick network of writing and images. I'd never come across any hypertext pieces before and I had a lot of fun trying to find my way through this piece and building the experience for myself. As I thought about what it felt like to experience Patchwork Girl, my mind drifted to other art forms and I found it interesting how much the writerly/readerly division could be applied elsewhere. Many interactive art pieces (such as installations using some combination of video, sound, sculpture, and text) seem to share a lot with the experience of Patchwork Girl. In these pieces, viewers create their own experiences by exploring the installation. Again, there are often no clear starting or ending points and there are many ways to experience it. Of course there are tons of peices out there that let the viewers participate in such an open way. Many more traditional art pieces, such as a painting on the wall of a museum, could be considered similar to the readerly text. In this case there's an established way to view the painting and the viewer "is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject" the piece. (Barthes 4)

One interactive installation artist I was recently introduced to is Camille Utterback. She had a piece set up at Brown a few years ago that some people may remember. It was called 'Text Rain' and was in the CIT. I like a lot of her other pieces more and if you're interested you can check out some videos of them here: http://www.camilleutterback.com/ I particularly enjoy her External Measures series which combines painting and interactive video in really intersting ways. In these pieces the viewers are left to paint the picture themselves by moving their bodies. These pieces do let both the artist and the viewer contribute to what happens on the screen and viewers can shape their experiences, but I don't know if they totally qualify as a writerly text. With Patchwork Girl too, the reader's/viewer's experience has limits and his or her path through the piece is defined in some ways.

Xanadu and Second Literacy

Both Foucault and Moulthrop rely on the metaphor of a map in their essays:

“Maps derive not from territories but from other map-making enterprises,” (Moulthrop 1).

“The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place…the heterotopia par excellence,” (Foucault 6).

Moulthrop predicts Xanadu to be no different from the Disney/Speilbergian future as “a place we must come ‘back’ to,” (Moulthrop 3). Thus, the future is a Foucauldian “boat,” a “place” in temporal space, “without a place,” (Foucault 6).

In terms of Xanadu as a technological innovation, a thing of “the future,” what does its recursiveness say about Time? The Xanadu refigures literacy—something of the past—to be re-enabled by hypertext, a thing from a place of as-yet unrealized existence. Is hypertext the “progressive self-modification” in the recursive loop of Time (represented by evolutions of literacy as markers of some kind of progress)?

overwhelmed by the patches

"Patchwork Girl" and Knowledge

The various components of “Patchwork Girl” bring to mind attempts to graphically represent the structure of human knowledge via mental mapping and in a way to reduce the human mind into a computing machine. “Patchwork Girl” mocks these deterministic, “scientific” attempts by its hectic language and by its self-affirmed insecurity about how one part relates to a visually connected other and about a part’s relation to the whole (the author addresses this at one node). In short, “PG” evokes a hermeneutic problematic that mental maps, file structures, etc. attempt to eliminate. In “PG’s” clear-cut links there is a painful recognition of their arbitrariness in regard to the whole and of their necessity in regard to other nodes. The reader is left to imagine the relationship of parts to whole, a relationship that is not stable or consistent across time or readers. Moreover, there are no clear temporal or causal relationships between nodes. They simply exist in a "no-place of the mind."  

“PG” is consciously reductive and orientalizing&