• How enabling or disabling are concepts such as ‘the network’, ‘feedback’ and ‘information’ for contemporary forms of life?
• Is the Internet one or many things?
• Is the advent of the ‘Information Age’ something to be welcomed or feared?
• What role can philosophy play in thinking about information and communication technologies and forms of subjectivity emerging in relation to them?
These questions and other related ones were tackled in this intensive one-day workshop at the University of Dundee. The workshop took place Wednesday April 1st 2015, 10 am – 6 pm, Room 2S15 in the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee. More info >
Dominic Smith (University of Dundee): ‘Does the Digital Subject Sleep?’ [MP3]
Ashley Woodward (University of Dundee): ‘Is the Digital Subject the Übermensch?’ [MP3]
Alan Bell (University of Dundee): ‘Paranoia, fictions and realities; technological change and the record’ [MP3]
Joris Vlieghe (University of Edinburgh): ‘How learning to read and write shapes humanity: A technosomatic perspective on digitization’ [MP3]
Erika Fulop (University of Hamburg): ‘Weave Your Own Web: Authorial Self-representation on the Internet’ [MP3]
Arnauld Regnauld (University of Paris VIII): ‘Aura is Interface: Translation and Subjectivity in the Digital Era’ [MP3]
Claire Larsonneur (University of Paris VIII): ‘Interface me? Living 3.0’ [MP3]
Pierre Cassou Noguès (University of Paris VIII): ‘Body as Money’ [MP3]
Galit Wellner (Ben Gurion University): ‘Codes of Subjectivity’ [MP3]
Tim Barker (University of Glasgow): ‘On Being Con-Temporary: What Technical Media Studies Might Offer to Theories of Contemporaneity’ [MP3]
It's the end of the 1960s and it is surprising to see how some of the media conventions (many of which are now widely accepted as contemporary) "survived" the techno-evolution for nearly half a century. All basic elements of the interface are still there today, unharmed, only massively pimped-up by high-tech cosmetics: the screen, the drawing pad, e-pen, graphic interface with Cartesian system of graphical representations. It's what's seen in the screen what has changed the most.
The Genesys system, developed by Dr. Ron Baecker in MIT's Lincoln
Laboratory from 1967-69, was one of the world's first interactive
systems for real-time animation. Genesys utilizes an interactive animation that exploits the potentialities
of direct graphical interaction. Because every last picture in the animation sequence
drives algorithms to generate the next one (so-called "dynamic display"), the process is referred to as
"picture-driven animation".
It would be hard to imagine a contemporary media user enjoying the interaction with the same graphic interface and experiencing the same joyful immersion, as that young illustrator in the movie did. Realization that you can control the imagery in such a new way must have triggered the feeling that suddenly, a completely new space for explorations opened up right in front of you.
From the times of Ch.Babbage, explorations in the fields of automated computing and cybernetics were carried out mostly by professionals, *
[* In contemporary techno-cultural lingo, the analogue for "professional" is "geek." It is interesting to notice, that the connotations of "geek" over the period from 60s until the "noughtees," followed a peculiar dynamics: from negative (sociopathic, asexual, "smart-ass", "programmer") to positive (social, sexual, successful, "CEO"). ]
at least until the 1990s, when "realistic" graphic interface became popular — i.e., became a norm. The representations in the computer screen became "real enough" to be enjoyed by everyone, not just programmers.
As we know, this realistic turn was met with explosion of enjoyment, in direct proportion to global computer sales. A radical change in the world-wide economy of enjoyment, and a general facelift to the interfaces: keyboard, drawing pad and e-pen, monitor. They remained intact, without any changes on a fundamental level. Obviously, there must have been reasons for that, and the "enjoyment" factor is not to be missed here. The screen — and not the "margins" around the screen: monitor, input/output devices — received the most of attention. The joy of watching, seeing, looking, gazing, peering, staring, glancing, glaring, peeping. It would be only natural to say, that the "picture-driven animation" was, indeed, also an "enjoyment-driven animation" (and "progress").
There was no reason to change the concept of the rectangular computer screen as a "window" metaphor, or to change the concept of a drawing pad as a metaphor of "paper," or the concept of an e-pen as a "pen." The factors of familiarity, convenience, and cognitive accessibility can still guarantee their dominance.
If the first stage (mode? level?) of enjoyment in the 50s-70s was "the joy of
recognition," then the second stage — the one which still lasts (more or
less) — could ne named "the joy of immersion." It is hard to ignore,
that both of them suggest a progression to "the joy of acting." The joy
of acting after the new media have been recognized, and after they have been embedded in our being, in our Dasein. Acting under the influence of the new media with Heideggerian "you are what you do" in mind.
If there is a direction to the movement of enjoyment, then it is
the ideology of representational realism which determins it. The "joy of
acting" must be tied with the realism of robotic action. That is a good topic, which requires a separate, more elaborate discussion, and I'll put this aside for now.
Returning to my initial surprise, what is actually surprising to see (or, rather, to witness again, to remember), it is how enjoyable the early "computer graphic systems" were at their time. Computer-generated visualizations were highly abstract and symbolic (those dotted lines even bare some semblance with aboriginal art), reduced to still recognizable minimum, bound to the aesthetics of visual economy. And in the aesthetical totality, the imagery has a certain raw quality, in the sense of raw imagery of the cinema avantgarde in 1900-30s...
