Ken Perlin's Lecture/NaNoWriMo

Ken Perlin was a great speaker. I was almost surprised (though I shouldn't have been after reading some of his blog) that he was so personable. I guess I had a preconceived notion of what a computer genius would sound like, and Ken was more of a philosopher/psychologist than anything else. I love that his main concern was in understanding human behavior through computer representations. The facial expression program was ingenious for this exploration, and I was pleased to see that it was actually being used for behavioral purposes with autistic children. I can see how many of Ken's games would become excellent teaching tools, but I was disappointed to hear that he thought many of the educational games we used to play as kids were ineffective. I used to love Mathblasters and a myriad of typing games.

As for the Novel in a month contest, I think it's an interesting idea. I like that Ken started a blog to force himself to write everyday. I wish I had that kind of discipline, because I used to love writing, and I used to write all the time, anywhere. I'm not sure if I really want to write a novel this November, but it definitely might inspire me to start writing more. I'm also curious to see how his joint-creation will come out, it could be very interesting.

Chapter 12

Intro / Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes
1960
Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentille)

• formed to explore the potential of literature through various constraints in vocabulary, syntax, novelistic or dramatic conventions, poetic meter, for, etc.
• types of Oulipo experiements include: lipograms, palindromes, algorithmic tecniques - hypermedia, and others
• founded by François Le Lionnais (original members:Jean Queval, Raymond Queneau , Jean Lescure, Jaques Duchateau, Claude Berge, and Jacques Bens)
• Jean Queval was often banned from their meeting place and then readmitted, and would later attempt to ban himself and be stopped by the group on several occasions
• the failures of language led them, and others before them, to "reflect on this strane tool which one would consider, which sometimes commans consideration, without reference to utility."
• one goal was to bring together texts for an anthology of experimental literature
• 
  

1961
Raymond Queneau

• created the famous book of poems in which each of 14 lines is interchangable with 10 others - Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes
  
• helped to define a new type of computer-mediated textuality, gives the reader an enhances role in the process of literary creation
• computer can be used for more than just creating infinite variations from a set of materials, it can also narrow them down and make decisions, but Calvino Argues that this will never create literature on its own.

1981
Paul Fournel

• the Centre Pompidou experiment
• use of computers to aid in reading select combinatory or algorithmic works (ie. Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes or his A story as you like it)
  
• computer can help with editing, or fine-tuning a text
• different types of relationships between author, work, computer, and reader: 1- Author>Computer>Work (creation is aided by the computer, author inputs information, computer makes selections), 2-Author>Computer>Work>Computer>Reader (the computer helps both the author make selections, and gives the reader clues to solve enigmas created by the author), 3-Author>Computer>Reader>Computer>Work (author creates material, reader choses what material to use, computer creates a product)

Italo Calvino

• created a short story or novel to explore the necessity of a computer for the creation of literature
• by writing a detective story with hundreds of possible scenarios, a computer is helpful in organizing and presenting what those scenarios are given the information provided
  

This is such a great committee. Of course the french created an organization whose mission was the explore the possibilities of literature; to create new and exciting ways to use text. I'm all for this kind of exploration and I'd love to play with this principle of constraints to see what I can create. One of the definitions that I liked the most for Oulipo was "rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape." This is a great metaphor for the work that they do.

Chapter 11

1965
Theodor H. Nelson

• coined the term "hypertext" as 'a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.'
• proposed that there were several specific types of hypertext; in this essay he describes on as a complex, reconfigurable, linked structures of information, which can be manipulated at a granularity much smaller (or larger) than the page.
• his vision was a precursor to making "personal information managers useful platforms for thinking and working in a networked world"

Chapter 10

1964
Roy Ascott

• "remade art (and art education) in view of Wiener's cybernetics"
• Ascott saw a connection between cybernetics/science and art (arguably the first to discuss new media art)
  
• used art "as an investigation of behavior, of creating situations for exploring behavior"
• created an entire system of art education that would include art, design, and science, and also require its students to find their own personal artistic identity
• Art should ask questions and find new answers
• Artists should be encouraged to use science as a tool and a reference and to integrate the two fields

Ascott definitely has an interesting idea for an art education curriculum. I really like the idea of students taking on personalities opposite from their "normal" selves and have random handicaps so that they must become interdependent and broaden their own experiences of personal behavior. That seems like a fascinating social experiement to me and I would be curious to see if it could really be implemented and whether the results will be as Ascott claims, that the students will then be able to create their own "special creative identity."

Chapter 9

1963
Ivan E. Sutherland

• created the Sketchpad System - a program developed for designers to draw geometric shapes on the first direct-manipulation interface using constraints.
• it allowed designers to communicate with the computer via picture/image rather than text alone.

Alan Kay

• created the object-oriented programming language Smalltalk and Dynabook
  

Chapter 8

1962
Douglass Engelbart

• outlines several ideas for the future of computers and computer technology
• imagined and created the word processor
• invented the mouse, the window, mixed text/graphic displays, the hyperlink
• helped to establish the Internet
• worked to "augment human intellect"

I applaud Engelbarts efforts to make it easier to solve more complex problems as our societies have evolved, but I can't help but think that it is this philosophy that has led us on a race towards what's most efficient and easy, but maybe not what's best.

Chapter 7

1959
Brion Gysin

• cut newspaper articles into sections ad rearranged them at random to create a book called Minutes to Go
• inspired Burroughs to write about the cut-up method

1961
William S. Burroughs

• the cut and paste method that he describes is used today in "many aspects of new media in computer literary practice as well as game theory
• oulipo was insipired by this technique
• cut-ups can be used by anyone, universal participatory way to utilize art and create new and more interesting game situations.
  

This is an interesting experiment with chance operations, and it can wield some pretty interesting results, or it can be kind of unitelligable. I definitely think this is worth trying, but I'm not super excited about it.

Chapter 6

1961
Allan Kaprow

• One of the many who organized a number of spontaneous, interactive performances
• Happenings blurred the lines between audience and artist, and between genres and mediums.
  
• the form is open-ended and fluid
• there is no obvious purpose or goal; the process is what's important
• they are ephemeral
• creates an organic connection between art and its environment
• the act of chance and spontenaity are of utmost importance, happenings are generally unscripted or very sparsely thought out
• no need for the patronage system that is corrosive to art, and are thus ultimately liberating

The creation of happenings calls into question authorship and allows for a more open, participatory definition of art.

Chapter 5

1960
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider

• promoted computer science education
• head of Advanced Research Projects Agency
• encouraged computer networking
• imagined a man-computer symbiosis in which computers help us to make decisions and solve problems.

I wonder if our PDA devices are something like he might have imagined or would he want us to go much further?

Chapter 3

Who: Alan Turing

When: 1950

What: Turing establishes a test for philosophers and computer engineers to create computers/programs that could imitate the non-physical actions of a human. "Can a machine fool someone into thinking it is a human?" Of course there were many objections to this test, because people were afraid that someone would develop computers with advanced systems of artificial intelligence that would outsmart a human, and that the lines would be blurred between human and machine. Turing establishes that of course computers can think, albeit in a very different process than humans, and wanted people to be more interested in how closely a computer could imitate a human.

Chapter 2

Who: Vannevar Bush

When: 1945

What: He invisioned the "memex" and essentially the idea for the modern day computer. This man was clearly ahead of his time, as he imagined many advances in technology that was yet to be established because of lack of funding. He imagined a camera using "dry photography" in a similar way to how the television works, and he imagined compressing books and information to make more accessible to scientists, and looked into new ways to call up this information and link it all together the way a brain works. Surely, Bush would be pleased by the innovations today that have made his ideas, realities. One of his innovative ideas that we haven't really seen much of today is the voice to type device. We have the technology for this today, and programs that use it, but it doesn't seem to be as prevelant, and I wonder why that is. Another is the device the piece of the Memex that would automatically photograph notes and sketches that the user would write/draw onto the machine. Again, we have this technology but it's not commonplace yet and I think it could be very practical.

Digital Dirt/Google Wave

Digital dirt, to me, is just the next step in hyper-surveillance in the age of the Internet. Everything we type into the Internet is being saved and stored somewhere, often in several places, and it's being used by everyone. Information is being used by employers, advertisers, the government, you name it. Just yesterday my friend's roommate used one of those tracking services to get someone's full name, date of birth, address, phone number, cell number, credit score, etc. and all he had to do was pay 10 bucks and presto, there it is. We, and at least I, don't think about it nearly often enough and are pretty careless about posting our information on the web, and in some instances it has become unavoidable. These days, in our generation, if you don't have a facebook account, or even just to make these blog accounts, personal information is required everywhere. I'm not sure what we can do to combat this besides throwing away our computers, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

The Google Wave program is intriguing. I like the idea of having my live chat incorporated into my email, but only if I can use it with as many people as I can use ichat with, otherwise it won't be worth it. I think it could be useful in terms of organization and saving things, but it's just more information that's being saved on the Internet for you. I guess I can't really say much else about this until I get a chance to try it and check out the features.

Ken Perlin

His website is pretty interesting. I wish I understood more about how he was creating these little games/programs. I tried to play the sheep one and the crossword/maze, and I guess I'm just not technologically inclined enough to understand how they work. I enjoyed his blog a lot more because he's asking some really interesting questions. I was particularly curious about this blog entry on developing a computer that could have the computational skills of a human brain. The thought that if we could develop something with a power of a brain, what happens when we go beyond that, will these brain computers be able to outsmart us, will they no longer have a need for us? I know this day is far into the future but who knows how far, and what the implications will be.
It's clear that Ken is extremely advanced in his understanding of computers and how to manipulate them. The program he created to create textures with "Noise-Turbulence" is amazing, however, I have no idea how it works. I'm not even sure why it's called noise-turbulence, so this will definitely be something I ask about when we meet him at his lab. Nevertheless, the output of this program is amazing, especially the liquid textures. I thought it was great that the inspiration came to him at 4am drinking coffee.
As for the PAD technology, I had no idea that this was created so long ago. I don't know why I haven't really seen it used until the IPhone/IPod Touch, but perhaps I just haven't seen where it was used before that. The idea is genius, to give us infinite space by playing with depth, I see it as a really practical piece of software and I wish we could use it for text documents (as a college student I see this as a cool way to take notes, so that I can add little pieces of information or links to specific notes I take).

Class # 5 viral videos

Create your own Font: I really like this idea. I don't have a lot of use for it in my everyday life, but the idea is pretty cool. I think I'll definitely try to use it just for fun when I have access to a scanner. I would love to go one step further with this program and use it to recognize my handwriting as font and then I could scan any handwritten papers, etc. and have it converted to a text document. I usually prefer to hand write essays and other assignments so that would be a great feature to use this kind of technology for.

Photosketch: As with the font creator, I don't have much use for photosketch, but I think the idea is interesting. I think the program involved could have a lot of other, possibly better, uses for it because the sorting technology seems very advanced. I hope this program makes people more, rather than less skeptical about the images that are being presented to us everyday.

Augmented Earth: I'm not sure how I feel about this program yet. It seems that the technology is nothing new, it's just making it easier for surveillance purposes, which has its pros and cons. Obviously I'd rather not have everyone able to find me no matter where I am, but this is already possible with Google Earth and government/police cameras, which are becoming even more omnipresent. In fact, I think I've decided that I'd really rather not have all of this surveillance, screw Big Brother.

Music Sites: Today music is increasingly accessible because most music can be easily downloaded, and if not it can probably be streamed online somewhere. I'm not sure what this is doing to the music business, but I'm usually for art/music that is democratic and accessible to all (although I understand that money has to be made somehow, it seems that most sales are from merchandise and concert tickets today anyway, and we're not going to be able to convince people to buy CD's anymore; digital music is the future). I happen to be one of the people who gets all their music through downloading, and I use a torrent program to get all the files. If you're interested in using torrents (torrents are compressed files that are shared peer to peer and through a torrent downloading program that decompresses the files into regular music/video files) you need Vuze for mac's, and for PC's it's bittorrent or utorrent. Then you can pretty much find whatever you're looking for, music, tv shows, movies, video games, etc.

Cyberpunk/Steampunk: I'm not sure what else to say about these subcultures. I think it's interesting to see people get so involved in an aesthetic, which I can understand, I definitely love aesthetics, but I probably wouldn't ever get as particular about it. My interests are too varied to focus my attention the way these people do, but more power to them, there are certainly more destructive obsessions out there. I think the fact that they involve the word punk is very fitting. The term punk to describe the music sub-culture of the 1970's-80's came from a magazine that was created to present the sub-culture to the world and give those people involved in it a common ground and a type of validation to a group of outsiders. This idea totally applies to cyber and steampunk as minority groups who bond around common interests and aesthetics. I see that steampunk is really taking off today with the Way Station and Steampunk month, but I just hope it doesn't become another commodity the way punk did.

History of the Internet: This was a great documentary about the creation of the Internet. Today the Internet has become incredibly vast and it's easy to forget that it only began 30 or so years ago and it began as a network between two, then three, then four, and so on computers. It's incredible to see that the people working on it were mostly grad students not much older than us, with an interest in communicating through computers, so they just set out to figure out a way to do that, with almost no precedent. What they created is a phenominal feat, and probably the most important invention of the century. What may be even more important is the fact that it was designed to be ultimately democratic by not giving the authority over its expansion and access to anyone person/group/country. Without that distinction we would lose so much community and information that we now have access to through the Internet.

Project Natal/Augmented Reality

Look, I love the Wii as much as the next person, but my god people, can't we just go outside! I thought it was the most ridiculous thing that some kid with an actual skateboard, scanned its image into the game so that he could "ride around" on his carpet. If you want to play a video game, play a video game, but if you want to do real sports and jump around your living room pretending to do them, then why aren't you motivated enough to just go do it. This program, in combination with the Augmented Reality program really make me feel like we're all going to turn into computer zombies and never leave our house.

However, I'm a little more inclined to accept Augmented Reality as a positive advancement in technology. There seems to be a lot of interesting uses for it like the AR system of the F-35 Lightning II. According to wikipedia (so of course this may or may not be the case):

The F-35 Lightning II has no Head-up display because all targets are tracked by the aircraft's situational awareness and the sensor fusion is presented in the pilot's helmet mounted display system that provides an augmented reality system that allows the pilot to look through his own aircraft as if it wasn't there.

As with the brain scan technology, I'm not sure how far we can go with this, on one hand, our whole world becomes a video game, on the other, we become hyper-informed (we're already heading this way with Iphone/Blackberry technology) citizens and possibly function better, or at least more efficiently, in our everyday lives.

Brain Scan

Brain scan technology is the craziest advancement in science that I've seen in a long time. The actual image of a woman literally being plugged into a computer was astounding. I had no idea we were already at this level of technology that we can now understand the impulses of the brain so specifically, that we can tell what a person intends to do moments before the body responds. I'm not sure how much farther we can go with this, if we can eventually know what someone is thinking or seeing. If we ever got to that point, we would have some serious ethical questions on our hands (I imagine our government would use this as a tool to force information out of people), but for now I see this as an incredibly useful tool to people who have lost control of some or all of their body.

Steampunk

Steampunk is an interesting new(ish) "lifestyle" that has emerged to incorporate an old-world, industrial age aesthetic to our modern, technological age. I really like the idea of juxtaposing old and new, the costumes particularly are great. I've seen this style on Firefly and Serenity, but I didn't realize that it had taken off as an entire subculture. I'm interested in anything that has people making their own stuff, especially things as elaborate as these people have done, like the car the man was making in the Youtube video, or the huge elaborate dresses some of the women were wearing. There has been a lot of borrowing from different eras in the current styles today, and I wonder why we haven't really come up with a new aesthetic to define this age, or if it's just that we're in the age of "remixes."

Garden of Forking Paths

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires 1941
This story is important to New Media because it introduces the idea of parallel universes, which is the precursor to hypertext.

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
Argentina 1963
Hopscotch is considered the first "hypertext" in that it allows the readers to decide in what order they would like to read his book.

I absolutely loved Borges' story of the Garden of Forking Paths. His writing is beautiful and intricate, and although the idea of the "forking paths" didn't come into the story until near the end, I enjoyed the entire piece. I've always thought about what an interesting concept it is that there may be an infinite universes in which each decision we make opens up new possible worlds with different outcomes. The Internet seems to be a great example of this ever-expanding universe as it continues to grow larger with every person who logs on, and every word I type.

Rich Rodriguez

It was cool to have Rich come in and talk to the class about his project from last year, and video games in general. I really love the idea of Little Big Planet, the gaming platform he was using, because as Rich was saying, it's definitely taking us to the next level in gaming where we have become such experts in playing video games that we can actually understand how they work and make our own. I always find that there's nothing more satisfying than making your own anything, food, clothes, art, and now video games. The game that he created, Owl Collector, was pretty neat, basic, but to be able to see how all the levers are switched and how each action has a trip wire was a really cool experience. I'm by no means an intensive gamer, but I enjoyed seeing how it all worked.