Chapter 35

1985
Donna Haraway

• created the idea of a cyborg "socialist-feminist" as opposed to the image of the goddess, "the cyborg engages in the here and now"
• Haraway enjoys that the cyborg is not working towards regaining an imagined purity, but can embrace the boundaries of dualism
• her work had a large impact on "progressive scholarship in science and technology"
• "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess"

It's an interesting idea to use the image of a cyborg for a new form of feminism. I would have to agree that I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess, but I'm not sure I understand her complete perspective as it relates to feminism. I sort of see her ideas as pertaining to both genders, and I enjoy how she has embraced the dualism. If we can understand black and white but live in the gray I think we can be much more effective in working with society.

Chapter 34

1984
Sherry Turkle

• video games become hugely popular in the 1980's
• wrote The Second Self, which explained how different age groups worked with computers
• approached computer technology from a basis in psychoanalysis (human-computer interaction)
• understood the beginning of the "avatar"
• in her second book Life on the Screen, she explores how our interactions with computers can affect how we see ourselves and the world around us
• considered Dungeons and Dragons to be an important antecedant to many computer adventure games
• discovered that as much as designers would like, gamers are not as concerned with narrative and story-telling in their game-play

I'm sure it may be true for many gamers that the narrative is unimportant, but I feel otherwise. After listening to Noah Wardrip-Fruin talk about video game narrative, I feel like there is still hope. There seem to be many ways to improve the stories and dialogues in a game, and personally, I really enjoy video games with great stories. (This may, in part, be due to the fact that as a child I much preferred to watch my brother play video games, than to play them, so games like Final Fantasy were my favorites.) I'm much more likely to pick up a game with an interesting story line than the hundreds of games that all have the same narrative where you are given a weapon and must kill everyone you can find and steal their belongings, honestly I've had enough of those.

Chapter 33

1983
Ben Shneiderman - Direct manipulation

• proposed that it would be more effective to instruct the computer in a more graphic way, rather than command language
• this idea informed: graphical user interface, visual programming environments, and other systems
• direct manipulation: seems to imitate the outside world via metaphor/representation
• advantages of this system can be seen with graphical applications (Photoshop)
• uses images that we are familiar with to represent mostly equivalent computer programs/commands

Chapter 32

1983
Ben Bagdikian

• new media often over takes old, but sometimes they begin to integrate themselves
• 6 companies now dominate all of US mass media
  
• will all media become integrated into these companies, or will the expansion of the Internet overcome this
• more and more internet companies are preventing users from transmitting too much data, and often prohibiting public servers

This is my biggest fear! This is what my entire concentration boils down to, media is converging, we are losing the freedom and wonderful anarchistic democracy of the internet, what is going to happen to culture!? If I have to, I will work the rest of my life to overcome this ungodly monopoly of power over the media, this is not the way it works in every other country, it does not have to be this way in the US.

Chapter 31

1982
Bill Viola

• Viola is one of the "highest-profile of video artists"
• created "70 millimeter" video art
• video art: began as an exploration of the video medium as opposed to film, "reconfigured public and industrial conceptions of the video image"
• poetic approach to video
• created the Aspen Movie-Map - mapped onto a system that was familiar, with the challenge to create something new and surprising
• questions how we use language

I'm always for artists who question the everyday, who rework familiar concepts to create unfamiliar new ideas. Video art has always really interested me and it was really in its prime with the era of the "Happenings". I took a class at Gallatin where we were able to play around with video art and explore what happens when you stop trying to make a narrative and just enjoy the instrument; it was fantastic.

Trip to Chelsea

Our trip began on the Highline which is a favorite New York treasure of mine. I love that hidden in plain sight all throughout the city are these great cultural monuments and I'm particularly excited to see some of the art installations along the path. We passed the Gehry building on our way towards the first gallery and I was amazed I'd never really noticed it before. Autumn and I decided it should only be allowed for artists' studio spaces because corporate businesses wouldn't appreciate such great architecture. (Some day I hope this is true,maybe we'll at least have our studios there.)
Our first stop was the Postmasters gallery which when you first walk in seems pretty abstract. However, after the curator explained to us the exhibit and the concept of data visualization I was really intrigued. I loved each of his pieces almost purely as opportunities to alter my perspective. I love when an artist asks me to rethink the way I see the world. His piece representing the night sky of the battle of Troy was inspiring; the details that went into its creation were fantastic.
Next we went to see Bitforms, which was opening its new exhibit that evening. I was completely drawn in by its pieces that redefined space, text, and sound, again asking me to rethink my perspective. I was particularly pleased by one of the artist's play with typography by creating the giant vagina with multilingual text.
I think, however, that I was most impressed with the last gallery we went to see, Eyebeam. Especially for our generation which has seen much of our social lives turn into the "screen," it was so refreshing to see people looking for ways to bring it back out again while still maintaining our fascination with technology. It gives me so much hope that a place like this exists to put faith in artists, engineers, and inventors to come up with new ideas and challenge the status quo.

Chapter 30

1981
Theodor H. Nelson

• proposed a universal electronic Publishing System and Archive, similar in function to Bush's Memex device
• give everyone the ability to produce their own documents and connect them to anyone elses public documents, with the ability to edit any version of any text, theirs or others public files
• envisioned a company who would be in charge of running this network and each member of the network would pay a small fee to access each document, in the same way we pay the utilities companies

My first impression of Nelson's text was that he seems extremely condescending. I just wanted to say to him stop blabberng about how we might not understand or want to take the time to read through and just say what you want. If I've taken the time to start reading, why are you trying to deter me? "Suggestions are welcome, if you are sure you understand the design first." This kind of statement made me care so much less about his really intereting archival ideas. What Nelson has come up with is very complex but also complete in that, if this program were fully developed it could easily be implemented.