December 1, 2007 at 9:41 am · Filed under class
Discussed Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” in light of the following questions:
- What are some of the problems or unanswered questions that Bush is attempting to resolve?
- Bush identifies the difficulty of consulting the vast amount of human knowledge as caused by the “artificiality of systems of indexing.” What does he mean here? Explain how the human mind “operates by association” and discuss some specific examples of this.
- Identify correlations between Bush’s technological predictions and contemporary devices and systems we currently use.
- Describe the “memex” machine in detail. What are some of its key technical features and functions?
- What is the “trail” that Bush writes of? How has this dream been fulfilled today with our own technology and systems? If it hasn’t, theorize how the notion of “trails” might be realized.
Homework: Physical Database Project
The physical database final project is due next Thursday, Dec. 6. Be prepared to present your database projects to the rest of the class. This assignment is worth 20% of your final grade. Download the assignment details here.
Also, here are the images from class, which contain several examples of projects relevant to the assignment.
November 23, 2007 at 2:08 pm · Filed under learninglogs
Post ‘em below:
November 23, 2007 at 2:06 pm · Filed under class
This week we watched Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johan Grimonprez, a film which traces the curious history of the relationship between television news media and skyjackers.
Following this screening and discussion, we dove into a chapter entitled “Open Circuits” from Feedback by David Joselit, a rather difficult text but one which analyzes television as the material point of contact between commodities and networks within the field of distributed information. Briefly, here are some major points you should recall from the reading:
- Television is the point of contact between networks and commodities: “things expand into information as information contracts into things”
- Those that own and control the television medium must maintain a careful balance between the mobility of the network as a dynamic content distributor and the stability of the commodity as a reliable thing to be purchased:
- “while the commodity requires the network in order to move it from place to place […] the mobility of the network, as the trajective principle, is always a potential threat to the stability of commodities”
- The TV artworks of Nam June Paik and Warhol’s experimental commercial express ruptures in the balance between commodity and network:
- In “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television,” Paik breaks the uniformity of the broadcast network by creating a microcosm of individualized receivers and distorted signals
- Warhol’s commercial reinforced the medium of TV, its “texture,” by repurposing the electronic information of the TV image into a nearly abstract visual field the represented the immateriality of the medium
Joselit identifies 4 relationships to recount the history of television’s single symbiotic system of network/commodity:
- The network is a function of the commodity. The network exists in order to market products and specifically in order to sell TVs. The original feedback loop of TV is established between network and commodity.
- The commodity is a function of the network. The network emerged as a system for selling any other product, thus “consolidating a new consumerist middle class.” So, too, TV programming was structured in order to add value to commodities, to increase the “tension differential” (desire).
- The network is itself a commodity. Early on, executives realized that the network itself was an “organic” whole which needed cohesion and consolidation – a status of the commodity.
- The audience is a commodity. “Broadcasters sell audiences.” “Viewers go from strangers to acquaintances to friends to customers and finally to statistics.” The viewer is valued proportionally to their spending coefficient. And politically, audiences shift from being democratic publics to mere demographic markets.
Joselit’s primary thesis is to identify the main properties of the Television medium/system (”closed circuit”) in order to discover precedents and potentialities for opening it up and critiquing/changing it from withing: his so-called “open circuits.”
Homework
Complete the following for next Thursday, November 29:
- Read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush
- Write the 8th (and final) learning log
- For those of you who have missed past learning logs, you may make them up for partial credit
November 9, 2007 at 4:41 pm · Filed under learninglogs
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November 8, 2007 at 6:14 pm · Filed under class
Based on the reading of Manovich’s “Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime”, we discussed the significance of data visualization as a new cultural form that has been vastly accelerated by computer processing power:
- Larger data sets
- Dynamic
- Real-time
- Mathematical analysis
- Map one type of representation onto another
Data modernism and abstraction: both in painting and data visualization there exists a reductive process:
- For example, in Mondrian, reducing phenomena into essential Platonic forms
- Or, in data viz., reduction of vast data sets in order to see patterns, structures
- Data visualization is the new abstraction
However, where traditional modernism reduced the richness of the visual world into minimal, repetitive structures (eg. Mondrian), the visualization of data sets creates endless, varied imagistic representations
Data visualization is the anti-sublime
Sublime: a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.
- The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is “dark, uncertain, and confused.”
So, data visualization transforms that which is vast, infinite, beyond quantification (data) into a form which is comprehensible (anti-sublime).
Manovich raises some key questions about the arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping: Why is data mapped one way or another?
- Perhaps, an exploration of this unfathomability and irrationality is necessary to build into these projects
And what does it mean to be “immersed in data”?
Homework
Complete for next Thursday, November 15:
- Read “Open Circuits” from Feedback: Television Against Democracy by David Joselit
- Write learning log
November 2, 2007 at 12:45 pm · Filed under learninglogs
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November 2, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under projects, class
We created a collective map of places in Philadelphia which connect in some way to our memories of past places and experiences: http://platial.com/infoconcepts/places
Students were instructed to:
1. Describe a strong memory from a visit you have made to an unfamiliar place. Include details about the following:
- Identify the location: country, city, district, street (as specific as you can)
- Physical environment: streets, paths, buildings, landscape, vegetation, quality of light, temperature, color, scale, etc.
- Who was with you?
- Emotional content: how did you feel? What did you think?
2. Now, with the memory fresh in your mind, walk out into the city. Go out in any direction. Don’t think, just walk. Stop and stand still. Look around. Wait. Look around again. Try to find at least 3 locations in center city that correspond in some way with that memory of that specific experience and place you wrote about.
- Make a note of the exact location: intersecting streets, or street and address
- If you have a camera or camera phone, snap a picture of the location
3. Come back to class. You will submit the written memory, the details of the location, and the image to a collaborative online mapping program.
Homework
Complete for next Thursday, November 8:
October 22, 2007 at 10:02 am · Filed under projects
When you have completed your image/audio compositions, upload them to a video sharing service of your choice (youtube.com or vimeo.com for example) and post them as a comment within this post. (Most of these video web sites allow you to copy and paste html code so that you can embed the video within the page.)
October 22, 2007 at 8:36 am · Filed under class
REMINDER: Research Papers Due Thursday, November 1
This week you took the midterm exam and I gave a brief tutorial on iMovie, which you will be using for next week’s in-class sampling / remix assignment. Remember, I won’t be in class, so Will Lindsay will be sitting in for me.
Homework
Read the handout I gave you after the exam: “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” and “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” by Sergei Eisenstein. This will give you a framework with which to think about the montage project.
October 12, 2007 at 12:55 pm · Filed under class
ANNOUNCEMENT: The mid-term exam will be given on Thursday, Oct. 18.
After hearing about your paper topic proposals, you read “Database as a Genre of New Media” by Lev Manovich. Some key points:
- Database, in its most simplest sense as it is used by artists: “collections of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search.” This is quite different from traditional narrative form.
- In general, new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database… and the content of the work and the interface become separate
- Database and narrative seem to be opposed:
database : data structure : : narrative : algorithm
- algorithm: A finite set of unambiguous instructions performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a goal, especially a mathematical rule or procedure used to compute a desired result.
- Computer games are not dependent on databases, but construct narratives… an algorithm is the key to successfully completing the game, the hidden logic
- Narratives and games are similar in that the user must uncover its underlying logic, or algorithm
- The ontology of the computer: data structures and algorithms – these are mapped onto the culture:
- Everything is being collected; new cultural algorithm: reality > media > data > database
- Database and narrative seem to be opposed:
- database : data structure : : narrative : algorithm
- However, narrative and database can come together in new media work: the traditional narrative can be seen as the “user” traversing the author’s database in a particular trajectory while a new media database work can be seen as offering multiple trajectories that create hyper-narratives (interactive, that is)
- Therefore: narrative is a possible interpretation of the database in new media work
Homework
Study for the exam! Here are the potential exam questions. I will choose 3 of these for the exam.
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