Critical Response 1: Some hilariously late thoughts on cyberpunk, obsolete futurism, and human/media interfacing.

Everybody knows Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage – “the medium is the message.” It’s popular because it sums up perfectly the way in which the 20th and 21st centuries’ sudden explosion of new media have affected interpersonal communication. Radio and TV changed the way we tell narratives, both journalistic and fictive. The internet has done much the same, but with a notable exception: there is far more variety in the ways in which humans can interface with data (and narratives) via the medium of computers.
Writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson explored the ways in which people would interface with the net in the future. As it turned out, they were wrong about many particulars, but did a fairly good job of predicting some of the broader concepts. Like Jules Verne’s idea that man would one day travel to the moon (he was right; we just didn’t put people inside giant balls and shoot them out of a cannon to do it), Gibson and Stephenson’s predictions for the future of human/computer (and mediated human/human) interfacing were largely right… in the same way that the adorable three-year-old girl who describes the plot of Star Wars is also technically right.

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One of the major themes of the cyberpunk era is the coming similarity of having an internet connection to heroin. “Jacking in,” in Gibson’s works, is an analogue to “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out.” It’s a drug-powered surge toward a collective consciousness. Gibson’s internet echoes the narcotic togetherness of the 1960s, but rather than getting people high in order to facilitate groupthink, the Net is the other way around: it sucks people into the zeitgeist to get them high.

The fear of technology ensconced in all science fiction is just as present in cyberpunk. Much like fear of a rapidly changing society helped readers of Victorian Gothic fiction stay up all night with the lights on (and of course, the Victorian Gothic was science fiction for its time – Dracula, for example, makes use of then-futuristic telegraph technology!), fear of the coming ambiguity between humans and computers made the anxieties of cyberpunk thrilling (and not just cyberpunk, at the time – who can forget Patrick Bateman’s ATM from American Psycho and its inexorable command to FEED ME A CAT?)

Regardless of the anxieties of early adopters, computers never did end up meshing with us as completely as we thought they might. VR technology was introduced in the nineties and never went anywhere, something demonstrated by the abject failure of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. Attempts to change the way we interface with data physically have been made, but few have been successful since the introduction of the mouse decades ago. Who can forget the rousing success of the Power Glove, for example? It’s so BADDDDDD!

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Nowadays, people claim that multi-touch is the future of data interaction. Check out Microsoft’s Surface for an idea of where this may be going: YouTube Preview Image
Multi-touch may well be the future of data manipulation: the success of the iPhone has proven that people are open to new ways of manipulating media (shaking it, dragging it, pinching it, twisting it). The all-encompassing sensory override of Gibson and Stephenson’s work is unlikely, though.

Representation and Memory

So, peep this,

I was ruminating on these pictures after Monday’s heated discussion, and I was reminded of a visual art lecture I attended that was about representation.  The main point was that a representation of a certain thing be it a 1) picture 2) painting 3) blog 4) insert your own representational item here, or turn to page 8 to see what happens with the sharks!

Perhaps the most famous manifestation of representation versus reality was the Magritte painting, The Treachery of Images, in which a painting of tobacco pipe is accompanied by lettering that tells the reader, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” or, “This is not a pipe.”  Truly, it is not a pipe because we can’t use it to smoke.  I wanted to insert a link here, but the tubes will not obey my will today.

Other than that observation, I just wanted to see if anyone has read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  Not super important, but there is a section near the middle where the narrator is waxing all poetical and shit, and he wonders why it is that we remember what we want to forget (trauma) and forget what we want to remember (names, faces, etc).  I thought that vaguely related to The Ebb of Memory, and the camouflage class concept that so amused us on Monday.

Word.

Camouflage Class


A 1943 “camouflage class” at NYU – students prepare for jobs in the Army or in industry by making models from aerial photographs. The models are themselves photographed and used to develop camouflage schemes; simulacrum of a landscape, encrypted with the fantasies of war.

A lot of artists have grappled with the effects of facsimile in this context – from Don Delillo’s most photographed barn in America, to the photography of Oliver Boeburg and Thomas Demand. In each case, with the continued replication of a scene comes a peeling-away of its original signification; uncanny and auratic, it becomes a place of unbridled potential, unsettled and pushed into a realm of the fictive and imaginary, hitherto camouflaged in geometries and landscapes of the everyday.

The Ebb of Memory

“The sharp upswing in all of this record-keeping – both active and passive – are redefining one of the core elements of what it means to be human, namely to remember. We are moving towards a culture that has outsourced this essential quality of existence to machines, to a vast and distributed prosthesis. This infrastructure exists right now, but very soon we’ll be living with the first adult generation whose entire lives are embedded in it…For the next generation, it will be impossible to forget it, and harder to remember.”

Via things: Kevin Slavin writes on digital archiving and recollection. (scroll to the bottom)

critical response 1

Well…all right.  As usual I am writing this the night before it is due, with no real idea as to what I really want to say.  All I know is that I couldn’t decide which piece with which I wanted to study ‘critcally.’  Whatever that means.

Finally in the last moments it came to me.  Or rather it appeared on my screen through the intra-blarg.  I really prefer to write as I speak, in case that hasn’t become clear, but you are all bright eyed and sharp as tacks, so I am sure you saw through my pretentious throw-away comments.

So considering that I like to keep my funky fresh flows as informal as possible, and we are writing for a blog, and Dick’s speech is very anecdotal I figured I would engage with a few of his ideas.  He certainly puts forth more than a few novel concepts in this piece, and I could probably spend countless hours trying to dissect his ‘drug-addled ramblings’ as Hung Te called them.  Also, we briefly touched on this in class, so please forgive any rote repetition for those not present.  Very early in the speech, he says this:

“The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish…What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live”

So what Dick seems to be saying is that traditions–which normally are the foundation of any culture–must be exorcised to make way for new practices.  This implies that the new things take nothing from their ancestors, and old things die out withour propagating.  But without old practices upon which to base new evolutions where is this progress coming from?

Alas, later in his speech, Dick invokes one of the oldest institutions–the Church–in order to legitimize his bid for the supernatural.  He claims to have channeled the essence of the Holy Spirit in order to have predicted the events that happened to him later in life.  I find it hard to reconcile that a man of such fantastic imagination would also believe that God’s thoughts and God’s plan were the ultimate causation for all things.

Again, I apologize for the repetition, but I need to set the stage for my next two Dick-inspired (hahahahaha…get those dick laughs out now) anecdotal jumps.  In the first part, I was raised Catholic.  I went to private school all my life, and while that is not all that special, I went to an all-male Catholic prep school.  Yep.  Pressed shirt, tie, blazer with a crest, pleated slacks…the whole shebang-a-bang.  Picture that for a moment if you will.  I would link pictures, but I might die of embarassment.

So!  In short, I was taught by a selection of religious brothers over the years and intelligent design was the rule.  Basically, God planned every step of the way, from evolving from apes to waking up this morning with clutches of yesterday still clinging to you.  Yep, that was all God, the Holy Ghost (which is a fucking terrifying concept when you are 8), and J.C.

But the best way to get someone to reject a religion is force them to practice it for 12 years.  Yeah, I was an altar server, and I am convinced my parents will one day try and blackmail me with the pictures.  So it would be safe to say that I have effectively rejected most of the dogmas of Catholicism.  I mean, it’s pretty tough to toss out the things like don’t kill, don’t steal.  Those are tenets of basically any religion or code of conduct.  Everyone should live like that, right?

So when I see Dick riposte by saying–in so many words–that intelligent design is kosher as Christmas and he writes by chanelling the Holy Ghost, the alarm bells start going off.  Later in the address, Dick says this, “my two preoccupations in my writing are “What is reality?” and “What is the authentic human?”  So then I started thinking about this part of his argument in terms of Clarke’s City and the Stars.

Diaspar is a city that ultimately turns in upon itself, relying on traditions to maintaint itself.  But what kind of existence doe sit have?  It’s a paltry half-life.  They sit in stasis.  There is no variety, no adventure, nothing new.  All it takes is one free-thinking man to break the cycle though.  These ossified traditions do need to be excised so that new ones may develop.  They have led an ingenuine humanity to a place where there is no such thing as progress and truly in order to go forward we must go backwards.

End of line.

Cool Event – Powersuits Promenade

Hey everyone, thought this event might interest some of you. I’ll definitely be going.

Here’s the official invite for the March 14th eatART event at the Great Northern Way Campus.

We’ll be showing off all of our large-scale New Media sculptures including The Mondo Spider, Daisy the Solar Powered Tricycle, the containR and the Heliomatrix. From 7pm-9pm is family time and we’re encouraging people to bring their kids, parents and grandparents. I’ve attached the poster and the press release. Please forward this invite to all those who you think may be interested. I promise it will be an exhilarating new media experience.