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Possible Theoretical Issues

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Topics with Theoretical Implications

  • Interface: keyboard organization, (not)viewing product
  • Ubiquity/availability/access
  • Control in context: how is the tool used in industry, education, the arts (micro)
  • Control in context: the Feedback Loop in industry, education, the arts (macro)
  • Time/Space
  • Storage capability
  • Materiality: paper, ink, metal, microprocessors, CRT displays
  • Ethics: collection and disposal of the natural resources and labor force that sustain manufacture and use in all ways; fact and/or/vs. fiction; language and representation (of self, of each part of the “rhetorical triangle”)
  • The Manovichian Pentad: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, transcoding (in what ways is the typewriter these things?)
  • The Humanist Agenda: physical, emotional, psychological/mental, spiritual, psychic knowledge produced or prevented by this production tool; also Haunted Media reading
  • The Interdisciplinary Quandary in the Ivory Tower and the Gutenberg Galaxy: who’s job is it any way to do this work?
  • Ontological, Epistemological Two-steps: Subject/Object Relations in 1) Identity Politics (does the typewriter promote or challenge patriarchic hegemony?) 2) sociolinguistics (are there Ong-like issues here, and if so what are they and how do they “work”)

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Typewriter Response Paper

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Dear Class,

I had a little anxiety about this response paper, as you might be able to tell:)

So the below may not fit what the assignment intended, which I’m sure I’ll figure out better for the next one.

I put this up as a word doc here: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kfries/758a.html

I’ll get my stuff up about Vannevar Bush’s Memex machine and microfilm up as soon as I can.

Regards,
Kevin

Text Means Tissue

“The typewriter veils the essence of writing and of the script. It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man’s experiencing this withdrawl appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.” Heidegger in Kittler, GFT, p. 199

Slight of hand. Magic. Meaning’s mystical origins: Is the typewriter a machine that veils truth and allows for the mechanistic rape of the imagination regardless of subjective identity or role? If texts are tissues and typewriters are the primary tool during a span of years for producing texts, then unveiling the truths embedded in those texts would require an analysis of the typewriter. How do we know what we know? From what we are taught, from what is communicated to us through written material, often produced using the typewriter or a related technology. The skilled user of the typewriter may or may not be any more controlled by determinative constraints of her tool in shaping her products than any other producer of texts; however, if the interpreter’s task is to be reliable and complete, then the understanding of a text is gained by interrogating not only the content of the textual communication but also its context including the circumstances of its production.

Heidegger’s metaphor of the veil prompts consideration. The gap between the ways in which many writers and communicators (incompletely skilled) and a few (completely skilled) communicators labor at their craft is a crevice in the theory of new media. Whether or not New Media veils truth more or less than old media, whether or not the tissues produced by these transcoded, variable, automated, modular, numerical representations (Manovich) are organic and thrive in an information ecology or whether selective forces differing in power, nature, and influence relegate other texts to oblivion is one of the most challenging questions of power in the field of language arts ten years past the popular and commercial introduction of the World Wide Web and the Internet. With the introduction of new technologies, whether the typewriter or the Internet, this question of the veil also strikes at the heart of the authenticity of the communication: not only is it a speech-act in good faith among cooperating interlocutors, but moreover does the communication “ring true?”

The example of the typewriter in the production of New Media theory crosses significant landscapes including different academic disciplines. Given the wide territory simultaneously affected by and influencing the study of New Media, a certain amount of lawless creativity is allowed. The methodologies, the questions, and the applications of New Media studies are both robust with opportunity and vulnerable to the use of the broad ax rather than a scalpel. In such a context for the textual scholar, the task of considering the ways in which the typewriter can simultaneously veil and reveal truth is a productive and fertile territory indeed.

This response paper begins a questioning response to Heidegger’s veil, and provides a chance to briefly explore some other thoughts on the typewriter in the literary spheres of Henry James and Dracula (separately), historical elements of the typewriter, the device itself, eg. the keyboard and issues of interface, and the typewriter as an important element of knowledge transfer in the information age archives.

Selected Literature Review

The typewriter’s double edged nature is just as sharp as the sword’s. The might of both instruments is qualified by its own form, function, and use in any given feedback loop.

Both Thurschwell and Seltzer note the multivalent ways the typewriter can be become either the source of noise or dissonance in the work of Henry James or as a method of revealing previously unknown perspectives. Thruschwell looks at the typewriter in the relationship between Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet and notes the power relationship between them and the construction or obstruction of the meaning of love, meaning and experience shaped by the materiality of counting words, taking dictation, is constructed by the task of typing (20). At the same time the role of the typewriter and the secretary provide a chance to uncover new “portrayal[s] of class relations and commercial exchange, [and] allows us to think about how questions of communication and consciousness in other works [beside In the Cage] might also be related to economics and technology” (9). Furthermore, Seltzer discusses The Aspern Papers and notes that the interiority of sealed letters, even without the typewriter, allows “for the technical conditions of intimacy to get in the way of intimacy” (203).

Rosalie Silverston and Victoria Olwell separately discuss historical trends in the social history of women that are shaped by the typewriter. While social standards for the behavior of upper-class women and the market (economical) standards of the typewriter keyboard are different, the phenomenon, the presence of the typewriter affects both. These authors could be said to show how the typewriter does not so much obscure as allow for women to foreground their social power. Indeed, in a passage too long to quote here, Olwell (58-60) indeed promulgates the view that the typewriter can not be viewed as a monolithic tool of modern enlightenment but that as it provided new opportunities for women, the cultural phenomenon of the typewriter also broght to the surface anxieties about sex, gender, and labor that could be argued as veiling (the anxieties that is) one truth in favor of others.

Jennifer Wicke takes up the role of technology, including the typewriter, in the novel Dracula. Wicke highlights character Madame Mina’s observation that her typewriter has a “manifold” function that allows for the mechanized production of triplicates (476). The typewriter and the personal computer both offer effort-saving features, but the duplication of error is one threat that the mechanization of language in the arts and sciences poses. Duplicated errors, as any textual scholar knows, prove at times to be indeed an iron veil over truth.

Liebowitz & Margolis, Inhoff, and Berg separately address elements of the typewriter itself, focusing on some aspect of the typewriter key. Leibowitz and Margolis can be said to consider the ways in which the choice of standardized keyboards creates gaps and divisions (or veils) in perception. Inhoff et al. would make Bruno Latour happy indeed in an extremely technical examination of speed during copytyping, concluding that the findings support the understanding that “a model of eye-hand coordination that postulates the eye-hand coordination involves central and peripheral processes.” The mere suggestion of emphasis is the foundation of slight of hand maneuvers explicitly or implicitly that affect the life of any text, and the typewriter is then no more objectively accurate than any other tool. Thomas Berg’s analysis of submorphemic slips that are found in the published records of scientific research puts the nail in the Count’s coffin: the typewriter is forever as subjective as the pen, whichever appears to different audiences as more “authentic”.

Finally, Christopher Keep and David Bell address the typewriter’s presence in the information economy in the landscapes of archives, and more generally in the emerging information age where information and speed connect the typewriter to a later generation transmitters of information (or code).

Conclusion

The typewriter shapes what we see outside ourselves and what we inside ourselves know to be true. The unwary person who does not consider the tool’s power to both veil and reveal truth risks being controlled by the very mechanism in her use.

While some writers are simply unaware of inscribing technologies, the presence of Takahashi’s humorous web page comments on the current incarnation of the typewriter: the word processor. Takahashi’s Word Perhect points out that writers are in fact too well aware of the limitations, frustrations, even absurdities of the writing and inscription technologies available to them.

Beware the veil. The transformation of the typewriter into the word processor is not a seemless transition or substitute. The move toward the “ease” of the word processor hides and reveals; for example, a word processor hides and reveals the presence of the paper. The “Print Layout” view in Microsoft Word only mimics the paper page, relegating the paper to a peripheral device. This is a slight of hand indeed. What is right under the writer’s nose is mere suggestion of the truth, not the true paper itself. The meaning of each slight of hand of each typewriter technology differs, and here the point is not to definitively catalogue or map them, but to suggest that the uncritical reception of them, in their individuality or in their aggregate, threatens to recalibrate the interpretation of texts produced with them.

Works Consulted

Bell, David F. “Infinite Archives.” 33.3 SubStance (2004): 148-161.

Berg, Thomas. “Slips of the Typewriter Key.” 23 Applied Psycholinguistics (2002): 185-207.

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen of the 20th Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Clarke, Arthur C. “The Steam-Powered Processor.”

Derrida, Jacques. “Word Processing”

Fleissner, Jennifer. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 22 (2001) 417-455.

Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.

Inhoff, Albrecht Werner and Jian Wang. “Encoding Text, Manual Movement Planning, and Eye-Hand Coordination During Copytyping.” 18.2 Journal of Experimental Psychology (1992) 437-448.

Keep, Christopher. “Blinded by the Type: Gender and Information Technology at the Turn of the Century.” 23 Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001): 149-173.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

—. Discourse Networks: 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Liebowitz, S. J. and Stephen E. Margolis. “The Fable of the Keys.” 33.1 Journal of Law and Economics (April 1990) 1-25.

Olwell, Victoria. “Typewriters and the Vote.” 29.1 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2003): 55-83.

Seltzer, Mark. “The Postal Unconscious.” 21 The Henry James Review (2000): 197-206.

Silverstone, Rosalie. “Office Work for Women: An Historical Review.” () Business History

Takahashi, Tomoko. Word Perhect. http://www.e-2.org/commissions_wordperhect.html. Accessed March 13, 2006.

Thurschwell, Pamela. “Henry James and Theodore Bosanquet: on the Typewriter, In the Cage, at the Ouija Board.” 13.1 (1999) Textual Practice 5-23.

Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” 59.2 ELH (Summer 1992): 467-493.

403f

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Thoughts on the “Data-flaneur”

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Man’s inner concerns do not have their issueless private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience (Benjamin 158).

If we accept the assertion Kittler offers in his preface to Gramophone, Film Typewriter that “understanding media…remains an impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions” (Kittler xl), Manovich’s claim that “the computer database and the 3D computer-based virtual space have become true cultural forms—general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world” (Manovich 215) becomes far more problematic. How are these forms of information access shaping our understanding of media and our perception of the world? To what effect? Kittler concludes:

What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather…their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility. (Kittler xl-xli)

Are we simply a product of these two means of accessing and navigating through information? If we now conceive of perception and subjectivity not as located in a fixed subject position, but as movement on a trajectory through space (Manovich 279), is it still possible to stop and examine where this trajectory leads?

Manovich’s use of Baudelaire’s description of the Parisian flâneur was rather compelling and useful in thinking about how new media has created new roles for the “super-modern” subject—“the data-flâneur” and “the data-dandy.” But there is an aspect of flanerie that emerges in Baudelaire (particularly in Benjamin’s reading) that Manovich seems to leave out of his discussion. Although Manovich does suggest that the flâneur’s behavior can be seen as an attempt to “compensate for the loss of a close relationship with his group by inserting himself into the anonymous crowd” (Manovich 269), what is missing is the sense of terror that arises in the modern subject while moving through this anonymous crowd of strangers. “For the perfect flâneur,” Baudelaire writes, “for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite” (Baudelaire 795). Yet, the endless fear of collision, the overload of sensual information and experience, the overwhelming desire to see oneself reflected in an Other combined with the horror of exposure or recognition constantly undermine this “immense joy.” “To see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (Baudelaire 795)—this is the goal of the flâneur. “The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito” (Baudelaire 795). Thus, by definition, the flâneur must remain a non-entity, a face in the crowd, indistinguishable from all the other faces rushing by.

With the current overflow of information, our senses have been flooded by the accessibility of data. As Manovich observes in his opening to “The Forms”:

If traditional cultures provided people with well-defined narratives (myths, religion) and a little “stand-alone” nformation, today we have too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together (Manovich 217).

Thus we have unlimited access to information, but little or no means to process or integrate this information into an effective narrative, as a tool to reflect on the world and our place in it. The database provides us with the capability to search, but not to analyze. The 3D navigable space allows us to conceptualize new media, but not to come any closer to a true understanding. We, like the “mere flâneur” who never removes himself from the bustling streets to reflect on and order the “mass of raw materials which he has involuntarily accumulated” (Baudelaire 795), have perhaps given into that “insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’.” For it is not the flâneur, but Baudelaire’s “man of genius,” the artist, who attempts to transform the “non-I” into something known, “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive” so that “all the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized” (Baudelaire 795).

This solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier that that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other that the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’ (Baudelaire 796).

It is this figure and not the “mere flâneur” who is able to fully realize the potentialities contained in the present and to ultimately “distil the eternal from the transitory” (Baudelaire 796).

For Manovich to claim that the database and 3-D computer-based space has become true cultural forms, influencing our perception of ourselves and the world we live in, he must situate the subject not as a subject in a fixed position, but as moving through space on a trajectory. What have we lost in the shift to a “computerized society”? What constitutes identity in an age of virtual anonymity? What remains of the body in our current computer culture? Are we nothing more than a list of screen names, passwords, and search histories?

Works Cited:
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. (155-200)
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Lietch, ed. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2001. (792-800)
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stabford, Stanford UP, 1999.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

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Meditation on the Model

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Ever since Johanna Drucker’s comments about the idea of a model as a new conceptual structure, the description of a conceptual “model” has lingered in my thoughts. These thoughts were piqued again during her talk when she responded to a question about how to design a search through a database: she explained that the search can be a kind of model. Of course, the database and paths through the database are the primary subjects of Manovich’s chapter “Forms,” but before we get there, the McCarty article and Latour’s chapter on centers and distance seem like a nice place to start a meditation on the “model.”

A model – according to the McCarty article linked in the blog below – is “a simplified and therefore fictional or idealized representation, often taking quite a rough-and-ready form.” McCarty notes that the prominent aspects about a model are its tractability and manipulability. “Tractability in turn requires complete explicitness and absolute consistency; manipulability resolves into mechanical action and interactivity” (6). Does Latour’s system, as a theoretical rather than mechanical construct, fit both the criteria of “tractability and manipulability? In terms of tractability, the Latour model allows for the proliferation of “nth order inscriptions” (234) to handle the inevitable accumulation of information gathered from “immutable mobiles.” Latour constantly writes in nonspecific terms, so the centers of accumulation and their peripheries are not confined to one location or culture. I would suggest that these characteristics make up a certain tractability, being both explicit and consistent in the relationship between center and periphery, contained within the Latour system. Yet once we try and fit Latour’s system/model onto the other McCarty criteria, “manipulability,” or, the interactivity of the model, the Latour-as-model statement becomes problematic.

Can we really say that the Latour model allows for internal tweaking, for some kind of adjustments that can qualify under the rubric “interactivity?” Without delving too deep into the idea of abstractions from linear prose and whether or not that counts as manipulation (questions that are addressed in a thread on the blog), let me first say that Latour’s own words seem to preclude any attempt to call his system a “model.” Once he refers to his inscriptions as “immutable” it appears plainly obvious that his system has violated McCarty’s property of “manipulability” required of all “models.” However, an interesting revelation occurred to me when reading the Gorman article: If Gorman, and by further association Mcgann, is right (regarding textual indeterminacy), the Latour system can fit into the category of a “model.” When Gorman denudes Eisenstein’s claim about the letter of Tycho Brahe, or when McGann expounds upon his own indeterminacy and the “textual condition,” it does not necessarily limit Latour’s entire inscription model. Instead, we can lop off the prefix and call them “mutable” mobiles, still transferable, still technically inscriptions, just not as concrete as Latour would have us believe. The emphasis on inscriptions remains, along with the emphasis on accumulation and distance, except now accounting for the indeterminate nature of the inscriptions is also part of the model. While exempt from the critiques of McGann and Gorman, Latour’s model was closer to McCarty’s discussion of a “representation.” Yet once we place his system/model in light of the remarks about a text’s inherent instability, McCarty’s “manipulability” trait of a proper “model” becomes satisfied by the inherent instability of the text itself. If we assume that a scholar is the “user” of a theoretical model, then it is not too much of a stretch to consider all potential interpretations circumscribed by the field of textual studies as potential manipulations within the Latour model. In other words, a theoretical model such as Latour’s (or for that matter Kittler’s), requires a structure of variables set up in consistent relationships with one another. Each variable needs the potential to be manipulated, which in turn affects the overall appearance of the model without fundamentally transforming the underlying relationship of variables.

Now, numerous contemporary theoretical models allow for abstract manipulation of the theory itself. In fact, the potential for further discourse is what makes such critical models of thought so essential and significant. A theoretical model does not answer every question. It represents a structure of thinking in which different contributions can be added or subtracted depending on scholarly discourse. When McCarty refers to models as “simplified” he does not mean simple, far from it. Models provide us with an approximation of knowledge; they are supposed to be part of “a continual process of coming to know” (McCarty 6). Yet, how then can we differentiate between models, and does the postmodern discourse necessitate a new “model?” To shove all theoretical models into one file labeled “models” is to collapse the concept of “model” all together, diminishing its meaning. One way to answer this question, and a way to distinguish the 20th century model from the 21st century version, is to further explore interactivity, to perhaps break down the different types of interactivity. It is at this point where we are venturing more towards the New Media and the Manovich readings about “Forms.”

In defining the database and the “navigable space” as two defining “forms” of the new media culture, Manovich seems to be presenting us with another conceptual model, albeit a model made up of two essential parts. Neither the database nor the “navigable space” by themselves satisfies McCarty’s criteria of tractability and manipulability. The database is tractable and explicit, but the database itself is not interacted with until we envision, or some sort of software envisions, a navigable space which we can manipulate. The reverse is true of the navigable space: we can manipulate, but to move around in this space requires an implicit knowledge that violates McCarty’s rule about tractability and explicitness. The New Media example of a model then would be the constructed search through a database.

It is at this point then that we need to briefly tease out the difference between this type of model and the theoretical models mentioned earlier. The obvious answer is that the New Media “model” is visually presented before us and not an abstract model like Latour’s or those of post-stucturalists like Kittler. However, the major impact of the visible model is that it generates an entirely new rhetoric: a visual rhetoric of interactivity. Since one has to “watch” oneself navigate through an explicit database – as opposed to the Latour model where one has to conceptualize the manipulability of transferred texts – one becomes aware of certain visual cues that suggest one method of manipulation (or direction of navigation) instead of another. The visual presentation of the model effects specific “cycles” of navigation depending upon optical characteristics. Our eyes become complicit with the model. These visual cues collectively form a new visual rhetoric, and that new rhetoric would seem to sit nicely within the emerging fields of webpage design and graphic art. While a theoretical model relies on conceptualizations of outcomes from manipulations (in Latour, the specific outcomes are consequences affecting the centre/periphery relationship due to losses inherent in the transfer of inscriptions), the New media model relies on a tangible rhetoric created by the specific manipulation of objects in the visual field. In the New media form, the eye, and by association the body, becomes more than just an interpretive tool, but it is absolutely complicit with the model itself, and must be included in a discussion about that model’s structure.

Of course, it may seem like my argument can be reduced to the differences between abstract theoretical models and the more tangible model of the search through a database, differences that seem to be summed up in a discussion of a visual materiality. Yet even if this is the case, I am still intrigued by how the New Media model makes our body – in terms of our optical patterns of behavior – another variable to be manipulated. It is as if the theoretical model provides variables to be conceptually manipulated by a “user,” but a New Media model is manipulated and, more importantly, manipulates its user.

33b2

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Virtual Reality, circa 1940

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

The Invention of Morel, written by Adolfo Bioy Casares and first published in 1940, was way ahead of itself in terms of technology. It has been in my thoughts all semester and with this week’s readings, I finally realized why. Although there is explicit discourse about technology in the novel (such as the narrator’s explanation about the purpose of the radio, which-for him- is to satisfy the sense of hearing), I will examine the more implicit technological ideas present in this work. The Argentinean author managed to create an alternate reality that could now be examined as a new media object, a virtual world by the standards of today.

First, a short synopsis of the story is necessary: in this short novel, Casares created a mysterious world on a deserted island (rumored to kill inhabitants or visitors by some sort of flesh-eating disease, which proves to be an important detail later in the story), traversed by a lonely, unnamed fugitve. After spending some time alone on the island, he is joined by a cast of characters that seem to be there on vacation. The fugitive goes through a period of psychological stress and vacilation, in which he first begins to think the visitors are there to capture him and turn him in. Eventually he realizes that not only do they not care about him, but they cannot see him nor hear him. Then, after a short time believing he is a ghost, he believes that they are “artificial ghosts” (Bioy Casares 66) whose “…ears were not used for hearing…” and whose “…eyes could not see…” (Bioy Casares 26). They are present on the island, but in form only. Their week-long vacation, including all their actions, repeat over and over again with zero alterations. Coupling this realization with the fugitive’s discovery of a machine that was created by one of the “holidaymakers,” Morel (hence the name of the novel), he realizes the truth about the island. The realization is confirmed when he views a confession by Morel to the other visitors: he brought his closest friends to this island to record all their actions in order to project them for eternity in paradise. Mechanically, the invention operates on the power of the tides and Morel has created it based on the principles of recording vibrations, much like the phonograph. Morel’s greatest achievements include creating a machine that captures, records and projects vibrations without the use of screens nor any other visible physical apparatus. As well, the projections are not just 2D, but rather 3D. The main flaw of his system, however, is that after people are recorded, their flesh begins to decay and then they experience a slow, painful death.

I propose that the fugitive’s island world fits many of the parameters of new media objects delineated by Manovich in The Language of New Media in his chapter “The Forms.” It would now qualify for examination as a virtual world. The first question is whether the island world (including the projections that operate in a continuous, infinite loop described by the fugitive as “a rotating eternity” (Bioy Casares 75)) qualifies as a database or as a narrative. It is a database, a set of data in the form of vibrations, organized and retrieved by Morel’s machine. It includes all the visual and spatial details of one week, including which plants were alive and which were dead. This virutal database is superimposed on the “real” database and so the results include sights such as two moons and two suns in the sky at times. (Note: the sun of the projection is weaker, so there is some loss of quality in the images that are projected.) On the other hand, it may also be viewed as a narrative for its cause-and-effect relationship with the fugitive, but it is not interactive for him. Just as if he were watching a Web-streamed program, the fugitive has no control over the time of the projections. He does, however control himself within the confines of the time and space of the projection to the point where he is able to create a mental model of it, and he has memorized the actions of the other characters and can react to them and within them.

On this note, we may also consider the island as one of Manovich’s “navigable spaces.” The other characters’ actions are already programmed, the fugitive must figure out how to navigate amongst them. The parameters of his virtual world are defined by the projection: doors that were closed or locked during the recording must stay that way, for example. The fugitive’s trajectory is controlled by such factors, similar to the way in which current-day computer users’ trajectories are controlled by the programs or games which they are operating. Manovich also outlines one problem of new media as the “relation between the virtual and the real” (260). The fugitive so loses himself in the alternate reality before him (including falling in love with one of the women of the projection), that he creates another recording including himself (a recording of a recording, then). He layers himself in, just as one may layer additional objects in a digital image.

As stated earlier, Adolfo Bioy Casares was more or less creating a new media object with his island and Morel’s invention, without being aware that what he was doing was a precursor to the technologies of decades to come. When the fugitive wrote in his diary “…we cannot understand anything outside of time and space…,” (Bioy Casares 72) he could have been describing some of the current obstacles in new media, problems that creators such as Kabakov (with his installations described by Manovich) are working to overcome. The fugitive lives in the virtual island world as many computer users live today: unable to change the framework within which they spend hours or days. They both have control only over their own trajectories, with the difference that a computer user may often interact with his environment and the fugitive was only permitted to react to his.

Works Cited:
Bioy Casares, Adolfo. The Invention of Morel and Other Stories from La trama celeste. Trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin, University of Texas Press: 1964.

Manovich, Lev. “The Forms.” The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: 2001.

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Immutable Mobiles

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Here is a link to a section of Latour’s website. It deals with an art exhibit he helped put together in 2002. Specifically he talks about images in art, science and religion which may be useful in a discussion about inscriptions. Pay special attention to his presentation on iconoclash, a slide show that deals with cascading images and inscriptions. You can also browse the rest of his website if you’re curious. Enjoy.

Hello Everyone,

Hope everyone had a good spring break. Here is some information for my presentation on Tuesday.

There are two main issues I would like to take up concerning Latour. In their response papers both Jess and Will touch on the paradox of inscriptions which seem to be both fleeting and permanent. This seems to be a reoccurring theme in class. One of the key elements in Latour’s immutable mobile is stability. Does this model offer any explanations for the permanence or lack of permanence for inscriptions? Can we read newer types of inscriptions as containing the accumulation of previous levels? For examples of ways to think about new types of inscriptions here is a link to a site designed by M.A. Syverson at the University of Texas at Austin. The actual URL will be posted below. It deals with some of these issues and directly engages Latour. I think it has some short comings so we can talk about that as well. Also at stake in this issue of stability is of course time and space manipulation. This is something else I would like to take up.

The other issue that seems to be at stake in Latour’s work is modeling. I would like to discuss the Gorman piece in relation to the strengths and weaknesses of Latour’s model. In relation to this I am including some quotes from Willard McCarty below that also touch upon this topic

That it’s for now but I’ll be adding some more info by Monday. Thanks.

Pete Sinnott

Syverson: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/talks/cccc01/exampleprojects.html

Quotes

“The cascade of fourth, fifth, and nth order inscriptions will never stop, especially if the population, computers, and the profession of demography, statistics and economics, and the Census Bureau all grow together. In all cases the nth order inscriptions will now stand for nth-1 order paper forms exactly as these in turn stood for the level just below” (Latour, 234).

“Most of the difficulties we have in understanding science and technology proceeds from our belief that space and time exist independently as an unshakeable frame of reference inside which events and place would occur. This belief makes it impossible to understand how different spaces and different times may be produced inside the networks built to mobilise, cummulate, and recombine the world” (Latour, 228).

“Watching the graph paper slowly emerging out of the physiograph, we understand that we are at junction of two worlds: a paper world that we have just left and one of instruments that we are just entering. A hybrid is produced at the interface: a raw image, to be used later in an article, that is emerging from an instrument” (Latour, 65).

“What is behind a scientific text? Inscriptions. How are these inscriptions obtained? By setting up instruments. This other world just beneath the text is invisible as long as there is no controversy” (Latour, 69).

“The new inscription device brought the living objects to their desks with one crucial change: the irreversible flow of time was now synoptically presented to their eyes. It had in effect become a space on which, once again, rulers, geometry and elementary mathematics could be applied” (Latour, 230).

“All the distinctions one could wish to make between domains (economics, politics, science, technology, law) are less important than the unique movement that makes all of these domains conspire towards the same goal: a cycle of accumulation that allows a point to become a centre by acting at a distance on many other points” (Latour, 222).

“But although sacred the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables” (Grenvill, qtd in McCarty, 1).

“Two effects of computing make the distinction between ‘idea’ or other sort of mental construct on the one hand, and on the other ‘model’ in the sense we require: first the demand for computational tractability, i.e. complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a computational representation provides” (McCarty, 3).

“There are in general two ways in which a model may violate expectations and so surprise us: either by a success we cannot explain, e.g. finding an occurrence where it should not be; or by a likewise inexplicable failure, e.g. finding one where it is otherwise clearly present. In both cases modeling succeeds intellectually when it results in failure iether directly with the model itself or indirectly through ideas it shows to be inadequate. This failure, in the sense of expectations violated, is as we will see fundamental to modeling” (McCarty, 4).

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Posted in Uncategorized, Presentations | 2 Comments »

Discourse Models

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

One topic which we never got to last night is Kittler’s reception and influence, which Dan had looked into some (see the quotations on his handout or his posting below). I’m wondering whether we might think of Kittler’s contribution as not historiography or even narrative (as I called it), but rather as a model (an idea inspired by Johanna Drucker’s remarks about digital humanities and modeling yesterday).

Willard McCarty defines model as follows:

By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models; a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new. . . . a model is by nature a simplified and therefore fictional or idealized representation, often taking quite a rough-and-ready form: hence the term “tinker toy” model from physics, accurately suggesting play, relative crudity and heuristic purpose (Cartwright 1983: 158). . . . [T]he model of exists to tell us that we do not know, the model for to give us what we do not yet have. Models realize.

Is Kittler’s avowed “post-hermeneutic” criticism a form of theoretical modeling? Not discourse networks but discourse models?

Posted in General Discussion | 3 Comments »

Still trying to contribute in absentia: Links!

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Sorry I couldn’t make it last night; my inconvenient stomach bug turns out not to be a 24-hour one. Stay out of the bullpen, guys; I hear other people are having unpleasant symptoms.

Anyway, first, this is a little late but I just got around to reading this article on Edison’s filmmaking from Smithsonian magazine. It includes the following notes on “The Great Train Robbery”:

All of these are interesting, but none of them is art: creatively speaking, the movies were still a toy. Then, in late 1903, came The Great Train Robbery, the American cinema’s first defining masterpiece. Directed by Edwin S. Porter, this 12-minute epic is an archetype for the western (despite its central New Jersey locations). The story could not be simpler—bad guys hold up a train, escape and frolic for a while with their ill-gotten gains, and are finally caught and killed—but a new bond was forged between filmmaker and viewer; stationary vignette gave way to active storytelling. At the end, one of the actors, Justus Barnes, points his pistol at the audience and fires it in our faces. The effect on 1903 filmgoers, who had never seen anything like it, was phenomenal; people were widely reported to have screamed and ducked and then laughed when it was over, with the same happy terror that aficionados find on roller coasters.

The main argument here is that Edison is a failure on the artistic side of filmmaking; essentially, he is a technician and a businessman. I’m wondering how much that would really matter to, say, Kittler.

Also, in light of the new link to alternate keyboard models, I just have to point people to the DX1 (if that wasn’t gone over in class). Talk about altering machine specifications to fit human needs, and eliding the boundaries between typist and typewriter…

Posted in General Discussion | 2 Comments »

Us Inside the Cubicles

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Great to see the two response papers below.

Just a quick follow up from the very end of the discussion last night:

Places like MITH, which superficially don’t look very different from evironments at Micro$oft (or whereever) are about getting people like us into the cubicle. So you open the black box and instead of a 20-something coder or a harried mid-level manager you find someone with a Ph.D. in English. Or Women’s Studies. Or Spanish. That’s why I think the work of the digital humanities is so important, and I take that to have been McGann and Drucker’s essential point yesterday as well. If you go to the Blake Archive, each of the images that is there online is the end product of a process that requires hours of color correction and hands-on image processing. That’s simply not viable in a commercial setting. Fortunately however, we are (still, for the time being) able to name the practice of lavishing exquisite amounts on attention on singular objects: scholarship.

Btw, the person who knows the most about what’s inside the cubicles of contemporary knowledge work is Alan Liu. See his magisterial The Laws of Cool. (Liu will be at MITH on April 28.)

Posted in General Discussion | 1 Comment »

Typewriter as Interface

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

The evolution from typewriter to computer that Kittler outlines at the end of the chapter “Typewriter” from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter seemed odd to me at first. The two technologies could not appear to be anymore different: one being purely mechanical and the other being purely electronic. But in fact, it was only through merging the two concepts that the revolution of computerized technology begin to occur. The typewriter is a graft on the difference engine or Turing machine that generates a man-machine interface, a way for the human operator to communicate with the computational device.

This is contrary to Kittler, who seems more caught up in the notion that the computer is an improved version of the typewriter that subverts the feminine typist. He asserts that “reading (formerly reserved for secretaries) or computing discrete data” (page 245) was a quintessential essence of the typewriter. The secretary, woman, was part of the typewriter schematic, and computers merely replaced the secretary’s ability to read and compute with a device. In this way, the computer is a typewriter—a desexualized typewriter that seems to further distance technology (writing in particular) from women:

“When ENIAC, ‘the first operational computer,’ according to misleading American accounts, calculated projectile trajectories and A-bomb pressure waves during the Second World War, one hundred women were hired in addition to male programmers. Their job: ‘to climb around on ENIAC’s massive frame, locate burnt-out vacuum tubes, hook up cables, and perform other types of work unrelated to writing.’” (246-247)

With the need for secretaries removed, women are relegated to house-cleaning ENIAC. A harsh scenario, but it’s no wonder why Kittler would choose to include it. In fact, it’s rather vital for him to do so because it demonstrates how the ENIAC has displaced woman’s role in the typewriter’s feedback loop.

Kittler is not playing politics here, not entirely. Rather, he demonstrates that fine line between the mechanical role and the human role—the most important distinction in Alan Turing’s artificial intelligence test. The Universal Discrete Machine that “’also renders superfluous the typist’” (page 246) is an artificial intelligence that has as its endpoint the necessity to appear completely human. Man and machine are one, according to Kittler: the technologies and the humanities have collided, and when the machine fulfills that obligation to be indistinguishable to a human being, humanity is replaced. The typewriter that can read itself replaces the secretary; the computer that can code itself will replace the programmer.

But computers of that age never relied upon the typewriter in order to function. The Babbage difference engine and the Turing machine both relied upon mathematical instruction to work, not typing. They did rely upon human interaction as part of their computation (a point I concede to Kittler), but creating a new typewriter was never the intention. Computation was the intention, which is why all code is reduced to 0’s and 1’s instead of a’s, b’s, c’s, and d’s.

Perhaps the fact that both the difference engine and the Turing machine did not actually function outside of theoretical concept, Turing’s Universal Machine being purely conceptual, gives Kittler’s point more substance. “The hardware of average computers is at a kindergarten level,” (page 248) he writes, pointing to the fact that complex mathematical analysis has to be broken down into discrete steps for the computer to process. Mathematical elegance is impossible for the computer of today to Kittler; this must be managed by humans. Programmers thus are to the computer what the secretary is the typewriter: making up for the machine’s shortfalls and soon to be replaced with the advent of superior technology. She is the unspoken, the unseen entity that processes another’s words without adding any of her own: a function that the machine easily subverts.

But here that confusion, which surfaced the first time Kittler asserts this analogy, surfaces again: Mechanical devices are not electronic devices. This point can never be made more clear than in “The Steam-powered Word Processor,” where Arthur C. Clarke tells the tale of a Reverend Charles Cabbage (note the pun on Charles Babbage’s name), who creates a steam-powered computational device to automatically write his sermons. The result is a disaster, Cabbage’s machine being too slow and breaking when forced to a faster speed. “[H]is problems could have been solved by the use of electricity” (page 120 in the CP) writes Clarke, pointing to the somewhat romanticized notion that an electrical apparatus will succeed where a mechanical one fails.

For electricity has the advantage in the binary world of computation; it is able to transmit instructions at a speed imperceptible to a human operator. Once the typewriter was grafted onto the computational device, mechanization as a design principle would soon be swept away by electronics. The mechanical is too violent and too apparent to a human operator, the grinding and agitation of metal upon metal that will self-destruct if used too aggressively, which is what happens to poor Reverend Cabbage:

“’Faster, faster!’ called the impatient vicar, as the workmen shoveled coal into the smoke-belching monster in the churchyard. The long belt, snaking through the narrow window, flapped furiously up and down, pumping horse-power into the straining mechanism of the Loom…The result was inevitable. Somewhere, in the depths of the immense apparatus, something broke.” (page 122 in the CP)

“[C]omputation works as a treadmill” (page 248) says Kittler, musing at how early computers barely assisted mathematicians in there analysis. But the “treadmill” only needed a way to work fast enough so that its computational trek would be imperceptible to its mathematical operators. Mathematicians needed a device that could operate faster, give faster feedback, and would not be prone to the great shortfall of moving metallic components that agitated against each other and inevitably broke. Not that computers were any less prone to failure, but that the transformation of user input into operational failure no longer passed through a violent mechanical apparatus but through a seamless electronic signal that provided instantaneous feedback into its status.

The invention of the mouse and the point-and-click interface showcases the computer for what it is: a human-machine interface, without the necessity of the typewriter. One no longer needs to type in order to compute. Confusion arose easily after the mouse was invented as people still, wrongly, thought the computer to be a typewriter. The humor in this can be soon in modern cartoons:

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail34.html

“Your computer has too much computer in it, and not enough typewriter.” Here, the character Strong Bad initially fails to interact with the iMac computer because he cannot conceive of computation without typing. But computation can occur without typing, because a computer is not a typewriter. The keyboard is a typewriter, yes, but it is only the interface with the computer, and it is not necessary for a computer to function. Passed its typewriter roots or an array of function buttons, command keys, and direction arrows the keyboard enlists to perform its task as interface.

I think perhaps the ultimate attempt to transcend the keyboard beyond its typewriter roots, and into the true realm of the interface, is the Optimus. No, not Optimus Prime of Transformers fame, but the Optimus Keyboard by Art Lebedev Studios. The Optimus features an OLED panel beneath each key that is linked to the operating system. This configuration allows the keyboard to display a shift in functionality directly on the keys. If your OS changes languages, the keys shift (the English alphabet will be replaced by the other languages alphabet). Open up a copy of Photoshop, and the keys on the optimus will display icons to indicate shortcuts. Hold the shift key, the keyboard changes as well. There website is here:

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

Marketing hype aside, the Optimus keyboard showcases an example of the keyboard as the interface it was intended to be. With the assistance of the button-specific display, computation becomes faster, and the keyboard becomes more an electronic device than ever. But another fact, that I hate to sneak in at the end here, is the programmability of the Optimus. The OLED panel on each key is programmable, what is displayed on the key as well as what the key does when pressed can be customized to user preference.

And if you think about the nature of the keyboard shortcut, such as CTRL-ALT-DELETE, we see that the keyboard has always been had programmability, which is that “most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent” according to Lev Manovich in his chapter “What is New Media?” (page 47). In Windows, originally, CTRL-ALT-DELETE was a keyboard shortcut that could be redefined. The process for doing this was painful at best, which is why it takes something like the Optimus to makes this programmability more transparent.

The result shows how the keyboard is made so much more than a typewriter because of its role as interface between humanity and technology. But the interface and the device the interface is the translator for are not one in the same. Computation will always require an interface between humanity and technology, of which word processing is only a part. We will all be typists only until a better interface comes to subvert the typewriter.

William

d2c

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