Tuesday, November 10, 2009

NMR For Classes 8 & 9

Chapter 10 - The Construction of Change by Roy Ascott
  • 1960's - Cybernetics & art continue to retain focus - the distinction between participation & interaction
  • Art of the Electric Age focuses on the interaction and relationship between the work & viewer.
  • 1980's - Telematic art: communications & collaboration between people far apart
  • Relationship between art, science, & behavior, a flexible structure to bend science & art

Chapter 11 - A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate by Theodor H. Nelson
  • Nelson coined the term "hypertext" & offered a complex, reconfigurable structure for info
  • Thought about the web years before it came to be commonplace

Chapter 12 - Six Selections by Oulipo
  • Developed a system with the potential to create computer-mediated textuality
  • Enhances the readers ability to create literature
  • Renegotiates the relationship between the work, the creator, & the viewer
  • Yours for the Telling
  • Like Choose Your Own Ending books we used to read in elementary school
  • Allows the reader to take an active role
  • Computer and Writer by Paul Fournel
  • Outlines the different relationships between creator, computer, art, & viewer
  • Talks about math & literature
  • Prose and Anticombinatorics by Italo Calvino
  • Examples of how computers help create literature
  • Chooses compatible possibilities
Chapter 13
  • "The medium is the message"- McLuhan.
  • 1962 - Typographic technology causes a change in western thought
  • Printing press - Gutenberg - people can be hypnotized one sense at a time by a new technology
  • 1964 - "The Medium is the Message
  • This essay makes me want to claw my eyes out.
  • Talks about the idea that the media itself overshadows the content it puts out.
  • Hate.
Chapter 14 - 1967 - Bauldrillard's critique of Understanding Media
  • 1965 - Influential artist were gathered from various groups in Europe and New York
  • 1966 - E.A.T was founded, Experiments in Art and Technology
  • 1970's - Advancements of technology and art together
  • The Pepsi Expo Pavillion is created as a collaboration between artist and engineers.

Basically, McLuhan is a nutcase. A brilliant, brilliant man, but a nutcase. Why do brilliant people feel the need to write in such a way so that it takes an average person a lot of serious work to figure out what they're saying? A lot of McLuhan's ideas and concepts can be restated in a way so the average high school student could understand them, but they're so convoluted that I don't want to read it because it makes my brain hurt.

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