Digital Culture 3: Archive Fever

Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture by Darren Tofts & Murray McKeich.

The above book Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, is full of digital illustrations of bodies by Murray McKeich that are part Svankmajer, part Giger and part Tetsuo: both surreal and technofetishist in nature.

Chapter 3: Total Recall.

"The appeal of recollection is this jump by which I place myself in the virtual" - Gilles Deleuze.

This chapter deals with the technology of writing as an extension of human memory. It gives us a history of technologies: from the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks: the Socratic complaint about logocentrism; to the the calculating machines of Liebeniz and Babbage.

Vanervar Bush

Memex (1945)

"He [mankind] has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory."

Ted Nelson

Hypertext was coined by the researcher Ted Nelson to define writing done in a non-linear or consequential verbal structures made possible by the computer. The use of hypertext would produce an essay or story that would offer multiple paths of alternate paths in linking segments. Literature in Nelson's mind is characterized as a system of interconnected documents.

Hypertext presents cultural artefacts that are interactive, that is pluralistic in its discourse and polyvocal, freeing the reader from the dominance of the author. Hypertext enables scholars to find linkages through tracing keywords through single books and whole bodies of scholarship.

Borges, The Library of Babel: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html

Cyberspace

"A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void."
– Neuromancer

Cyberspace has more literary origins. According to The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) describes cyberspace as a “virtual world” that “is being developed through the interface of the human mind and computer technology. It is an electronically defined world in which a human can experience an environment completely outside the one that he or she physically occupies. The term was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, although his imaginative rendition of the concept is a good deal ahead of the technology presently available and more dystopian than most writing on the subject. (Kostelanetz, R., 2001 p. 152)

Source:
Kostelanetz, R (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes (2nd Edition) New York: Routledge

Digital Culture 2

Week 2: Social Networking and the 'Technological Unconscious'


Today's Digital Culture session was interesting. I am not sure about Scott Lash's idea of Post-Hegemonic Power. I remain to be convinced. I must add an entry about this..... and read a book


It has been argued that we are moving away from narrative, and a narrative culture: a process of 'knowing' and understanding the world, is actually dying, as a consequence of digitization. It is argued is the world under the auspices of new media where information is organised into databases: where narratives demand closure , digital narratives can never be complete. The database is the new notion of the bardic function that reshapes social relationships and democratizes the public sphere.


Phatic Technology and Modernity : http://journal.webscience.org/169/3/websci09_attachment_175.pdf

I am reminded of Robert Hughes criticism of McLuhan and the culture of glut..... must add.

Digital Culture 1

Week 1: Digital (Dis)Order - The Cybernetic Matrix

This semester's theoretical unit examines the rather complex and intricate subject of Digital Culture. The first session identifies parts of the histories of the digital. We were introduced to a key term such as cyber, cyberspace and cybernetics. All these terms describe or are connected with electronic communication networks like the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Cyber is derived from the Greek word Kubernetes meaning “Steersman” or “Governor”. The term 'cybernetics' was coined in Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948 and 1961) and describes it in “Cybernetics in History”, The Human Use of Human Beings in reference to the complex communications and control systems in the animal world and in mechanical networks, in particular self-regulating control systems. Wiener’s use of the term suggests how people interact with machines through a controlling device, such as a steering mechanism.

Randal Packer and Ken Jordan argued that “Wiener's remarkable insight, which is the premise behind all human-computer interactivity and interface design, is that human communication should be a model for human-machine and machine-to-machine interactions”. Packer and Jordan also point out that in his discussion of cybernetics “Wiener claims that the quality of man-machine communication influences man's inner well-being. His theory of cybernetics was meant to improve the quality of our existence in a technological society, where people are increasingly reliant on machines, and where interactions with machines are the norm. The design of machines, and their ability to respond effectively to us, has a direct impact on the social condition” (2001, p48).

I have read that Wiener was Hungarian born although Wikipedia states that he was born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri (some websites say Maryland) other sources have describe him as Polish or of Russian descent.

From the word cybernetics emerges “cyborg", for "cybernetic organism".

Media Technologies and Public Spheres: 2

The second session Wednesday 7 October , 2009: 'The Media and Modernity: Mediation, Technology, Change'.

Here are some of my thoughts on Modernism and Modernity:

The adjective modern refers to the contemporaneous. So in terms of art, all art is modern to those who make it, whether they are the inhabitants of Renaissance Florence or present day Lincoln. Specifically the term Modern refers to a historical period from the mid 19th century to the nineteen seventies. The exact end date for modernism is up for debate, but we could argue the the 1970s represented the beginning of the end.

Modernism is a critical approach that stresses innovation over all criteria. It is characterised by a radical attitude toward both the past and present. Historically we begin in the 18th Century and the Enlightenment and then at a period that has often been called the Age of Revolution (American, French and Industrial) and then in 1848 the year of the Chartists and the revolutions that swept Europe changing peoples attitude to contemporary life. Crucial to the development of modernism was the break down of traditional of financial power-the church, the state, and the aristocratic elite. This meant that artists were more independent and so free to determine the content of their art, refusing to depict paintings with mythological, religious and historical themes (often referred to as Academic Art). Modernism was widely, but not exclusively associated with life in an industrialised society and was often distinguished by its celebration of technology and science (challenged by many modern artists after 1914). Modern Art arose as part of Western society’s attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged from the 19th century. Modern design emerged as a reaction against the declining standards of craftsmanship and to the Art Nouveau movement from the 1880s onwards. Many practitioners recognized the need for new approaches that would enable the mass production of well-made artefacts for mass consumption. It was believed that mechanization and technology, if properly channelled, could change society for the better. Progress seems to be a key word here when in art we see one style succeed another in quick succession. In the late 19th Century and early Twentieth Century we see the content of art shift from realism and naturalism to spirituality, the celebration of technology, the evocation of primitivism and the emptying of art of all identifiable forms. So Modernism cannot be seen as just one movement.

Media Technologies and Public Spheres: 1

A representation of the public sphere imagined by Pablo Picasso in his collage Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912).

This entry is little late as the unit has almost been completed. So my comments here are based partly on past notes. This particular unit, 'Media Technologies and Public Sphere' deals with themes such as how media technologies play a central role in shaping the idea of 'public communication'.

It deals with role of newspapers, publications, oil paint, the camera, television, the telegraph, the World Wide Wide, the Internet and radio and there role in shaping public discourse. What is media's significance in liberal-democratic societies? How did the public sphere shape the development of liberal democracies in the west?

The public sphere although may be shaped my mediums discourse like the media technologies mentioned above, there are other 'mediums' that may not be too apparent: the coffee shop from the seventeenth century onwards that emerged sometime between the Commonwealth and the Restoration; the Salon in 18th Century, the pre-Revolutionary France, that emerged in Paris in opposition to court life in Versailles and the café of the nineteenth and twentieth, full of rootless cosmopolitans (that is I think how Stalin described them), revolutionaries and café intellectuals.

The last "medium of discourse" is represented above in a collage by Picasso.