Paranoia, in some respects, I think, is a modern-day development of an ancient, archaic sense that animals still have — quarry-type animals — that they’re being watched. . . . I say paranoia is an atavistic sense. It’s a lingering sense, that we had long ago, when we were — our ancestors were — very [...]
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New Media?
“It’s now obvious nobody yet knows how to create a successful, and truly new, medium.” Steve Lohr, in yesterday’s NYTimes, observes that new media, specifically that based around the Internet, revolves around two aspects: searching and shopping. All else — the promise of virtual reality, multimedia dissemination, and other interactive digital components — has not [...]
Rehearsals for Life (Or, Technology and the Creative Artist Wrap Up, Part 5)
In a talk that Henry Jenkins gave at Macon State College earlier this semester, he stated that technology is interactive, but participation is cultural. I interpret this to mean that computers interact with one another, and this is not a human-like interaction; this communication in itself is not inherently meaningful without interpretation — without a [...]
The Configuration of Ludology (Or, Technology and the Creative Artist Wrap Up, Part 4)
Simply, the ludologists are concerned with the game as game, primarily, before any other considerations. They criticize the narrativists for applying previous schemas to the study of what they consider to be a unique field, deserving of its own disciplinary typology. More to come…
Janet Murray’s Holodeck (Or, Technology and the Creative Artist Wrap Up, Part 2)
For many, Janet Murray‘s Hamlet on the Holodeck represents the foundational text that defines cyberdrama and narrativism. Her seminal work theorizes a “universal fantasy machine” that the “half hacker, half bard” could use “to write stories that cannot be told in other ways” (15, 9). This experience, one that Murray likens to Star Trek‘s holodeck, [...]
Hey, What About Truth and Beauty? (Or, Technology and the Creative Artist Wrap Up, Part 1)
I began this semester by asking the question “what is art”? After a discussion that suggested art was anything from an escape to humanity’s finest achievement, we, perhaps artificially, narrowed our definition to state that art is always: critical, penetrating, challenging, engaging public: influential, inspiring, controversial historically positioned: technologically positioned/determined imaginative narrative mimetic: mirrors the [...]
The Internet of Things
Via KurzweilAI: Changes brought about by the internet will be dwarfed by those prompted by the networking of everyday objects, says a report by a UN body. As anyone in new media can tell you, ubiquitous computing is not a new idea. Technologies like Bluetooth, nanotechnology, and the Big-Brotheresque RFID will allow us to begin [...]