Listing entries tagged with technology

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art and technology, 1971   10.29.2008, 1:08 PM

A quite note to point out that LACMA has announced that they've posted the long out-of-print catalogue for their 1971 Art and Technology show online in its entirety in both web and PDF format. It's worth looking at: Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingston, the curators of the show, attempted to match artists from the 1960s with corporations working with technology to see what would happen. The process of collaboration is an integral part of the documentation of the project. Sometimes attempted collaborations didn't work out, and their failure is represented in a refreshingly candid fashion: John Baldessari wanted to work in a botany lab coloring plants; George Brecht wanted IBM & Rand's help to move the British Isles into the Mediterranean; Donald Judd seems to have wandered off in California. And some of the collaborations worked: Andy Warhol made holograms; Richard Serra worked with a steel foundry; and Jackson Mac Low worked with programmers from IBM to make concrete poetry, among many others.

One contributor who might be unexpected in this context is Jeff Raskin (his first name later lost an "f"), who at the time was an arts professor at UCSD; he's now best known as the guy behind the Apple Macintosh's interface. We've mentioned his zooming interface and work on humane interfaces for computers on if:book in the past; if you've never looked at his zoom demo, it's worth a look. Back in 1971, he was trying to make modular units that didn't restrict the builder's designs; it didn't quite get off the ground. Microcomputers would come along a few years later.

Posted by dan visel at 1:08 PM | Comments (0)
tags: art , collaboration , failure , history , raskin , technology

from work to text   03.26.2008, 1:06 PM

I spent the weekend before last at the Center for Book Arts as part of their Fine Press Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers. There I was taught to set type; not, perhaps, exactly what you'd expect from someone writing for a blog devoted to new technology. Robert Bringhurst, speaking about typography a couple years back, noted that one of typography's virtues in the modern world is its status as a "mature technology"; as such, it can serve as a useful measuring stick for those emerging. A chance to think, again, about how books are made: a return to the roots of publishing technology might well illuminate the way we think about the present and future of the book.

I've been involved with various aspects of making books – from writing to production – for just over a decade now. In a sense, this isn't very long – all the books I've ever been involved with have gone through a computer – but it's long enough to note how changes in technology affect the way that books are made. Technology's changed rapidly over the last decade; I know that my ability to think through them has barely kept up. An arbitrary chronology, then, of my personal history with publishing technology.

The first book I was involved in was Let's Go Ireland 1998, for which I served as an associate editor in the summer of 1999. At that point, Let's Go researcher/writers were sent to the field with a copious supply of lined paper and a two copies of the previous year's book; they cut one copy up and glued it to sheets of paper with hand-written changes, which were then mailed back to the office in Cambridge. A great deal of the associate editor's job was to type in the changes to the previous years' book; if you were lucky, typists could be hired to take care of that dirty work. I was not, it goes without saying, a very good typist; my mind tended to drift unless I were re-editing the text. A lot of bad jokes found their way into the book; waves of further editing combed some of them out and let others in. The final text printed that fall bore some resemblance to what the researcher had written, but it was as much a product of the various editors who worked on the book.

The next summer I found myself back at Let's Go; for lack of anything better to do and a misguided personal masochism I became the Production Manager, which meant (at that point in time) that I oversaw the computer network and the typesetting of the series. Let's Go, at that point, was a weirdly forward-looking publishing venture in that the books were entirely edited and typeset before they were handed over to St. Martin's Press for printing and distribution. Because everything was done on an extremely tight schedule – books were constructed from start to finish over the course of a summer – editors were forced to edit in the program used for layout, Adobe FrameMaker, an application intended for creating industrial documentation. (This isn't, it's worth pointing out, the way most of the publishing industry works.) That summer, we began a program to give about half the researchers laptops – clunky beige beasts with almost no battery life – to work on; I believe they did their editing on Microsoft Word and mailed 3.5'' disks back to the office, where the editors would convert them to Frame. A change happened there: those books were, in a sense, born digital. The translation of handwriting into text in a computer no longer happened. A word was typed in, transferred from computer to computer, shifted around on screen, and, if kept, sent to press, the same word, maybe.

Something ineffable was lost with the omission of the typist: to go from writing on paper to words on a screen, the word on the page has to travel through the eye of the typist, the brain, and down to the hand. The passage through the brain of the typist is an interesting one because it's not necessarily perfect: the typist might simply let the word through, or improve the wording. Or the typist make a mistake – which did happen frequently. All travel guides are littered with mistakes; often mistakes were not the fault of a researcher's inattentiveness or an editor's mendaciousness but a typist's poor transliteration. That was the argument I made the next year I applied to work at Let's Go; a friend and I applied to research and edit the Rome book in Rome, rather then sending copy back to the office. Less transmissions, we argued, meant less mistakes. The argument was successful, and Christina and I spent the summer in Rome, writing directly in FrameMaker, editing each other's work, and producing a book that we had almost exclusive control over, for better or worse.

It's roughly that model which has become the dominant paradigm for most writing and publishing now: it's rare that writing doesn't start on a computer. The Internet (and, to a lesser extent, print-on-demand publishing services) mean that you can be your own publisher; you can edit yourself, if you feel the need. The layers that text needed to be sent through to be published have been flattened. There are good points to this and bad; in retrospect, the book we produced, full of scarcely disguised contempt for the backpackers we were ostensibly writing for, was nothing if not self-indulgent. An editor's eye wouldn't have hurt.

And so after a not inconsequential amount of time spent laying out books, I finally got around to learning to set type. (I don't know that my backwardness is that unusual: with a copy of Quark or InDesign, you don't actually need to know much of an education in graphic design to make a book.) Learning to set type is something self-consciously old-fashioned: it's a technology that's been replaced for all practical purposes. But looking at the world of metal type through the lens of current technology reveals things that may well have been hidden when it was dominant.

While it was suggested that the participants in the Emerging Writing Seminar might want to typeset their own Emerging Writing, I didn't think any of my writing was worth setting in metal, so I set out to typeset some of Gertrude Stein. I've been making my way through her work lately, one of those over-obvious discoveries that you don't make until too late, and I thought it would be interesting to lay out a few paragraphs of her writing. Stein's writing is interesting to me because it forces the reader to slow down: it demands to be read aloud. There's also a particular look to Stein's work on a page: it has a concrete uniformness on the page that makes it recognizable as hers even when the words are illegible. Typesetting, I though, might be an interesting way to think through it, so I set myself to typeset a few paragraphs from "Orta or One Dancing", her prose portrait of Isadora Duncan.

Typesetting, it turns out, is hard work: standing over a case of type and pulling out type to set in a compositing stick is exhausting in a way that a day of typing and clicking at a computer is not. A computer is, of course, designed to be a labor-saving device; still, it struck me as odd that the labor saved would be so emphatically physical. Choosing to work with Stein's words didn't make this any easier, as anyone with any sense might have foreseen: participles and repetitions blur together. Typesetting means that the text has to be copied out letter by letter: the typesetter looks at the manuscript, sees the next letter, pulls the piece of type out of the case, adds it to the line in the compositing stick. Mistakes are harder to correct than on a computer: as each line needs to be individually set, words in the wrong place mean that everything needs to be physically reshuffled. With the computer, we've become dependent upon copying and pasting: we take this for granted now, but it's a relatively recent ability.

There's no end of ways to go wrong with manual typesetting. With a computer, you type a word and it appears on a screen; with lead type, you add a word, and look at it to see if it appears correct in its backward state. Eventually you proof it on a press; individual pieces of type may be defective and need to be replaced. Lowercase bs are easily confused with ds when they're mirrored in lead. Type can be put in upside-down; different fonts may have been mixed in the case of type you're using. Spacing needs to be thought about: if your line of type doesn't have exactly enough lead in it to fill it, letters may be wobbly. Ink needs attention. Paper width needs attention. After only four days of instruction, I'm sure I don't know half of the other things that might go wrong. And at the end of it all, there's the clean up: returning each letter to its precise place, a menial task that takes surprisingly long.

We think about precisely none of these things when using a computer. To an extent, this is great: we can think about the words and not worry about how they're getting on the page. It's a precocious world: you can type out a sentence and never have to think about it again. But there's something appealing about a more altricial model, the luxury of spending two days with two paragraphs, even if it is two days of bumbling – one never spends that kind of time with a text any more. A degree of slowness is forced upon even the best manual typesetter: every letter must be considered, eye to brain to hand. With so much manual labor, it's no surprise that there so many editorial layers existed: it's a lot of work to fix a mistake in lead type. Last-minute revision isn't something to be encouraged; when a manuscript arrived in the typesetter's hands, it needs to be thoroughly finished.

Letterpress is the beginning of mechanical reproduction, but it's still laughably inefficient: it's still intimately connected to human labor. There's a clue here, perhaps, to the long association between printers and progressive labor movements. A certain sense of compulsion comes from looking at a page of letterset type that doesn't quite come, for me, from looking at something that's photoset (as just about everything in print is now) or on a screen. It's a sense of the physical work that went into it: somebody had to ink up a press and make those impressions on that sheet of paper. I'm not sure this is necessarily a universal reaction, although it is the same sort of response that I have when looking at something well painted knowing how hard it is to manipulate paint from my own experience. (I'm not arguing, of course, that technique by itself is an absolute indicator of value: a more uncharitable essayist could make the argument could be made that letterpress functions socially as a sort of scrapbooking for the blue states.) Maybe it's a distrust of abstractions on my part: a website that looks like an enormous amount of work has been put into it may just as easily have stolen its content entirely from the real producers. There's a comparable amount of work that goes into non-letterpressed text, but it's invisible: a PDF file sent to Taiwan comes back as cartons of real books; back office workers labor for weeks or months to produce a website. In comparison, metal typesetting has a solidity to it: the knowledge that every letter has been individually handled, which is somehow comforting.

Nostalgia ineluctably works its way into any argument of this sort, and once it's in it's hard to pull it out. There's something disappointing to me in both arguments blindly singing the praises of the unstoppable march of technology and those complaining that things used to be better; you see exactly this dichotomy in some of the comments this blog attracts. (Pynchon: "She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?") A certain tension between past and present, between work and text, might be what's needed.

Posted by dan visel at 1:06 PM | Comments (3)
tags: labor , process , technology , typesetting

why are screens square?   11.14.2007, 12:21 AM

More from the archive, I'm afraid; but I've quoted this so often in the last year that it merits repeating.

A video of Jo Walsh, a simultaneously near-invisible and near-legendary hacker I met through the University of Openess in London, talking about FOAF, Web3.0, geospatial data, the 'One Ring To Rule Them All' tendency of so-called 'social media' and the philosophies of making tech tools.

"Why are screens square?", she asks. What follows is less a set of theories as a meditation on what happens when you start trying to think back through the layers of toolmaking that go into a piece of paper, a pen, a screen, a keyboard - the media we use to represent ourselves, and that we agree to pretend are transparent. This then becomes the starting-point for another meditation on who owns, or might own, our digital future.

(High-quality video so takes a little while to load)

Posted by sebastian mary at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)
tags: burnout , hacker , jo , screens , technology , toolmaking

ecclesiastical proust archive: starting a community   02.09.2007, 7:46 AM

(Jeff Drouin is in the English Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York)

About three weeks ago I had lunch with Ben, Eddie, Dan, and Jesse to talk about starting a community with one of my projects, the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive. I heard of the Institute for the Future of the Book some time ago in a seminar meeting (I think) and began reading the blog regularly last Summer, when I noticed the archive was mentioned in a comment on Sarah Northmore's post regarding Hurricane Katrina and print publishing infrastructure. The Institute is on the forefront of textual theory and criticism (among many other things), and if:book is a great model for the kind of discourse I want to happen at the Proust archive. When I finally started thinking about how to make my project collaborative I decided to contact the Institute, since we're all in Brooklyn, to see if we could meet. I had an absolute blast and left their place swimming in ideas!

While my main interest was in starting a community, I had other ideas — about making the archive more editable by readers — that I thought would form a separate discussion. But once we started talking I was surprised by how intimately the two were bound together.

For those who might not know, The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is an online tool for the analysis and discussion of à la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). It's a searchable database pairing all 336 church-related passages in the (translated) novel with images depicting the original churches or related scenes. The search results also provide paratextual information about the pagination (it's tied to a specific print edition), the story context (since the passages are violently decontextualized), and a set of associations (concepts, themes, important details, like tags in a blog) for each passage. My purpose in making it was to perform a meditation on the church motif in the Recherche as well as a study on the nature of narrative.

I think the archive could be a fertile space for collaborative discourse on Proust, narratology, technology, the future of the humanities, and other topics related to its mission. A brief example of that kind of discussion can be seen in this forum exchange on the classification of associations. Also, the church motif — which some might think too narrow — actually forms the central metaphor for the construction of the Recherche itself and has an almost universal valence within it. (More on that topic in this recent post on the archive blog).

Following the if:book model, the archive could also be a spawning pool for other scholars' projects, where they can present and hone ideas in a concentrated, collaborative environment. Sort of like what the Institute did with Mitchell Stephens' Without Gods and Holy of Holies, a move away from the 'lone scholar in the archive' model that still persists in academic humanities today.

One of the recurring points in our conversation at the Institute was that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is "my reading" of Proust. It might be difficult to get others on board if their readings — on gender, phenomenology, synaesthesia, or whatever else — would have little impact on the archive itself (as opposed to the discussion spaces). This complex topic and its practical ramifications were treated more fully in this recent post on the archive blog.

I'm really struck by the notion of a "reading" as not just a private experience or a public writing about a text, but also the building of a dynamic thing. This is certainly an advantage offered by social software and networked media, and I think the humanities should be exploring this kind of research practice in earnest. Most digital archives in my field provide material but go no further. That's a good thing, of course, because many of them are immensely useful and important, such as the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Some archives — such as the NINES project — also allow readers to upload and tag content (subject to peer review). The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive differs from these in that it applies the archival model to perform criticism on a particular literary text, to document a single category of lexia for the experience and articulation of textuality.

If the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive widens to enable readers to add passages according to their own readings (let's pretend for the moment that copyright infringement doesn't exist), to tag passages, add images, add video or music, and so on, it would eventually become a sprawling, unwieldy, and probably unbalanced mess. That is the very nature of an Archive. Fine. But then the original purpose of the project — doing focused literary criticism and a study of narrative — might be lost.

If the archive continues to be built along the church motif, there might be enough work to interest collaborators. The enhancements I currently envision include a French version of the search engine, the translation of some of the site into French, rewriting the search engine in PHP/MySQL, creating a folksonomic functionality for passages and images, and creating commentary space within the search results (and making that searchable). That's some heavy work, and a grant would probably go a long way toward attracting collaborators.

So my sense is that the Proust archive could become one of two things, or two separate things. It could continue along its current ecclesiastical path as a focused and led project with more-or-less particular roles, which might be sufficient to allow collaborators a sense of ownership. Or it could become more encyclopedic (dare I say catholic?) like a wiki. Either way, the organizational and logistical practices would need to be carefully planned. Both ways offer different levels of open-endedness. And both ways dovetail with the very interesting discussion that has been happening around Ben's recent post on the million penguins collaborative wiki-novel.

Right now I'm trying to get feedback on the archive in order to develop the best plan possible. I'll be demonstrating it and raising similar questions at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference at NYU in mid-March. So please feel free to mention the archive to anyone who might be interested and encourage them to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu. And please feel free to offer thoughts, comments, questions, criticism, etc. The discussion forum and blog are there to document the archive's development as well.

Thanks for reading this very long post. It's difficult to do anything small-scale with Proust!

Posted by jeff drouin at 7:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
tags: Online , academia , archive , blogs , books , digital , encyclopedia , folksonomy , hypertext , literature , multimedia , narrative , network , novel , open_access , pedagogy , peer_review , photography , publishing , reading , search , social_software , tagging , technology , textuality , university , web , wiki , writing

the good life: part 1   09.26.2006, 12:41 PM

The Van Alen Institute has organized an exhibition that explores new design and use of public space for recreation. The exhibition displays innovative designs for reimagined and reclaimed public spaces from various architects and urban planners. The projects are organized into five categories: The Connected City, the Cultural City, the 24-Hour City, the Fun City, and the Healthy City. As part of the exhibition, the Van Alen Institute has been holding weekly panel discussions about designing public space from international and local (NYC) perspectives. The participants have been high level partners in some of the most widely regarded architecture firms in NYC and the world. The questions and discussions afterwards, however, have proved to be the most interesting part; there have been questions about autonomy and conformity in public space, and how much of the new public space has been designed for safety, but little else. They have become 'non-spaces', and fail to support public needs for engagement, relaxation, and health.

This week their discussion will move away from the architectural and planning and into new technology. It will be interesting to see how technology supports and influences ideas of connectedness in a public place; while the value of connecting to others from a private, isolated space seems obvious, doing so from a public place seems less common and less intuitive than face-to-face interaction. The panel, including Christina Ray (responsible for the Conflux Festival ) and Nick Fortugno (Come Out & Play Festival), will present and discuss "The Wired City" at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, Sep. 27.

Posted by jesse wilbur at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Wired , architecture , design , technology , the_good_life , urban_planning , van_alen

love through networked screens   05.10.2006, 1:23 PM

This past weekend, I saw a remarkable film: "Three Times," by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. It's a triptych on love set in Taiwan in three separate periods -- 1966, 1911, and 2005 -- each section focusing on a young man and woman, played by the same actors. Hou does incredible things with time. Each of the episodes, in fact, is a sort of study in time, not just of a specific time in history, but in the way time moves in love relationships. The opening shots of the first episode, "A Time for Love," announce that things will be operating in a different temporal register. Billiard balls glide across a table. You don't yet understand the rules of the game that is being played. Characters gradually emerge and the story unfolds through strange compressions and contractions of time that comprise a weird logic of yearning.

This is the first of Hou's films that I've seen (it's only the second to secure an American release). I was reminded of Tarkovsky in the way Hou uses cinema to convey the movement of time, both across the eras and within individual episodes. There's much to say about this film, and I hope to see it again to better figure out how it does what it does. The reason I bring it up here is that the third story -- "A Time for Youth," set in contemporary Taipei -- contains some of the most profound and visually arresting depictions of the mediation of intimate relationships through technology that I've ever seen. Cell-phones and computers have been popping up in movies for some time now, usually for the purposes of exposition or for some spooky haunted technology effect, like in "The Matrix" or "The Ring." In "Three Times," these new modes of contact are probed more deeply.

The story involves a meeting of an epileptic lounge punk singer and an admiring photographer, while the singer's jilted female lover lurks in the margins. Hou weaves back and worth between intense face-to-face meetings and asynchronous electronic communication. At various times, the screen of the movie theater (the IFC in Greenwich Village) is completely filled with an extreme close-up of a cell-phone screen or a computer monitor, the text of an SMS or email message as big as billboard lettering. The pixelated Chinese characters are enormous and seem to quiver, or to be on the verge of melting. A cursor blinking at the end of an alleged suicide note typed into a computer is a dangling question of life and death, or perhaps just a sulky dramatic gesture.

What's especially interesting is that the most expressive speech in "A Time for Youth" is delivered electronically. Face-to-face meetings are more muted and indirect. There's an eerie episode in a nightclub where the singer is performing on stage while the photographer and another man circle her with cameras, moving as close as they can without actually touching her, shooting photos point blank.

But it was the use of screens that really struck me. By filling our entire field of vision with them -- you almost feel like you're swimming in pixels -- Hou conveys how tiny channels of mediated speech can carry intense, all-consuming feeling. The weird splotchiness of digital text at close range speaks of great vulnerability. Similarly, the revelation of the singer's epilepsy is not through direct disclosure, but happens by accident when she leaves behind a card with instructions for what to do in case of a seizure, after spending the night at the photographer's apartment. This all strikingly follows up the previous episode, "A Time for Freedom," which is done as a silent film with all the dialogue conveyed on placards.

It's one of those things that suddenly you viscerally understand when a great artist shows you: how these technologies spin a web of time around us, sending voices and gestures across space instantly, but also placing a veil between people when they actually share a space. In many ways, these devices bring us closer, but they also fracture our attention and further insulate us. Never are you totally apart, but seldom are you totally together.

"Three Times" is currently out in a few cities across the US and rolling out progressively through June in various independent movie houses (more info here).

Posted by ben vershbow at 1:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
tags: Hou_Hsiao-hsien , Taiwan , cellphones , film , mediated_existence , technology , ubiquitous_computing

this is exciting.   02.13.2006, 6:01 PM

every once in a while we see something that quickens the pulse. Jefferson Han, a researcher at NYU's Computer Science Dept. has made a video showing a system which allows someone to manipulate objects in real time using all the fingers of both hands. watch the video and get a sense of what it will be like to be able to manipulate data in two and someday three dimensions by using intuitive body gestures.

Posted by bob stein at 6:01 PM | Comments (4)
tags: computers , cool , demo , interaction , interface , tablet , technology , touchscreen