How do machine and computer interfaces influence our perception of space and time - especially space and time through which we hope to move? A glance through any consumer electronics magazine reveals how often technological power is linked to the promise of mobility and freedom. To "take the controls" is to achieve self-determination.
Since the Cold War, we watch others interact with machines nearly as often as we operate them ourselves. As savvy consumers, most moderns are familiar with how images filter and condition desire - how might our compositions of switches, buttons, and monitors do the same? To answer this question, I employ writing, historical research, criticism, and the construction of actual interfaces. I look to the history of computing, nuclear armament, theories of interface design, and science fiction.
My hope is to create opportunities for more judicious use of common interfaces, and perhaps to discover some helpful design criteria.
I've presented on this project for the Geography Department at University of London Royal Holloway, the Public Memories project at Syracuse University, the Visual Democracy conference at Northwestern, and at Newcastle University's Culture Lab.
An increasing amount of this project's work takes place in collaboration with Ned O'Gorman. Together we're focussing on the role of interface use in the regulation of legitimate nuclear power. My earlier artwork under the name of the Department of Rhythmanalysis also continues to inform this research.
I’ve been really enjoying Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine, which is in part a story of influential researcher Joseph Licklider, but also an account of the whole story of American computing research from SAGE to the modern personal computer.
The book mentions a 1972 film produced to explain Arpanet (the military-funded predecessor to the Internet), and I found it online. The film was produced to display at an event in D.C. where computing researchers from the military, private and educational sectors were invited to see Arpanet in action for the first time.
Interestingly, the film ends with the now-familiar vision of moving to a paper-less society, and the apparently big-thinking Licklider gets the last word by imagining that we ought to get on thinking about social problems instead of technical ones:
The processing and distribution technology and the storage technology are gonna make it possible to get over onto a new technological base for intellectual efforts before our ponderous social processes will let us. I think more people oughta get in there and think about the social processes.
Shades of today’s TED talks, or perhaps some of the fringier current HCI research…or perhaps Social Informatics. Such rhetoric is also familiar to Neoliberalism and its roots in what Fred Turner calls the “New Communalists.” I’m still curious about the various ways in which technical and social heuristics are intertwined in computing history (and not wholly satsified by Turner’s account).
You can catch the last 8 minutes or so of this here. Includes some familiar rhetoric from today’s ebook craze.
The nice folks over at Vague Terrain, one of my favorite blogs, have kindly opened up their ranks to the likes of me. I’ll be posting periodically over there as well for the time being. The first series I proposed to them was on the Standard Test Subjects of computer graphics research - something that ought to be known outside of academic research, as part of our collective media history. For the first installment, I took a VERY brief look at the infamous “Lena” image, a cropped Playboy centerfold shot that has been used for years as a subject for demonstrating new digital imaging techniques. One could write plenty on that crazy story, the gender politics at work. For now, I’m just looking to make the story more known.
Here’s another sequence from a sketch for a video project based on my recent paper with Ned O’Gorman. Thinking here about who gains “legitimate” access to consoles and instruments, and how that figures in to who gets to be “modern” or not. Again, just a quick and dirty sketch here, bad voiceover and all.
Console use affects an individual’s potential for mobility through coaxing one’s body into particular habits of sensing and reaction. The patterns that quickly feel “normal” for habitual computer users/operators not only bind one to the station, but become a reference point for one’s use of the senses when away from the station. (Drive over 12 hours straight and the absent or present vibrations of your destination site will make you walk and move differently.)
Greg J. Smith caught Ned’s and my presentation at Syracuse last Fall and blogged about it at Serial Consign - now he’s nicely revisited my work for an editorial on Rhizome. He makes some apt connections, and I’m happy to be included in his very interesting scope of interests.
There are more people around than usual in my home lately, so I’ve had to rethink the role of music in the house. My usual noisy stuff wouldn’t fly with the guests, and I couldn’t take myself out of the social mix with headphones. So I thought to turn to songs again, actual melodies with memorable words that are “safe” for a wide variety of people.
For that, I thought to turn to Gospel. This will be an ongoing effort, I’m sure, but as I’m trying not to spend money on music right now, I started my dive into Gospel music with the Urbana Free Library.
