Multiple projects and activities pushing forward these days:

• Ned O’Gorman and I will be in residence with the NEH/Vectors Fellowship Program this summer in Los Angeles, at USC. We’ll be working on a prototype for a new archive of American atomic test films, based in part on scraping existing databases.
• Lisa Nakamura and I recently wrote together about the scifi film District 9 for the online journal FlowTV.
• I’ve been writing more about the Palm Pre marketing campaign and its reception online. More about that to come somewhere soon.
• I’ll be presenting on computing history and Science Fiction cinema/tv next week in Minneapolis, at the annual conference of the Rhetorical Society of America.
• My design for a large mural on the histories of genetics and cybernetics is finally, nearly complete. Should be printed and installed on campus here at Illinois in the next month.
• My outstanding students Jeff and Bonnie invited me to go off about New Media education for the HASTAC blog recently.
• Some folks here at Illinois’ Beckman Institute recently invited me to talk about the role of the visual in the communication of scientific research to the public. I provided a little tour of the campus along these lines, which you can see here in a slideshow.
• Lastly, I have a new way of explaining the vocations of artists using dog breeds. I tested it out on some folks at Illinois State University during a recent artist’s talk there. Will share soon.
• [Praise be. Summer is here for us academics.]

My next installment of a series on the standard test subjects of digital imaging research is up at Vague Terrain. I like the venue for the subject, since the writing can be less scholarly and the subject geared more toward a user group than a discipline.

document from DIRT (image: Bonnie Fortune)

As we move thankfully into Spring, here’s some evidence of Winter activity. My presentation “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills” at Links Hall in Chicago put in me in some fine company, as did the inclusion of some drawings in the Winter issue of Ausgang. You can also find the next installment of my “Arbitrary Legends” series for Vague Terrain over here. By the way, I’ve bid adieu to Facebook, and should probably explain why somewhere. Loving Tumblr more all the time though.

I’ll be back in Dingburg territory this weekend, presenting a short illustrated monologue as part of the DIRT series at Links Hall, Chicago. Would love to see you there.

I gave a presentation today to HCI Researchers at my University in which I tried to explain how designers and artists are taught to create and iterate. The scientists picked up on the potential problems as quickly as we artists do from the inside. View my slideshow here.

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.

Selected reference books behind one of my favorite workspaces on campus:

• Mottoes
• Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
• Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
• World Ephemeris for the 20th Century
• Satanism Today
• Encyclopedia of Human Behavior
• Encyclopedia of Creativity
• Encyclopedia of Ethics
• Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics
• Encyclopedia of Bioethics
• Dictionary of Asian Philosophies
• American Women and Religion
• Last Words
• Utah Newspapers, Traces of Her Past

For some time now, as I’ve fallen deeper into the academic side of the fine art industries, I’ve struggled to understand the peculiar divide between art in the university and art in the commercial market.

Here’s the best way I can summarize this divide these days:

The more prestigious an academic institution one works for, the more likely recognition of one’s art research is subject to market forces, rather than to peer review.

This is probably not news to anyone, but for me it’s the simplest way of describing a wide-ranging problem. Why is this the case, and why is it a problem?

First, this is the case because academic institutions appoint and promote professors in a comparable way to the appointment of professors in other fields - based on excellence of work, as determined through demonstrated public recognition.

The larger the scale of recognition for artists, the more likely the generating engine for that recognition has little to do with the academic world. Features in prestigious magazines, curated group exhibitions, commissions and the like are more bound up with commercial gallery sales than with anything like academic peer-review. (This is not a complaint, mind you - more on that in a minute.)

The most prestigious academic institutions require artists who have received great recognition in these areas. Such artists have likely spent much less time in the academic side of art, as their work required long labor in the commercial world. If they land in an academic job, they are likely to feel somewhat alien, and rightly so. Everyone else around them has risen to their position through very different structures of recognition.

For the record, I have nothing against a profit-driven market for fine art. We owe a great deal of new knowledge and experience to such markets. This market doesn’t support everything that I expect from art - not even close - and it does seem to best serve the wealthy. But in the end, this market benefits a broader range of people than do many other luxury markets.

However, there is a problem in how success in this market translates to academic expertise, especially for institutions that lay any claim to faculty governance or to the stewardship of knowledge through research. Here’s how I see it.

Thanks to the hard work of my predecessors, art professors are viewed as colleagues by their peers - on matters of promotion, curriculum, and recognition of excellence. In fact, as colleagues most art professors come with very little experience in how judgment of value happens in a peer-review based model of knowledge production.

An artist can earn a deserved and prestigious place of recognition within the art world without ever having to discursively articulate her relation to other artists or ideas, living or dead. Through manual expertise, intellectual curiosity, and savvy attention to demand, an artist can work her way up through all manner of coveted residencies, awards and exhibitions, without even needing to identify a home discipline. This is only right, I wouldn’t want to see this go away, for art has no need for the mechanisms of disciplinary academic review.

Conversely, peer-reviewed artistic achievement - through conference presentations, certain granting agencies, visiting lectures, certain curatorial models, and publication - won’t hold any particular weight in the commercial art market. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But when these two domains of recognition are conflated in review of art professors, we end up with people asked to do things they aren’t qualified to do. The conflation of these domains also contributes to a non-specific vocabulary for evaluation of student work, curricular goals and programmatic priorities.

I’m having trouble thinking of a good analogy. The best one I can give is unfortunately from dog shows - you can’t judge the working breeds using the standards of the sporting breeds. Sure, they’re all dogs, but they perform in very different ways.

Some time ago in the 20th century - and others have told this story - artists managed to convince universities that the sort of knowledge produced through deft manipulation of material form could be evaluated and judged. The MFA was born, recognized as a terminal degree, and artists started getting tenure.

It’s time now to make some clearer distinctions and descriptions of how art researchers are and aren’t like other university workers. We may even have multiple classes of art researchers at this point (as in psychology or other fields). These need to be somewhat protected from one another, expectations made clearer, the interface between a market-driven field and a review-driven field smoothed in the interest of communication, fairness, and value. This is especially true during a time of such limited economic resources.

I should add here that from a labor perspective there are far more pressing issues than the one I describe. I suspect that many to most instructors of art at the college level are not even employed full-time, so this whole dynamic only dimly affects them - except in their ability to move into a full-time position as desired in the current system.

Also, of course, instructors in academic institutions that privilege teaching over research are less affected by the dynamic I describe. (For that matter, I’m not even sure how much longer we’ll see artists in research university settings.)

Lastly, in fine art education I’m not sure there exists an ecosystem of knowledge and value at work - there may be multiple pyramids rather than a single structure of ascending value and prestige. So this point I’m trying to make may only affect a small number of people. But as long as research universities are such centers of science, industry, and the military, I’d like to see art’s role clarified in the interest of maintaining a relevant role.

from Dore's illustration of Dante's Limbo

Grasping at some definition in the amorphous time of family holiday visits. A few shapes emerge in the mist:

Status updates are not so different from how postcards once functioned. (This I decided after reading Rina Piccolo’s piece on postcards in the wonderful Syncopated anthology.)

In Avatar, a non-cybernetic mercenary army fights a cybernetic national amy. We’re supposed to side with the latter, which also wins.

I never noticed before that Aimee Mann is in The Big Lebowski - she plays the nihilist’s nine-toed girlfriend.

The fury/flurry of smartphones in recent consumer electronics has been omnipresent and consuming. Yet I’ve seen almost no hype around service plans, which seem to be steadily rising in cost. As far as I can tell, everyone with a smartphone is now likely paying around $850 a year for the service, and probably a lot more. What were they spending this money on three years ago?

On New Year’s Day my non-betting friend Zuppa bet money on a horse named Zippy, a long shot, and won.

Walking out of Best Buy with a new computer to set up for my in-laws. Coming the other way, an old stooped-over guy waving a glass coffee pot at the blue-shirts.

Used VHS copy of Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution for six bucks! Score.

Everywhere I turn these days - the work of David Mindell.

It’s hard to look a stranger in the eye when he displays detailed knowledge of your recent medical history (in the context of visiting a relative’s church).

Unabomber survivor Gelertner once wrote that software is to hardware what the musical score is to the musical instrument (or something like that).

My friends Stephanie and Nathan, in love and in life.

The Christmas holiday as we know it is a celebration of life - this we do through getting together with blood relatives, the people wherein our lives begin and grow. It’s meant to be the best day of the year, the time when the stuff we really live for is most present. It’s an assertion of life against the coldness of winter and the short dark day of solstice. In the Christian form, there’s even a birth in the mix, a miracle birth of a deity in human form, no less.

Christmas, therefore, is liturgical - even in its secular form. In liturgy, people agree to perform some set of actions by a predetermined schedule, for the purposes of re-experiencing their base principles. In America, for example, the Fourth of July is a liturgical form, as is the Super Bowl (for better or for worse). And so Christmas is a liturgical act - a regular, collective act of celebrating life.

We all know how liturgies can ring true or ring hollow for people. When the Season’s celebration of life is presented as compulsory, easy, and even natural, those for whom death is more evident on this day might be forgiven for hurrying the day along, even dreading it.

I’m thinking about all this for many reasons tonight, but chiefly because of the people in my life who have lost much this year. My loved ones have lost loved ones. People I love have lost their jobs, their homes, their reasons for pushing through. People I love are missing their loved ones, badly.

So Christmas can ring hollow as a corporate celebration of life in these circumstances. Cynicism is so easy for me, especially in defense of others. I’m looking for another way tonight. Collective rituals can be good, I don’t want to see these things go away.

All I can think of is this - that liturgy intended solely to affirm the positive or provoke warm emotion is at best a limited ritual, and at worst a lie. The most powerful and rich liturgies, the most valuable ones, are meaningful because of what they push for when there’s no feeling at all. Ritual shouldn’t be meaningless for those who can’t feel the intended emotions - ritual should instead find its meaning in the lack of those emotions. The loss of faith, the loss of reasons for hope, is the REASON for the ritual. The liturgy is where the people push back, humbly moving their bodies in hope that their hearts will follow.

This is what I’ll be thinking about tomorrow. I’ll be searching through the carols I know for what song could express the good of the light while it is still yet dark.

I’ll be doing this because I want to think on Christmas about the life I want to fight for against the darkness. I want to celebrate Christmas not because I feel all sorts of good things about life, but because I want to push back, with others, against the night, against death.

[This post indebted to theologian James K. Smith.]