ART/FIST 240 Bringing Technology to the People

First, and most important it was necessary for computers to have a language beyond mathematics. The vision of Grace Hopper made it possible to communicate with computers using English. At Remington Rand her idea was not accepted for 3 years. In the meantime, she published her first paper on the subject, compilers, in 1952. "I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code. That was the beginning of COBOL, a computer language for data processors."

Queen of Code doc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvS0V7Tr4o

 

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013), whose vision of collaboration using computer technology to help solve the urgent and complex problems of all of humanity, died on July 2, 2013. His comrades believed that his ideas were never fully realized due to his ideals and generosity of spirit. For example, he resisted patenting the "mouse" he'd invented and it eventually fell into the public domain. The robotic rigidity of institutions is also to blame -- most powerful technology companies in American relegated him to R&D. Ted Nelson, professor and inventor of the first hypertext project, delivered Engelbart's eulogy on December 9, 2013. In his tearful delivery, he said the "...real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration...Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil." Engelbart articulated his ideas for collaboration publicly in what is known as The Mother of all Demos delivered on December 9, 1968, over a half a century ago. Some of what he described is still in the process of being realized in commercial forms such as Skype, Google Docs, and more.

Ted Nelson inserts a bit of attitude into this history. He detests the evils of limitations and compromise. He questions corporate control. His technical ideas may have not have had as widespread impact as others here, but his spirit, and that of his ilk, is what helped made computing a tool available to most rather than a select few.

 

Steve Wozniak believed that computers could be beautiful machines. Not just utilitarian devices with some industrial design on the outside, but beautiful from the inside out. Art objects. The idea was radical, and has changed our lives. We are now willfully living with computing technology all of the time.

Sophie Calle's First Exhibit

The first official Sophie Calle work of art: 

In 1979, Sophie Calle asked several (23) persons, friends, strangers, neighbors, to come and spend eight hours in her bed in order to keep this bed occupied twenty-four hours a day. These people had to consent to being photographed and to answer some questions. She took photographs of the sleepers and noted the important elements of these short meetings: subjects of discussion, positions during sleep, their movements during their sleep, the detailed menu of their breakfast she was preparing for them... The whole set of these series of photographs (23) was exhibited at the XIth Biennale de Paris in 1980, Sophie Calle's first show, inspiring her to "become an artist."

Beuys

 Indie doc trailer stuff...

 

 

Yves Klein told by Rotraut

 In 1962, Rotraut and Yves Klein married in Paris. Klein died six months later, while Rotraut was pregnant with their son.

 

Rotraut is the manager of Klein's estate and a highly accomplished artist. http://www.rotraut.com/fr/accueil/

From Work to Text

This essay extends the notion of 'the death of the author' to an analysis of forms. The Work is the physical product, the Text comes after the consumption of the Work, where the ideas can live on and mutate. It's almost cliche now to look at an artwork and talk about 'the text that surrounds it', but this idea is relatively new, and represents for many a transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism.

In this essay Barthes brings up 7 points that can be briefly summarized;

1)     Method: Work is a thing, Text is a discourse

2)     Genre: Work often identifies as genre, Text transcends genre

3)      The Sign: Work = moderately symbolic, Text = radically symbolic

4)      The Plurality: Work is often singular and always finite, Text is infinite

5)       Filiation: Work has an author, the Text extends beyond the author

6)      Reading: the Work is consumed, the Text keeps giving

      7)    Pleasure: Work = fascination/delight, Text = Utopian Pleasure

What we learn here is that what we mostly get from a cultural product isn't something that's extracted from it, but rather an entity that becomes quite independent of the original thing itself.

Everything we've looked at this term is pretty well summarized in three videos by the rather brilliant and accessible Tom Nicholas

 

 

Barthes' Musica Practica

Beethoven quickly becomes a focus of this essay. What was written here seems to evoke his 9th Symphony, created at the end of his life. Music which today can become invisible because of its pre-recorded familiarity, or revelatory in its creation of soul-stirring vibrations.

This doc is a bit cheezy but still a rather moving chronicle of the present day life of this 200 year old piece;

"That because Beethoven was freed {by deafness? maybe} to explore deep within his own nature, he was able to create works that would have a future." And, he most definitely did.

"The truth is perhaps that Beethoven's music has in it
something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the
exact locality), and this brings us to the second Beethoven."- pg.152

It may be important here to think of Barthes as a student of Phenomenology, having an interest in the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Through Beethoven he may be waxing on the complexity of experience that music, and all other art forms, can stir up.

 

The Death of the Author

"The Death of the Author" by (author) Roland Barthes may be one of the most influential works of theory to date, as well as a rather poetic musing on creators and their influences. Reflecting on this in the present day one can't help but see it implying how creative work can be effectively created via artificial intelligence. Here's a video explaining the basics of this essay...

 

 Here's one that's digs a bit deeper and shows how Barthes appropriated concepts from writings that preceded his by decades, in the spirit of the essay itsself...

 

The most provocative concept in this essay is contained in the final sentence "...the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." suggesting the overlooked contribution of the reader in the functionality and meaning of an artwork (as understood in 19freaking67!!!). This awareness may be the key to effectively reaching an audience in the 21st century.