April 21, 2003
Half Life 2
My favorite game of all time now has a sequel. It will be shown at E3 this year. Needless to say, I am having an awfully hard time controlling my excitement! You will probably here me talk about it for the next few weeks.
For some more info, but not much more...go here. If you have never heard of this game or if you have not played it, schedule a time to come over to my house and we will play it. Not only is the game fun, but the story line is rather intrigueing. Also the enemy AI is rather cool too. I bring this up only because the initial release in 2000 was rather astounding. The original title set the benchmark for ingenuity, story and gameplay. I can only hope the sequel will be every bit as good if not better in order to contend with Doom 3. From what I have see, HL2 has it's work cut out for it. Also, for you non-gamers out there...it is definetly worth your time to play.
You really need to go here, and you can't say it isn't funny, cause it is...well maybe not the gamespy part...
April 20, 2003
Genderspace
Kurt: I'm glad you decided to re-post this entry as it raises questions that are certainly worth discussing.
Let me start with the obvious. Given that the majority of games are created by men for men, it isn't surprising that the women characters depicted in them are going to model the attitudes of a highly sexist culture. This just furthers the author's point, and I agree, of how immature game culture is. Given the demographics of both the players and creators, what do we expect? Furthermore, are we still surprised that women fail to take pleasure in these games that continue to depict us as prostitutes and princesses?
The harsher reality is that even though some creators think they are revolutionizing the gaming industry by creating action-hero women, the truth is that their efforts are totally lost because of their often sexist views of women. (Let me stress that I am not limiting my critique to the gaming industry. Misogyny manifests itself in a plethora of conscious and unconscious ways, thus marginalizing women politically, socially and economically.) Having said that, I often wonder how many gamers are avid porno-watchers. I wonder this because the women in both pornograhic films as well as games have the same look. Just look at the pictures of the women that the author posts within her article - all are beautiful, big-breasted, smiling and posed perfectly for the male pornographic gaze.
I can't say that if game companies started paying attention to this sad reality, thus creating believable female characters, that I would be any more inclined to play games. The truth is that I lost interest in gaming years ago ... sometime shortly after Mario Bros. for the Super Nintendo. While it's hard to determine exactly why I lost interest, I feel confident in saying that, like most women, games simply don't appeal to us like they do to men. This is decently obvious given the unfeminine goals of games: shooting people, raping prostitutes, racing cars, making tons of money, conquering the world, etc. Personally, it all seems like a waste of my brain power to sit in front of a TV, push buttons, and get upset, for no meaningful reason.
The good news, as I see it, is that this illustrates the potential for artists/game developers to create material that non-gamers can feel an emotional attachment to. From what I have heard, this is something that game companies are aware of and are certainly trying to implement into their products. I certainly don't think that game creators are sitting around saying, "We don't know how many women play our games, but we really don't care." I'm sure they are wondering how they can make their products appeal to an even larger demographic. While I give them the benefit of the doubt, I find it hard to believe that their priorities lie in developing material that is entertaining for women. In order to accomplish that feat, they would first have to hire women. We know how difficult this concept is for Hollywood.
April 19, 2003
Location-Based Paranoia
"Cell phone firm offers SARS alerts
A mobile phone operator in Hong Kong has launched a location-based service that will alert people who are near buildings where the deadly SARS virus has struck."
Coming to a DVD Player Near You: The Interactive Movie
On the front page of the LA Times Business section:
"After handling the splashy special effects for hundreds of movies and television shows, Dan Krech and the artists at DKP Effects Inc. decided to step into the director's seat.
Their animated movie, "Scourge of Worlds," took $3 million and a mere seven months to make. It grabbed the attention of several major movie studios and nailed down a distribution deal from a unit of Warner Bros. The artists already are in talks to make a sequel.
And it'll never hit the big screen.
Krech and his team in Toronto are part of a booming new market: Straight to DVD."
Genderspace
I'm reposting this because it has been ignored thus far. This topic is deserving of our attention.
Character design in games is notoriously limited in its depiction of women (there is a broader range of male characters even though they still lack depth) and the effects of this shortsightedness by the industry will prevent a large female audience from developing.
This article starts the discussion.
Genderplay: Successes and Failures in Character Designs for Videogames
April 18, 2003
Visiting Speaker for 4/24(@UCLA): Mark Davis
Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology
Marc Davis
UC Berkeley
Thursday, April 24th, 2003, 3pm-5pm
GSE&IS Building, Room 111
(just west of the Research Library)
Abstract: Over the past five hundred years, we have seen the development of technologies and social practices that enable the educated populace to read and write text. However, with video (including motion pictures and television), millions of people "read" it everyday, but very few are able to effectively "write" it. The changing of this asymmetry will require research and innovation that more intimately integrate video and computation. This presentation will address the theoretical issues, core technologies, and applications that will enable video to become a computational data type that people can easily create, access, share, and reuse. Specifically, the research challenge is to develop technologies that create metadata about the semantic content and syntactic structure of video, and that use that metadata to automate the production and reuse of video. Addressing this challenge requires a methodology that interleaves the construction and analysis of artifacts and theories, and that combines ideas and technologies from multiple disciplines: information science, computer science, film theory and production, media studies, and human-centered user interaction design.
Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley where he directs the Garage Cinema Research group. His research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production and reuse. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, a developer of media automation and personalization technology. He earned his BA in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his MA in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.
Hosted by: UCLA Information Studies Seminar
Map to IS dept.: http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/about/contact.htm#map
April 17, 2003
interactivity?
I have been puzzled all week over a question that has continued to pop up in discussions. Here goes ... What constitutes interactivity? While the question is simple (it's only three words), I can't say the same for the answer. The reason I pose this question is because no one, including me, seems to be able to answer it.
This all relates back to our discussion in writing about what medium Sam's game would prove most successful? He designed a board game, which much like any other game - be that computer or on your phone - possesses the same pleasures and goals that gamers love.
Since conceiving the idea, he is exploring ways in which to make it into an electronic version. While I am certainly a fan of exploring new ways to present old ideas, I am confused as to why a board game was not automatically put in the "interactive" category. For whatever reason, there seemed to be a question of whether or not designing a board game was legitimate. The concept of the game is exciting .... I just wonder what making it "interactive" via a computer will do the pleasures associated with playing board games?
Perhaps this is begging the question of what other mediums, other than the obvious, will we accept for interactivity?
April 16, 2003
Visiting Speaker for 4/17: Hisham Bizri
Our speaker for CTIN 511 on 4/17 will be Hisham Bizri, currently a Research Fellow (artist in residence) at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he has also taught a number of classes in the Media Arts and Sciences Department at MediaLab. Seminar will meet in the IML at 2pm.
He is a filmmaker and visual artist and has created a number of experimental and digital films in the fiction, documentary, and experimental genres. He has also created interactive art pieces for the CAVE which have shown at Ars Electronica among others. More info: http://web.mit.edu/~bizri/www
Napster Audio and Video: Innovations in the Network
What are the possibilities for internet based distribution and production
of video and audio?
Napster, Gnutella and their descendant have demonstrated famously the
sheer scale of p2p filesharing systems, and the difficulties of exploiting
this for the benefit of traditional entertainment products under
traditional intellectual property regimes. However, less attention has
been paid to the emerging audio and video products and the new genres of
cultural product that exploit netbased distribution and production. This
panel will survey different experiments and projects in this realm,
specifically, projects that are designed to promote and sustain diverse
cultural resources, generating demonstrable social value.
Tuesday, April 15 4:00 PM
Center for Advanced Technology at NYU
719 Broadway 12th floor (between Waverly and Washington Place)
live webcast at http://xdesign.eng.yale.edu/AVsystems
cat.nyu.edu/meaow/glocal3.ram
Panelists:
Christian Nold: is the author of the Author of Mobile Vulgus, a
controversial book about politically activated crowd dynamics. He is
currently at the Royal College of Art where he is developing the Community
Edit system.
Pit Schultz lives and works in Berlin. Currently involved into radio
projects he is the cofounder of bootlab.org, klubradio.de, nettime.org,
mikro.org.
Natalie Jeremijenko is in the Faculty of Engineering, Yale University,
where she runs the Experimental Product Design program(xproduct)--a
program and courses that explore technological innovation for social
progress. She currently has an exhibition at Art in General that
demonstrates several audio and video systems designed for the notforprofit
arts sectors to promote participatory institutional agendas.
Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces independent art projects
involving gift economies and social architectures, including Free Words,
the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta. She has recently been developing new
work in the areas of open source/copyleft music distribution (Opsound) and
political organization (0pcopy).
Respondents:
Neil Seiling--former Executive Producer of PBS television series Alive
>From Off Center. A Media Arts Curator since 1978, with an emphasis on
building links between multi-disciplinary artists and their audiences
through media development. Served on inaugural panel for short films at
1995 Sundance, and NEA Film/video Panel.
Alan Toner-Studies collaborativity, and the effect of information
enclosure on cultural production and social life. Native of Dublin,
Ireland. Studied Law at Trinity College Dublin, and NYU Law School. He is
currently a fellow in the Information Law Institute at NYU Law. Member of
Autonomedia editorial collective.
Remote Respondents:.
Zeljko Blace is a co-founder of [mama], a media lab and culture club in
Zagreb. He is presently taking part in a number of projects: Kultura NOVA,
a multimedia institute organized by the European Cultural Foundation &
Open Society Institute. Zeljko has organized and curated a number of new
media events: GenArt2002, an annual exhibition, and recently Reality Check
for Digital Utopia, a digital culture encounter.
Mark Davis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information
Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. His work is focused on creating the
technology and applications to enable daily media consumers to become
daily media producers. His research and teaching encompass the theory,
design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using
media metadata to automate media production and reuse.
Kate Rich is a sound engineer and activist. She is known to work for the
bureau of inverse technology.
THE CAT'S MEAOW LECTURE SERIES
www.cat.nyu/meaow
The NYU Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) has
partnered with Creative Time (CT) and Rensselaer's iEAR
Studios to host a series of speakers on 'Media Art or
Whatever' (MeAOW). The CAT's MeAOW is an
Artist/Technology forum that hosts speakers whose work
rethinks technological innovation and demonstrates different
possibilities for the use and promulgation of new technologies.
The goal of this occasional series is to provide a venue where
artists can engage technologists to contest the visions of the
future that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in the new
technologies rapidly being adapted as the dominant vehicles of
cultural experience. Hosted by Natalie Jeremijenko and Chris
Csikszentmihalyi
DIRECTIONS:
Center for Advanced Technology, NYU
719 Broadway 12th floor (between Waverly and Washington Place)
N/R to 8th Street
A/C/E/F to West 4th St.
6 to Astor Place
TO RECEIVE EMAIL NOTIFICATION OF SUBSEQUENT
LECTURES IN THIS SERIES, SUBSCRIBE AT:
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cat_lectures
April 13, 2003
bill viola at the getty
Will, Mike and I went to see the Bill Viola exhibition at the Getty today. Great pieces and loads of inspiration and something everyone should check out. It runs until April 27 and is free ($5 to park). You really have no excuse/reason to check this out before it leaves. For more on my thoughts about the show, check my posting.
April 12, 2003
Museum of Jurassic Technology
From the Museum's Website:
Although the path has not always been smooth, over the years The Museum of Jurassic Technology has adapted and evolved until today it stands in a unique position among the institutions in the country. Still even today, the Museum preserves something of the flavor of its roots in the early days of the natural history museum - a flavor which has been described as "incongruity born of the overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena."
I personally really enjoyed the visit. I enjoyed the "overzealous spirit" and think that incongruity is perhaps more interesting and entertaining than the alternative - or perhaps I'm just entralled by the idea of a group of scientists staked out in an amazonian jungle trying to capture an elusive "x-ray" bat that can fly through solid objects. Anyway, I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts about the trip - and perhaps this would be a good way to start some dialogue on this site.
April 08, 2003
MOBILE DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS-CFP
CALL FOR PAPERS
HICSS-37 Minitrack on
MOBILE DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Part of the Software Technology Track
at the Thirty-seventh Annual
HAWAI'I INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEM SCIENCES
on the Big Island of Hawaii
January 5 - 8, 2004
In today's mobile society, access to relevant information and to context-
specific services "anytime, anywhere" is becoming increasingly important.
Mobile users are often particularly interested in information about and
services in their immediate vicinity, thus Mobile Distributed Information
Systems must address location-dependent distribution of and access to
services and information from mobile devices. In addition to location,
other environmental aspects, such as the user's current situation, topology
and available bandwidth of wireless networks, battery power and
characteristics of mobile devices, are also relevant for determining
information and service requirements. For mobile applications, a dynamic
re-configurable architecture is thus required to support flexible reaction
to changing contexts and seamless operation in foreign environments, with
little or no need for manual reconfiguration. With mobile devices becoming
more and more popular and powerful, communication and cooperation between
mobile users in an ad-hoc manner are strongly desired. Consequently,
the long-established distinction between clients and servers is blurred,
which calls for an extension of the architectural paradigm towards peers
or alternating roles.
!! Abstract Deadline extended: April 10, 2003 !!
CfP: HICSS-37 Minitrack on Mobile Distributed Information Systems at HICSS-37
This Minitrack will address current topics in the field of
Mobile Distributed Information Systems, such as:
- Location and Situation Aware Information Services: Modeling,
Architectures and Applications
- Network Support for Mobile Access to Services and Information
- Mobile Ad-hoc Networking and Computing
- Provision, Distribution and Management of Services for Mobile
Environments
- Directory Services, Service Discovery and Service Brokers
- Middleware for Mobile Distributed Information Systems
- Distributed Databases and Data Management for Mobile Applications
- Peer-to-Peer Computing and Cooperation: Scenarios, Platforms and
Applications
- Self-/Zero-/Auto-Configuration, Dynamic Configuration for Mobile
Users
- Mobile Multimedia Systems, QoS for Mobile Information Access
- Management of Groups of Mobile Users
- Mobile Devices: GUIs, Usability and Adaptability
- Location Tracking Technologies
- Security, Privacy and Billing Issues for Mobile Information and
Service Access
- Applications and Case Studies of Mobile Distributed Information
Systems
MINITRACK CHAIRS
Andreas Meissner Zhou Wang Lars Wolf
Fraunhofer IPSI Fraunhofer IPSI TU Braunschweig
Dolivostrasse 15 Dolivostrasse 15 Mühlenpfordtstraße 23
64293 Darmstadt 64293 Darmstadt 38106 Braunschweig
Germany Germany Germany
{Andreas.Meissner, Zhou.Wang}@ipsi.fhg.de wolf@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de
The Minitrack Website is http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/mobile/hicss
Please email general inquiries to hicss@ipsi.fraunhofer.de
MINITRACK PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Heribert Baldus, Philips Research, Germany
Andrew T. Campbell, Columbia Univ, USA
Maria F. Costabile, Univ Bari, Italy
Carsten Griwodz, Univ Oslo, Norway
Junzhong Gu, East China Normal Univ, China
Pål Halvorsen, Univ Oslo, Norway
Haiming Huang, Broadstorm, USA
David Hutchison, Lancaster Univ, UK
Jae-Yong Lee, R&D Center of Serome Technology Inc., Korea
Bruce McDonald, Northeastern Univ, USA
Andreas Meissner, FhG IPSI, Germany
Jochen Schiller, Freie Univ Berlin, Germany
Jens Schmitt, Tech Univ Darmstadt, Germany
Wolfgang Schönfeld, FhG IPSI, Germany
Jochen Seitz, Tech Univ Ilmenau, Germany
Zhou Wang, FhG IPSI, Germany
Lars Wolf, Tech Univ Braunschweig, Germany
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
April 10, 2003 Abstracts submitted for guidance and indication of
appropriate content.
June 1, 2003 Full papers submitted.
August 31, 2003 Acceptance notification sent to authors.
October 1, 2003 Accepted manuscripts sent electronically to the
publisher of the conference proceedings. Authors
must be registered for the conference by this date.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PAPER SUBMISSION
1. Abstracts may be submitted by email to hicss@ipsi.fraunhofer.de as
PDF, Postscript, or RTF documents. Abstracts may also be sent in ASCII
format and are expected to be 300-500 words.
2. Full papers should consist of 22-26 double-spaced pages, including
diagrams. Papers may be theoretical, conceptual or descriptive in nature.
(NOTE: Final papers will be 10 pages, double-column, single-spaced.)
Full papers should be submitted electronically. Please see the Minitrack
Website (http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/mobile/hicss) for the detailed
paper submission instructions.
3. Do not submit the manuscript to individual Minitrack Chairs - use
the above alias instead. Papers should contain original material and
not be previously published, or currently submitted for consideration
elsewhere.
4. Each paper must have a title page to include title of the paper,
full name of all authors, and complete addresses including affiliation(s),
telephone number(s), and e-mail address(es).
TRACKS AT HICSS-37
- Collaboration Systems;
Co-Chair: Jay Nunamaker; E-mail: nunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu;
Co-Chair: Robert O. Briggs; E-mail: bob@GroupSystems.com
- Complex Systems; Chair: Robert Thomas; E-mail: rjt1@cornell.edu
- Decision Tech. for Management; Chair: Dan Dolk;
E-mail: drdolk@nps.navy.mil
- Digital Documents; Chair: Michael Shepherd; E-mail: shepherd@cs.cal.ca
- Emerging Technologies; Chair: Ralph H. Sprague; E-mail: sprague@hawaii.edu
- Information Technology in Health Care; Chair: William Chismar;
E-mail: chismar@cba.hawaii.edu;
- Internet & the Digital Economy;
Co-Chair: David King; E-mail: dave@comshare.com
Co-Chair: Alan Dennis; E-mail: ardennis@indiana.edu
- Organizational Systems & Tech.; Chair: Hugh Watson;
Email: hwatson@terry.uga.edu
- Software Technology; Chair: Gul Agha; E-mail: agha@cs.uiuc.edu
HICSS conferences are devoted to advances in the information, computer,
and system sciences, and encompass developments in both theory and
practice. Invited papers may be theoretical, conceptual, tutorial or
descriptive in nature. Submissions undergo a peer referee process and
those selected for presentation will be published in the Conference
Proceedings (IEEE). Submissions must not have been previously published.
For the latest information visit the HICSS web site at:
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu
CONFERENCE ADMINISTRATION
Ralph Sprague, Conference Chair
Email: sprague@hawaii.edu
Eileen Dennis, Track Administrator
Email: eidennis@indiana.edu
Sandra Laney, Conference Administrator
Email: hicss@hawaii.edu
2004 HICSS-37 CONFERENCE VENUE
Hilton Waikoloa Village
on the Big Island of Hawaii
425 Waikoloa Beach Drive
Waikoloa, Hawaii 96738
Tel: 1-808-886-1234
Fax: 1-808-886-2900
www.hiltonwaikoloavillage.com
Fieldtrip Thursday!
This is just a reminder about the fieldtrip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology this Thursday, 4/10. Let's all meet at the museum at 2:30pm. There are directions on the website: http://www.mjt.org/
Persistent digital identity
from http://www.headmap.com/blog/
3 years ago, [when the headmap books were written] most individuals didnt really have a persistent stable identity point on the internet. They had email, but that doesnt persist and doesnt have an address independent of the mailbox its in. There were web pages, but most were linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be sprawling and impersonal. Now with blogs there is a sense of an individuals time and location stamped presence on the web, blogs are for the most part inherently personal, subjective, locatable, extensions of individuals.
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
Individuals have instant access and control over that identity.
http://www.headmap.com/blog/
December 28, 2002
Persistent digital identity thoughts
3 years ago, [when the headmap books were written] most individuals didnt really have a persistent stable identity point on the internet. They had email, but that doesnt persist and doesnt have an address independent of the mailbox its in. There were web pages, but most were linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be sprawling and impersonal. Now with blogs there is a sense of an individuals time and location stamped presence on the web, blogs are for the most part inherently personal, subjective, locatable, extensions of individuals.
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
Individuals have instant access and control over that identity.
A blog makes location more interesting. The individual is presumed to be moving, and to be having a subjective view of the space through which they are moving - whether virtual space (websites or whatever) or physical places.
A blog is not the same as a website, its an extension of an individual, it has an address
the individual has a physical location and is linked to the blog, a virtual location
the blog subjectively references addresses (physical and virtual)
A blog is potentially the vital conceptual bridge between email and a website, the one being private and the other often being too sprawling or collective to function as a simple personal identity.
It used to be that everyone who used the internet had something called a .fingerfile; which was a text file entirely written by and related to you, the user. You could put anything you liked into your .finger file and it served as your public identity to other users on the UNIX system you were using. You would type finger username and the person with that usernames finger file would come up.
The way internet use has evolved means that most people use email without having to deal directly or at all with unix and consequently most people dont use finger files. Subsequently the main expressions of their personal identity online were email (for the majority) and web pages (for the few).
An email address is an identity, but you can only send email to it or receive email from it. It lacks the functionality of a finger file, it carries no identity information independent of the status conferred by the address and whatever email is sent or not sent in reply.
Web pages largely evolved linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be impersonal, or personal but sprawling and not functioning like a simple finger file (which in some sense is just a status message telling you something about the user and whether they are logged in)
The blog, which is sub-species of web page, finally resurrects the finger functionality. It is independent of whatever webpages may belong to the author and owner of the blog, it functions as a status message which can be referenced whether the user is on the internet or not, it is subjective and owned primarily by individuals.
[&]
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
A blog makes location more interesting. The individual is presumed to be moving, and to be having a subjective view of the space through which they are moving - whether virtual space (websites or whatever) or physical places.
[&]
..identity is a *vital* concept for the future of mobile computing.
Blogging may well be the basis for an open source equivalent of microsofts .net passport intiative. You log into your blogserver (whether running on your personal server or on a public service like blogger.com) you upload personal data (including your physical location) and your entire internet identity is mediated by your blogserver.
Some of this information will be public (your blogface)
But if a company or an individual wants to negotiate with you, or you with them, it will all happen through your blogserver. You log into your blogserver and it handles passwords etc as you move through physical and virtual space
Blogs are models for future persistent identity. [forget hotmail ..read the business plans of the blogservers]
April 07, 2003
GDC mobile workshop slides
Presentations made at the GDC Mobile workshop have been posted here:
http://www.gdcmobile.com/archives/2003/
This includes DC Collier's talk which was similar to the one in our class.
April 06, 2003
Proximity research at Nokia
A recent talk by Nokia researcher, Marko Athisaari on interaction design for mobility and proximity - more at: http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/athisaari_trans.html
My topic is proximity. By proximity, I mean, quite simply, physical closeness; and many among you will ask, “How close is close?” But I mean the stuff that happens between the one-to-ten centimetres range and room-size interaction, and what people do, what kind of activities they undertake in that kind of space.
I might also add that although mobility and mobile telephony seem very much to do with being apart, in fact the evidence is quite to the contrary: a lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically in the same place.
I will then discuss quickly a couple of groups of services that we might expect to emerge in proximity, and then close with a few challenges for interaction design in this area........Now I’ll look at four kinds of services and product services value that people might get in physical closeness:
1) People in places
2) My things with me
3) Enhanced Spaces
4) Consumption.
April 04, 2003
the matrix has you...
The third animatrix short (not counting The Flight of the Osiris running before Dreamcatcher) is out.
You may thank Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame.
KMAC
Lev Manovich: Bio
|
Lev Manovich: New Media Theorist |
Lev Manovich is an associate professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego where he teaches new media art and theory. Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include little movies, the first digital film project designed for the web, Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history, and "Anna and Andy," a streaming novel. He is the author of "The Language of New Media," a book that has received more than 40 reviews and is being translated into Italian, Korean, and Chinese. Reviewers say the book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject."
Manovich's awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship 2002-2003, Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts, 2002 Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara and 2002 Fellowship from The Zentrum fur Literaturforschung, Berlin. Manovich was born in Moscow where he studied fine arts, architecture, and computer science. He moved to New York in 1981, where he received an MA in cognitive science from NYU in 1988, and his Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester in 1993. His dissertation "The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers," traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde of the 1920s. Manovich has been teaching new media art since 1992. He has also been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, and University of Art and Design, Helsinki.
Currently Manovich is working on a new book, "Info-aesthetics." His most recent art project is "Soft Cinema," which was commissioned by ZKM for its "2002-2003 Future Cinema" exhibition.
Related Links / Sources:
Lev Manovich's website
Soft Cinema
MIT Press - The Language of New Media
Ivan Sutherland: Bio
|
Ivan Sutherland: Head Mounted Display |
If Morton Heilig's Sensorama was the first step towards the creation of engaging Virtual Reality spaces, then Ivan Sutherland's work on what he called the Ultimate Display provided the link between Sensorama's primarily mechanical structure, and the technologically sophisticated, computer powered VR standard that is prevalent today. Like Heilig, Sutherland believed in the power of expressive and expansive virtual worlds, writing that, "a display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarty with concepts not realizable in the physical world.Ê It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." As a researcher, Sutherland was primarily interested in the idea of harnessing the power of computer science and mathematics in order to fully realize his conception of these immersive virtual spaces. With his 1970 invention of the head mounted display - the culmination of the paper "The Ultimate Display, published in 1965 - Sutherland made the first step towards making computationally powered Virtual Reality technologically possible.
In addition to his pioneering role in the history of VR, Sutherland is also responsible for a number of important technological milestones. His Phd thesis from MIT, Sketchpad, was the first implementation of the Graphical User Interface, and proved to dramatically affect Computer Graphics research. After academic stints at the University of Utah and CalTech, Sutherland co-founded Evans and Sutherland, an important virtual simulation company, and now presides as the Vice President of Sun Microsystem Labratories in Moutain View, California.
Morton Heilig: Bio
|
Morton Heilig: Sensorama |
In 1962, Morton Heilig - a Hollywood based cinematographer was clearly ahead of his time. His conception of the first virtual reality machine - an experience he patented as Sensorama - was the amalgam of a number of mechanized processes all serving the user's immersion within the limited space of the arcade box. Using motion, 3D stereoscopic imaging, sounds, artificial breezes, smells of jasmine and hibiscus, and tactile-feedback handlebars, Heilig was able to offer the user an experience that was unparalleled by any other form of entertainment during the era - breaking down the "4th wall" that neither film nor tradtional theater were able to circumvent. As is typical of such revolutionary innovations, Sensorama was unprofitable- ignored by a public that wasn't ready to engage with such a machine. But despite its commercial failure, Heilig's pioneering experiments with Virtual Reality have proved an important step in the evolution of sensory based immersion, providing contemporary designers with an early example of how powerful such experiences can be even without the technology available today.
Related Links / Sources:
Retrofuture
Sensorama at Artmuseum.net
Perry Hoberman: Bio
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Perry Hoberman: Installation Art |
Perry Hoberman is an installation artist whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and worldwide. He works with a variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete to seasonably state-of-the-art. Last year, his installation "Timetable" was awarded the Grand Prix at the ICC Biennale '99 in Tokyo, and "Systems Maintenance" won a 1999 Prix Ars Electronica "Award of Distinction"."Unexpected Obstacles", a retrospective survey of his work, was exhibited during summer 1998 at the ZKM Mediamuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany, and before that at Gallery Otso in Espoo, Finland. Other recent works include "ZOMBIAC", exhibited at the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and "Workaholic", shown at the exhibition "Vision Ruhr" in Dortmund, Germany. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (NY).
Related Links / Sources:
Hoberman.com (Artist Website)
Alan Kay: Bio
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Alan Kay: The Curriculum of the User Interface |
Kay is responsible for a long list of technological and theoretical innovations, including the Dynabook- the first real personal computing system, and Smalltalk- the first object oriented programming language. However, perhaps Kay has been most important to theories of user interface design. He writes that with the advent of personal computing, "millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment." Kay first developed these ideas with the Smalltalk language at Xerox PARC, building an interface of layered windows that would become the predecessor to the modern MacOS and Windows desktop schemes. Kay's truly radical idea, however, and the concept that has fueled his research with projects such as the Learning Research Group (LRG) in 1970 to Squeak today, is the idea that computer interfaces should be designed in such a way that the user gains a type of authoring literacy by engaging the interface rather than being prone to it. The logical next step then, was to use these machines as educational tools for children- the creation of an "environment in which users learn by doing: a curriculum of the user interface."
Kay's contribution to the world of interactive media is therefore more than the mere sum of his myraid creative and technical innovations. The idea that interactive media is ideally structured as an educational platform is an important concept that provides a possible blueprint for the development of interactive content and again proves Kay's notion that the future is best seen through invention and innovation.
Related Links / Sources:
Bob Stein: Interview
Bob Stein came and gave a talk at CTIN 511 seminar on January 30, 2003. Obviously, Bob has been a key figure in the development of the interactive form as a viable artistic and commercial enterprise, and we were lucky to have him share some of his thoughts concerning the future:
Q: as you conceive it, what does the term *interactive media* represent?
Bob Stein: Interactive media comprises a wide continuum. the defining element is that the user/viewer/reader controls the pace, sequence and direction of her experience with the content. this applies to something as simple as a book and as complex as a multi-player role playing game.
Q: in your opinion, is the general public ready to embrace new media?
Stein: sure; if it's compelling.
Q: in what ways do you think content publishing has been altered by new media technologies?
Stein: Lets' scratch the qualifier "content" since all publishing is about content. the changes so far have been minor in the "old categories" of books, newspapers, and magazines. to the extent that pubolishers in these fields have embraced new media it has usually been ancillarly to their traditional publications -- ie. CDs in the back of textbooks, or internet versions of the NY Times have not displaced the traditional forms in any significant way. The blogging phenomenon is the first really signifcant new form to emerge on the internet in terms of text-based publishing. On the other hand, we have entirely new genres and forms, for example games, which now occupy a significant place in the culutural landscape. And of course peer-to-peer sharing of audio now (and video later) is wreaking havoc with the music business.
Q: Why interactivity? Why not traditional forms of media? What does new / interactive media allow for that is not possible with other forms of media?
Stein: Books are already "interactive" in the sense that the reader interacts actively with the author's presentation -- determining pace and sequence of access, but also being able to pause at any point to reflect. with electronic books readers can become even more active --using the computer's ability to search text strings to navigate easily in a complex data space; linking out to the net as appropriate, engaging the author and fellow readers in discussion.
Q: what could a program like the interactive media division at USC bring to the current media landscape?
Stein: Here's one example.
over time, filmmaking is likely to bifurcate into two quite different strands -- one which makes big spectacle movies intended to be seen in a theater by a large audience and one which makes small personal films intended to be "watched" by one person with the expectation that the material is so dense and complex (like a novel) that the viewer will want to pause and look at various scenes more than once -- to really understand it -- much the way they read a book today. these new films will increasingly have gaming elements and/or simulations. the filmmaker/novelists of tomorrow could certainly come from the interactive media division of USC.
Bob Stein: Bio
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Bob Stein: Multimedia Visionary |
Despite the ostensibly disparate nature of Voyager's titles, Stein ensured that his products were all unified by their reliance upon text to handle the bulk of the presented material- a concept that, like a book, ensures that users will be able to notice the depth of the material and medium alike. As Stein notes, What's great about books is that the power is in the hand of the user. Books are random access - you can read a sentence twice or go back and look up a reference. Books are a user-driven medium versus a producer-driven medium like film. What we do [at Voyager] is to transform a producer-driven medium into a user-driven one. The meta medium is that they're all random access."
Stein's driving interest in the update of the fundamentally engaging qualities of books to new electronic mediums has carried over to his current position as CEO of the web publishing venture Nightkitchen. By creating the authoring environment tk3 Stein has with Nightkitchen, created software that he proposes will "enable people- even those with no technical experience- to assemble text, images, audio, and video files into sophisticated electronic documents." Stein's forward-thinking actions in the realm of multimedia have consistently placed emphasis on the importance of the user in content authorship, and have given allowed interactive works to become visable within the commercial world.
Related Links / Sources:
Nightkitchen
The Teachings of Bob Stein in Wired Magazine
