creativity/machine

Via YouTube’s new recommended for you feature and also via Twitter, I found this really excellent re-imagining of the Star Wars title sequence as if created by the great designer and filmmaker Saul Bass:

Via the ‘related videos’ feature, I came across Bass’s wonderful short film Why Man Creates, which won an Academy Award in 1968. Only the first 5 minutes is available online–long enough to deliver the grand narrative of creativity and innovation in Western civilization in animated form.

Watch it for the amazing drawings and the (gently barbed) jokes if nothing else.

Since for some of us it’s Easter today and many of my readers will be muttering ‘there is no God’ through chocolate-covered gritted teeth and grumbling about the failure of the Englightenment project, I highly recommended reading The Atheist Delusion afterward. As I prepare to encounter the pointy end of science as a fly on the wall next week, I found this to be the kicker:

In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society. Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th century, but it returned on a vast scale in nazism and communism, and still exists today. Torture was prohibited in international conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an instrument of policy by the world’s pre-eminent liberal regime at the beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased, but it has been repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.

[thanks, anne]

Technorati Tags: science, atheism, saul bass, animation

Jill posted slides of her presentation just now - which is such a good idea that I thought I’d steal it

I worked from a script, but the full paper still has to be written into existence. When it’s done I’ll upload it to the MIT5 website. In the meantime, please enjoy the Flickr-ness of the slides that went with the talk.

Kodak-au-go-go!

This steampunk keyboard does all kinds of unspeakably pleasurable things to me. Steampunk, by the way, is defined by the maker as the practice “wherein the craftsman demonstrates the construction of artifacts from an age of steam and brass”, and also refers to a genre of speculative fiction:

The term denotes works set in an era when steam power was still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

via boing boing and MAKE.

I’ve workshopped the affective and/or visceral dimensions of our engagement with ‘obsolete’ technologies before, thinking about the example of majestic theatre organs, in a post called love and the mechanical sublime, andanother one about typewriters. There’s much more thinking to be done though, and there’s definitely a kind of steampunk vibe behind the widespread recent scholarly enthusiasm for the more curious objects from the history of new media, especially in early modernity and the Victorian era, as well as popular histories like Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. Which reminds me, anne mentioned this new book to me the other day, must check it out too:

Residual Media, Ed. Charles R. Ackland, U of Minnesota Press.

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind. From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Or am I just fetishising the means? And if so, and more importantly, how can something that feels so good really be wrong?

Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, by Kristen Haring, is a new book out on MIT Press, found via Anne’s del.icio.us links.
From the blurb/summary:

Ham radio required solitary tinkering with sophisticated electronics equipment, often isolated from domestic activities in a “radio shack,” yet the hobby thrived on fraternal interaction. Conversations on the air grew into friendships, and hams gathered in clubs or met informally for “eyeball contacts.” Within this community, hobbyists developed distinct values and practices with regard to radio, creating a particular “technical culture.”

Sounds familiar in the light of hacker culture, open source, social software, and so on ad infinitum, no?

Without wanting to just impose patterns derived from contemporary culture onto history, I’ve been very interested lately in the way that emergent amateur cultures of (cultural) production have been articulated with technological change in a whole heap of contexts. I’m also increasingly interested in the articulation of the hacker ethic (or, the ‘tinkering’ discussed by Haring in the book) with masculinity. Looking through the gender+tech lens, it’s interesting to compare the history of ham radio and the personal computer with the domestication of, say, the gramophone or my old favourite, the camera. So this is one for next year - oops, I mean post-phd this year. It’s started already and slowly grinding into gear.

Happy New Year, by the way!

Thank you Glen for sending me this little treasure which I found in my in-tray this morning - for that you are a prince among men.

I’ve also uploaded the first two pages of one of the many fabulous example storyboards that the book includes in glossy colour. It’s called ‘Laura’s Seventh Birthday’, and it’s all about making the cake with Mother, playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and having girlish chit-chat. In a very pretty frock.

Going beyond the frocks - Kodak teaches us that in home movies the ‘in-between’ quotidian spaces and practices of everyday life are interesting and camera-worthy. But at the same time, the aesthetics of home movies are to be distinguished from professional movie-and television production; and the home-movie maker is not to aspire to those.

There’s a lot here I can use in my ‘history’ chapter on amateur creativity, new technology and the construction/teaching of new media literacy.

Current thesis word count: 20,724

I won’t even bother to pretend to rehearse the endless determinism vs. agency debate problem, but here is Nicholas Gane on Kittler on technology:

Gane, Nicholas. Radical Post-humanism:
Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 3, 25-41 (2005)

(citations removed for the sake of nice clean copy)

Kittler observes that around 1800 a general shift took place from the closed world
of the ‘Republic of Scholars’, ‘a system in which knowledge was defined in terms of authority and erudition’ and ‘in which patterns of communication followed the lines of social stratification’, to a more open system of reading and writing based on the practice of alphabetization, which involves the translation of visible into audible language, or the oralization of culture. In the midst of this shift, the book emerged as a universal medium, one that, for a short time, remained closed to competition from rival media. Kittler explains: ‘Aside from mechanical automatons and toys, there was nothing. The discourse network of 1800 functioned without phonographs, gramophones, or cinematographs. Only books could provide serial storage of data’. This situation soon changed, however, and by 1900 the book’s position as the chief storage medium was placed under threat by ‘new’ technologies such as the gramophone, phonograph and film.

Some things about typewriters and the corporeality of the mechanical and the sensuality of literacy:

Typing means “taking foolish chances with words”:

Typing represents to me the work of writing, of striking the physical world, and in so doing, changing it. Writing on a laptop (as I did to write this) is like sweeping powder over glass�a breeze, even a breath, can undo all the work. While I no longer believe that what a typewriter produces is somehow more truthful, I do miss the fact that it receives no email, can�t surf the web, and will never crash.

And of course there’s a retro revival:

With a typewriter, Cupertino resident Heather Folsom said, writing is a sensory experience. Her “noiseless” Underwood portable makes a satisfying thwack when she taps the keys. She piles finished pages beside her. The ink has its own special smell.

The visceral experience of writing rescued from the unbearable lightness of the digital - or something like that…

But it all feels different when the typewriter is the “new” technology: mechanization, speed, efficiency, desensitisation, dehumanisation - it bears all the symptoms and promises of modernity. From a wonderful piece in Cabinet Magazine:

The typewriter, by definition, mechanizes writing, the way the rifle mechanizes killing. The cold metal of a rifle or a typewriter insinuates itself between a person and his or her passion.

Being masters of their machines made women cold, too:

At the Rosenberg spy trial, in 1952, the prosecuting attorney sharpened the government’s case against Ethel Rosenberg by asking the jury to visualize the female, Jewish suspect sitting behind her typewriter, “hitting the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interest of the Soviets.”

For sale by crafty virtuoso: one typewriter nostalgia love box.

Or choose your letter and hang a key around your neck.

History of the IBM electric typewriter here.

And there’s Friedrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (which I haven’t read, but probably will) if you like your history of new media technologies infused with Heidegger and psychoanalysis.

Also, think mobile and handheld devices are new?

Think again.

Apple’s new ads run a line familiar from my research into 80s advertising (speed, ease of use, corporate vs. ‘everyday’). But this time, the brands are personified. And they’re kinda funny.

But just in case you were in any doubt, yes, it’s true. Technologies are made in their creators’ images. And they wear the pants (unless they are small ‘creative’ devices, like digital cameras from japan).

In the beginning, there was an apple from the teacher…



You could use it in the kitchen…


Eventually even Mom could join in…

Then it grew so small you could take it out into the world, where you were now more liberated, individual and same-yet-different than ever before.

If you like this stuff, the Mac Mothership is a treasure trove.

See also the Lisa TV commercial (featuring Kevin Costner), which told us: “soon there’ll be just two kinds of people. Those who use computers, and those who use Apples.” (link not working right now)

And Lori Reed’s article Domesticating the Personal Computer is the perfect accompaniment to all those apples.

I wonder how I could get a certificate of mastery though?

For a contrast, have a look at the history of Windows magazine ads at the GUIdebook gallery, where you will see that Microsoft was teaching us what computers were for too. I found the marked shift in tack that came with the introduction of the MediaCenter edition especially interesting.