Photoshop assignment from 1/29/08

Photo: Kathie Gossett

I think I fulfilled the requirements of the assignment-- I cleared up the scratches and corrected the colors. I was trying to give the sky a bit of a blue cast though, and at that I utterly failed. But, since the photo was taken in the UK, I would lay odds that the sky was gray to begin with.

Turing & More

Reading: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by Turing; "As We May Think" by Bush; and
"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Borges
from The New Media Reader

My first encounter with Turing was while reading Gibson's Neuromancer. I had picked up some of the references and (possibly with the help of a study guide) tried to identify more. I had picked up the idea somewhere of Neuromancer as post-modern and that one of the characteristics of a post-modern novel was intertextuality (like that wasn't a characteristic of a Renaissance piece, but I digress). So I looked up obscure references. Because I was the teacher. So I found out about Turing.

Oh. My. Gosh. He is an interesting man. He was so clever, but (oh, horror!) he was gay. So his government made him crazy. I still fail at wrapping my head around that.

Turing says "It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstance" (60). This caught my attention, because this inability to adequately catalog human behavior is what often trips up people with Asperger's Syndrome (like my son). Often bright, they can memorize all kinds of rules for behavior, but can never memorize all rules for behavior.

Enough about Turing.

Bush's article is interesting. In describing the future of information, he got many aspects right. Even if he missed on the actual methodology of the achievement, he identified many of the achievements that we have made in data storage and retrieval. And photography. "Often" he says, "it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately" (39). And it is very advantageous to look at the back of my digital camera to see whether the picture I hoped to see will appear. Or if I need to attempt to capture the image again.

In some ways, Bush's piece reads like 1950s Heinlein or Asimov-- the inventions are there, described in ways that fit with the current technology (punched cards seem awfully important, for example). But the concepts seem somehow right.

My favorite line from Bush, though, is that "truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential" (37). He was referring to the work of Gregor Mendel. My current research project (and this is related, promise) is on dual credit/concurrent enrollment and composition. There is a lot of information about education, and a lot of propaganda about concurrent enrollment. But most of it quotes the same studies, without showing the methodology. So instead of a lot of good information about a topic I am interested in, I get the same information channeled again and again. (I have found some good data, but the most cited data is not reported well).

The last article that I want to talk about is the Borges piece. It is actually a story. And in some ways, it reminds me of a videogame. A friend of mine teaches a class in interactive fiction, actually. Of course, the piece is not really interactive. The labyrinth by the narrator's ancestor is interactive, in that all possible choices continue to exist. In essence, I can "travel both" and "be one traveler" in this construct.

This does remind me of Sarte, though, in the randomness way the coincidences play out. The narrator obviously did not intend the fate of the man who validated his ancestor's work-- yet the fate still occurred.

What do the pieces have in common? They are all precursors to new media-- branched storytelling, information storage and retrieval (libraries on our desks!), and machines that can (or not) think.

Photoshop After

Photo by Kathie Gossett

Defining New Media

For class, this week, I read three pieces that attempt to define "new media." Silly me, I was unaware that the definition was not settled! Last week, had I been asked to define "new media" I would have said "media developed and delivered digitally."

The first piece I read was Anne Wysocki's "Opening New Media to Writing" from Writing New Media. Her definition of "new media" may be the hardest for me to wrap my head around. She argues that

we should call "new media texts" those texts those that have been made by composes who are aware of the range of materialities of texts that and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text-- like its composers and readers-- doesn't function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody (15).

In other words, "new media texts do not have to be digital: instead, any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media" (15).

I understand that, usually, writing is done in such a way as to create transparency. And generally, I find it frustrating when authors erase that transparency. When I took a class in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett a couple of years ago, I found reading those texts to be slow and tedious. We read Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. While the text was dense, and nothing much happened, the really frustrating part, for me at least, was Beckett's choice to not arrange the text into readable chunks. In other words, the sentences were long and dense and he did not use paragraphing as a way to organize the information. I go on about this because to me, Beckett was calling attention to the materiality of the medium by defying our conventions of how texts ought to be arranged.

This does call to mind Marshall McLuhan's declaration that "The Medium is the Message"

The other pieces that I read we presented as "Perspectives on New Media: Two Introductions" in Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort's The New Media Reader. The first, Janet Murray's "Inventing the Medium" seems to define "new media" as "digital." She says:

But the term "new media" is a sign of our current confusion about where these efforts are leading and our breathlessness at the pace of change, particularly in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take bfore we see the gift for what it is-- a single new medium of representation, the digital medium (3).

Lee Manovich, though, in "New Media from Borges to HTML" explodes these definitions. Manovich lists eight definitions of "new media," each addressing different aspects, each with strengths and weaknesses. By the end of that piece, I concluded that "new media" like a lot of academic terms, is a slippery term. It is used in a number of ways. I am not sure that one, singular, "correct" definition exists. However, the usefulness of the term does not seem to be limited by this lack of agreement. This can be see by the number of people who use the term.

Week 1; New Media Issue

http://www.robotworldnews.com/100389.php

It bothers me more than a little bit that an AI can play Ms Pac Man better than I can. I felt slightly better after I read the whole article and realized that the researchers gave the AI a list of rules-- kind of like when one of my friends would share strategy for the games. Of course, when I played Ms Pac Man the most was in the days before home games systems (and the one we eventually got was an ATARI 2600, hardly a speed machine), so any strategy that I could get to make my quarter last longer was very welcome!

I completely do not understand the concept of "cross-entropy." For some reason, I though entropy had to do with stuff falling apart. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, entropy was what allowed the kipple to take over, wasn't it? Anyway, they article says:

As they explained, the basic idea of cross-entropy is that it selects the most successful actions, and modifies the distribution of actions to become more peaked around these selected actions.

So evidently entropy means something other than what I thought it meant. Attempting to understand what the term meant, I cruised over to wikipedia's entry. Wow, was that completely not helpful. Looks like I need to ask my programmer friend. Or my friend the physics prof. Because I cannot understand anything pertaining to a law of thermodynamics without an intermediary.

Since Ms Pac Man was never really a strength of mine, and since the AI has yet to figure out how to hang out next to a power pellet, lying in wait for the ghosts to close in, I should feel less bad? Maybe?

New Media Theory and Practice I

This is my class blog for Dr. Gossett's New Media Theory and Practice I. I am excited about taking this class; the material fascinates me. I am worried about doing creative work-- that is not my strong point. I don't, for example, do creative writing at all. I do sew, and scrapbook, and quilt. Those, I guess are ways of doing creative work that only require manipulation of items. So maybe digital production will be okay?