Nuha's MMDD Blog

Art of Engagement

2006-04-25T19:04:00.000+03:00

Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement is an art exhibition that’s taking place in the American University’s art museum, Katzen Art Gallery between April 19- July 30. The exhibit came all the way from the West coast, San Jose Museum of Art and its presence in Katzen Art Gallery is the only in the East coast, what an honor we art students of the American University have. The exhibit is divided into four sections, in which all of them deal with the interconnectivity between art and politics. What a strong concept especially with what has been happening in the last few years, with all the media propagandas on a national and international level. I thought the exhibit was very strong and appealing to me particularly because I’ve been involved for about a year now in similar concepts that deal with the view of politics and how to express it through art and media. The exhibit deals with important concepts such as Free speech, Vietnam, black power, gay rights, Chicano liberation, the environmental movement, poverty, immigration, and nuclear war. The artists of the exhibit explored these issues and translated their point of views and their visions through using paintings, sculptures, works on paper, mixed-media pieces, interactive videos, and an outdoor installation made of fabric. They also used a narrative method to express the concepts behind their work in the form of a book that you can get from the gallery. The main artists that I focused on in the exhibit were Tamiko Thiel, Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, and Lynn Hershman. The main issues they dealt with in the exhibit were War and Violence and Racism, Discrimination and Identity Politics.

Utopianism, Technology, and the Avant-Garde: The Artist Shaping the Social Condition

2006-03-22T20:06:00.000+03:00

The effects of art and Technology and there interference in the social and political discourse have been existing since the turn of the 20th century. Starting with the Modernist movement to the Futuristic. It has been always the artist that controls the vision of the society towards the social conditions and the government. That's because the artist is the warrior who goes against any ideologies or theories and opens the eyes of the society to see beyond these restrictions by the government. Another example is the Dadaist movement who went against the idea of the high art society and took a totally different approach with different kinds of art. During the 30s, the Bauhaus movement started defending against consumerism and the repetition of daily genres. They also went against the society's norms and treated some political and mass media figures in a God-like treatment, which affected the society's way of thinking about them and seeing pop culture. At the turn of the millenium, artists like Peter Weibel changed the way people look at the political and social conditions by emerging technology and the internet into the new ideologies. He created the net_condition exhibit that deals with the different conditions in the society. Our social conditions, political discourse, artistic and scientific developments, and our way of communication have changed because of the new advances in technology and the net. The net is becoming the driving force that is controlling the society's behavior and its members' way of communication.

Additional sources
http://www.zakros.com/bios/utopianism.html
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/shanken.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky

Networks & Social Transformation

2006-03-16T22:40:00.000+03:00

Globalisation in the 21st century is controlled by the net and the effects of technology on the economic, social and political conditions of the society. That is why they called the exhibit net_condition exhibit. Peter Weibel enforces the idea of how the new millenium is shaped through the changes that are happening in the media world and how every second is valued in the production phase and not the product that is valued. Basically, the consumption phase became more valuable and appreciated than the production phase and time became the number one priority for all consumers and marketers. Because our society became an information society, all it depends on is the data and how it communicates through technology and the net. Our social conditions, political discourse, artistic and scientific developments, and our way of communication have changed because of the new advances in technology and the net. The net is becoming the driving force that is controlling the society's behavior and its members' way of communication. It created a virtual space to make it easier from people around the world to exchange ideas, stories, and skills. For example, video games, blogs, net based music, net intallations, etc... The more our societies depend on this virtual force of the cyberspace, the more our social, political, and economic conditions will build based on it and will control us.

More on this topic
http://on1.zkm.de/netcondition/curators/weibel/default_e
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6176/1.html
http://easylife.org/netart/catalogue.html

A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations by Lisa Jevbratt

2006-03-01T01:43:00.000+03:00

Jevbratt created a star map by collecting a number of IP addresses that are translated into colors. She started this poject in 1999 and updated it in 2001 and she is still adding to it. If you click on a certain color or IP address, it takes you to that specific address or website. She created the ping language to show how the internet and the internal functionality of the world wide web is working and how the information migrates through different IP addresses. Jevbratt is trying to communicate through the language of color and light. This language or map is not meant to guide the viewer to a certain place or time because it has so much information that they can't specify or limit. This map is meant to respresent the sublime and to make us ask ourselves the question "do we base the quality of the work on how relevant the information to us or the visuals and aesthetics are more important? This concept brings a lot of debate and contraversy where a lot of viewers think the starmapping approach of the sublime has no function and that it is completely tangible.

Links about topic:
http://jevbratt.com/
http://www.altx.com/mappingtransitions/jevbratt.html
http://jevbratt.com/projects.html
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/jevbratt/biography/

Paik and Novak, Icons in the Multimedia World...

2006-02-19T18:23:00.000+03:00

After the death of Nam June Paik, the father of multimedia, I realized how much he benifited the field of multimedia and as a multimedia student I should be thankful to him. He carried the concept of multimedia through his inventions through the decades to give new meanings and new functionalities to the field. His style is known for its dystopic vision to media that accompanied with the sense of humour and beauty. His work seems beautiful and objective, but a lot of criticism lies beneath for example in a lot of his work where he replaces the human with the machine. For example in his SYS Cop robots that look like traffic lights and replace the function of a human in that specific job. In Paik's work, there's a seductive element in the media that's why we have to have self concious and be aware of the capabilities of technology. He shows how each communication medium of each time period is affecting the consumer and the public views. Paik created things for the consumer that could have useful funcionality and make life easier. He made the Burn Calories Bike, Online Shopping, Web Catalogs, Magnet TV, Moon TV, and Buddha TV. The Buddha TV was very conteversial in the idea of suggsting how the media plays with our inner selves and makes us think how how it affects our inner selves in this digital world, that even the most sacred religious icon is affected by it. This concept is very similar to Novak's views of "self" and how the different concepts of the digital world makes us discover not only the space surrounding us, but also our inner selves. Also, Paik and Novak are similar in the idea that technology and multimedia will not only expand and advance, but it will also create different useful functions for the public to make their life easier. Paik dicussed media propoganda and the political issues in a humourous and funny approach. Also Novak emphasizes on concepts such as space, speed, and physical architecture. Novak offered a new perception to technology and the digital world similar to what Paik was doing all his life with the idea of liqiud architecture especially in his film "Electronic Super Highway" in the mid 90s. They both created different communities by joining different moving visuals. They both emphasized on the visuals vs text to convey a message they liked to reach their audience with. In conclusin, Paik's work is very ambigous. To me it seems very dadaist with all the humour and sarcasm that is joined with his futuristic style and thinking.

Related links:
http://www.paikstudios.com/
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/paik/paik_top.html
http://www.dashsys.com/products/paik.html
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://epublishingcorp.com/articlesRaichel/20thCentury%26contemp/NJProbotsm.jpg&imgrefurl=http://epublishingcorp.com/articlesRaichel/20thCentury%26contemp/NamJunePaik.htm&h=300&w=215&sz=25&tbnid=B1I5m1QqTqMJ:&tbnh=111&tbnw=79&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnam%2Bjune%2Bpaik%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D&oi=imagesr&start=3

Marcos Novak's "Liquid Architectures"

2006-02-12T20:07:00.000+03:00

Novak’s analyses and expectation about the technological changes in our digital world are very discrete and interesting to imagine happening. He introduces new ways of life with the aid of new digital characteristics that totally differ from what we have today. He describes the characteristics and the individual experience of the technologies that we have today and compare it to what we would be experiencing in the near future in terms of space, speed, and physical architecture. Novak offered a new perception to technology and the digital world. He offered the realization that technology is not only will expand and advance, but it will give new meanings to things that we have today and will redefine the concepts of time, space, and structure. Novak also emphasizes on the idea of "self" and how the different concepts of the digital world makes us discover not only the space surrounding us, but also our inner selves. By that we can know more about ourselves and start to appreciate all the effort that is being done to realize these digital concepts of space and time that will help our life to become easier. The idea of liquid architecture is really complicated and interesting to me, and with time and experience we will get used to it and will understand its functions and perceptions more thoroughly.

Related Links
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~marcos/Centrifuge_Site/MainFrameSet.html
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Novak.html
http://www.altx.com/interviews/marcos.novak.html

Char Davies, "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being"

2006-02-06T19:34:00.000+03:00

Char Davies explains thoroughly the concept of what people generally call “Virtual Reality.” He introduces the definition and the difference between virtual reality and the Telepresence. Although the general meaning seems to be the same between the two, they are actually different in their functions and their fields of importance. Virtual reality and Telepresence both involve humans interfering with the machine in a remote cyber space. In Davies piece Osmose, he makes the participants or what he calls the “immersants” to be in a 3D virtual reality and to make decisions and choices to discover their own selves and experience being alive in this cyber environment. After knowing about the Osmose, I look at virtual reality in a different way. Now I realized that Virtual reality is a whole field of artistic experimentation to make the individual discover their inner selves and existence. In Jeffery Shaw’s piece Configuring the Cave, the participant needs not just make choices in his/her mind, but it requires them to physically make decisions and changes in order for them to interact with the cyber environment. Immersants have to move a wooden body to be able to go forward with the experiment and to cause change. So, the concept of the Telepresence and Virtual Reality is present and almost the same in both experimentations, but the way each one performs and functions is different and that what makes multimedia a whole new field that’s open to adaptability and evolution, and makes it stands out depending on the distinct use of it by the operator or user.

Related Links
http://www.immersence.com/
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/chdavi/chdavi_e.htm
http://cat.eciad.bc.ca/r_and_p/char_davies.html

Telepresence by Eduardo Kac

2006-01-27T01:32:00.000+03:00

Kac makes a clear and informative way to describing the idea of the telepresence and the emergence of the connectivity between telecommunications and the virtual space, or the computer. He gives clear definitions for terms that are used in the digital world such as, cyberspace, virtual reality, and telepresence. He shows the link between real time and real space as a new communication medium. He draws the attention that although the idea of telepresence and the virtual reality are new terms, they actually existed since the fourtees, which I think is pretty amazing. Kac explains that cyberspace is a synthetic space that provides the person with certain interactions with digital environments by equipping him with proper hardware. These terms are interchangable and relatively work together to form what he calls being "telepresent in cyberspace." I was really amazed by these concepts especially when applying them to my project "Shatila, the Inspired Village" because Kac states that being telepresent in cyberspace allows several people from different countries to meet in a remote database and interact through the using graphics and telecommunication systems. Then Kac differentiate between telepresence and the other forms of communication, where telepresence is basically a hybrid of robotics and telematics, in which the "participant's" decisions are affected by the remote environment. In terms of human senses, Kac explains that the sense of touch applies also to telepresence where people keep in touch remotely through communication mediums such as the phone or the computer. These concepts make real space and real time irrelevant and make speed expressed by bytes not miles. Furthermore, they make us unable to dominate a specific public space, but a public image. Kac describes his experience with the vitual simulated environment of riding a mountain bike and his installation "Ornitorrinco on the Moon" and how they make the mind and the body engage in the experience and seperate from the real world. In general, I found this article very similar to the Agency article we had to read in MMDD 400 especially with the use of key terms such as, choice, behavior, decisions, participant, interactor, vitual space and reality.

Related Links
http://www.ekac.org/
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/03_02/bunny_art.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Kac

MORI Show

2005-12-08T13:40:00.000+03:00

This show was one of the most interesting shows. The presentation, concept, setting, lighting, audio, and space worked in such a united and coherent way together. The scientific facts behind the piece and the establishment of the mood and the visuals transform the atmosphere where the viewer exists and takes him/her to an underground world, and this is the message that the creator of the piece, Randall Packer, is trying to convey, I guess. First, the dark curtains reveal the attempt to enter a different dark world, then the ambiant sounds stress the underground activities of the earth, the walls and the height of the place emphasize that too, then you are drawn to the center where you have a hole in the ground that drives your curiousity to look inside it, then you see the true interaction between the audio and the visual where you have a monitor with a wavy snaky silver line moving with the same beat and rythm of the ambiant sound. That was amazing. I really like the idea of the link between the two phenomena of sound and sight. The show very reminded me of the Hirshhorn show and the phenomenon of the Synaesthesia (the unity of the senses in terms of synthesis of the arts. Arts include photography, paintings, digital media, installations, light art, and videos).

The MotI/On Show

2005-11-27T22:55:00.000+03:00

This was the first time for me to see a 3D installation and a video piece combined together in one work. I have seen photography, painting, or even sculpture that is accompanied with video or audio, but not a paper installation with a radical surreal sort of video. When I first entered the room, the piece was the only thing there (I got there 10 min. before they closed so there was no one) and it really caught my attention. The very small folded paper fragments that were forming the human size dress, the way it was hanging there under the lights inside the dark room, the blurry faded video, and the sound of the little girl singing at the background... all played very well in setting the mood and telling the story of the Little Red Riding Hood in "Tell Me More Stories." What made it even more interesting was the commentary of the two artists that was next to the door of the gallery room. Their comments made the two pieces more personalized and more linked to each other. The artist comment on how her childhood lacked the presence of the fairy tale fantasy world explains why she made the dress from folded pages from fairy tales books. The combination of the dress installation with the video that resembles the story of the Little Red Riding Hood strengthens the idea of this fantasy world where each artist finds part of herself, and that appears in Zoe's comment when she said that on Dec. 15th she will wear the dress to experience the world of fairy tales that she created. Also, in Maria's comment when she mentioned that the red dress used in her video is her daughter's and it was actually hers when she was little. So, I think this is a good example to show the interaction between real life stories and fairy tale stories that make the role of the agency even more powerful and clear in shifting the thoughts of the imagination from one world to another, and in showing how each person reacts differently towards this agency based on their own memories and experiences.

My Visit to the Hirshhorn Museum

2005-09-16T19:23:00.000+03:00

This was my first time to experience such a strange, pleasant, smart, and artistic experience. The Visual Music exhibition at the Hirshhorn was a unique exhibit that was based on the link between the two phenomena of sound and sight. The show explored the phenomenon of the Synaesthesia (the unity of the senses in terms of synthesis of the arts. Arts include photography, paintings, digital media, installations, light art, and videos. Synaesthesia basically is the induction of a sensory experience through the other and then both interact to elicit a high state of consciousness, and music is the most powerful source to elicit such a sensory reaction. The sound is experienced through an image and an image is experienced through a sound as artistic experience. There was a lot of famous artists' work that was joined with certain pieces of music that evoked amazing feelings and different visceral responses, such as Georgia O'keeffe, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Fischinger, and Jennifer Steincamp. One of the most beautiful sections was the experimental film and light show where they displayed work by Oskar Fischinger and the whitney brothers. They switched the form of the static rigid abstract paintings into a new world of movement and motion with the use of film and music. For example, Fischinger's piece of the visual motifs that resemble sound motifs, where you see the lines and colored shapes and circles move with vibrant music to give a feeling of unity and action. At the end, the show was amazing and I'm glad that I was able to go to it on its last day in D.C.

Alan Kay "User Interface, A Personal View"

2005-09-09T07:42:00.000+03:00

Based on the reading of Alan Kay " User interface, A personal View" I realized that multimedia is a whole new world of art, science, technology, and communication. Multimedia is not just a simple tool as most people think. Multimedia can be misinterpreted because it is usually associated with many communication tools, but it's not a tool. Multimedia is a concept process tool, we use it to express and deliver this concept visually, intellectually, and typographically. Multimedia is a far more complex medium than just a simple tool. There is a clear and obvious relationship between the form of multimedia and the message it's delivering. Through a combination of tools one can communicate his message, and be able to enhance his own experience, a process that enriches one's experience. The way this medium operates allows the individual the opportunity to think, collaborate, communicate, achieve, and be creative. It also allows users to reason, solve problems and form distinctive relationships between objects and what they symbolize. Multimedia as a practice existed decades ago and can appear as a single form or as a collaboration of forms interacting together. Because multimedia emphasizes on the concept of collaboration and communication, it is supposed to be usable and accessible to all people men or women, adults or children, americans and non americans. The "Personal Computer" or the laptop as Kay mentioned is a good example of a mediated, accessible, and usable tool.

Janet Murray "Agency"

2005-09-08T07:38:00.000+03:00

Janet Murray is a professional designer in computer interactivity especially for games. One of her main theories is the idea of the agency behind the pleasures that the audience, or as she called it the â€œinteractorâ€, gets when participating in games. The agency is the power that takes proper actions towards the audienceâ€™s options. As Murray states, this agency does not exist similarly in all situations or games because it does not depend on the action of interactivity or participation only, but also depends on the idea of multiple decisions and choices that can be made between the creator and interactor. One of the main forms of agency is spatial navigation, which allows the player to navigate through virtual landscapes. This kind of virtual space adds more pleasurable and aesthetic feeling to the interactor because it is not real so there are no limits and there is more freedom where in real life that could be physically not possible, but virtually is.

Two of the spatial navigation examples are the maze and the rhizome. The maze is based of the Greek myth in which brave Theseus kills the beast inside the maze and gets the treasure located in the center of the maze. The relation between the agency and the maze is that the maze is a path in a virtual space that leads to multiple choices the player should make to get various outcomes. The rhizome is a form of hypertext that can be never ending which continues in the form of a tube that has one path, but multiple decisions. It can be frustrating but at the same time comforting because the participants of the gameâ€™s story will not disappear by any chance. Murray gives examples on how hypertext and images in games can add suspense and complexity to the feeling of gaming. Another advantage of the computer navigational space is the pleasure of the journey story and problem solving where the journey and its participants are examples of real world people and the many possible solutions for impossible situations. So basically it is the pleasure of navigation and finding the solutions at the same time. Murray states that games involve in our real lives where they can be pretty dramatic. Games are not just about winning, but also losing because games reflect our real world with its hopelessness and weakness, which adds more excitement and an example for this is the earliest form of gaming, the agon between competitors. Murray explains how the interactor and the environment are the main elements in a game which she called â€œprocedural authorshipâ€ in which the interactor controls the rules of the game.

Hi Fall05 Fresh New Start

2005-09-02T07:32:00.000+03:00

This is a new blog for my multimedia 400. I will be posting my new summaries for Fall 05 in it. My old summaries are in another blog in movable type under the same username and has the summaries of Spring 05 Multimedia 200.

Lynn Hershman "Fantacy Beyond Control"

2005-03-25T09:21:00.000+03:00

In "Fantacy Beyond Control", Lynn Hershman discusses the idea of hyper nonlinear narrative through using the computer as a medium of the 21st century. She explains how any other medium canâ€™t serve the same function because for example books are linear in telling a narrative or a story. Another privilige that the computer has as Hershman emphasizes in her article is the amazing interaction and participation that happens between the medium and the viewer, or I should say the interactor. Itâ€™s a story that is created through the participatorâ€™s decision making process and it requires all the attention from the person to make the choices. And what makes the person more attached to the story or experience is that he/she has the control to decide the characters destiny and sequence of events as if the interactors are actually the characters in the story or the game. Hershman scientifically explains how the interactor uses the brain when engaging in such experiences so he/she can fully be into that fantacy and out of reality world.
It is really interesting that the person can be in a totally different world, communicating with unexpected random characters, and experience all sorts of emotions and feelings while s/he is sitting in his/her home or office. But to be able to create this successful virtual environment that can drag the person from his own world to another world and make him participate in it needs a lot of effort and collaboration to make it as realistic and believable as possible. As Hershman states that she collaborated with different artists, musicians, and film makers in order to achieve the level that she desired is her past successful projects.

Roy Ascott's "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?"

2005-02-14T09:20:00.000+03:00

In "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" Roy Ascott describes how in the world of technology and telecommunication, pure art became different than the telematic art, as he called it, in terms of form, content, concept, and behavior. With the electronic media including video, sound, and cybernetic systems, peopleâ€™s behaviors changed according to this change in the telematic culture and because of the over explosion of information and data which gave the human another way to explore and to use his/her imagination and creativity. The only difference that Ascott emphasizes is the role of the content in sending and receiving the content. He states that in the world of pure art or classical communication, the maker creates the content and the meaning that s/he wants the viewer to receive, whereas in the telematic art world the creator or I shouldnâ€™t say creator because there is no single creator, but creators who are the observers and the system that make the content and the meaning. And that makes the data of the content indeterminate, changeable, irrelevant, and unpredictable. Ascott likes joining science and art together when giving examples about the status of the creator and the participator, he states that the embrace of telematic art and the new technologies and the computer behaviors work in the same way that the quantum principle works in physics and in the same way Duchamp joined opposite emotions and interactions to form a telematic style for his art. The new way of creating and receiving the information from Ascottâ€™s perspective is called the "global vision" where the participator/creator thinks, feels, and sees things in his/her own way, in isolation, and with authority to share the ideas, creativity, and senses live with other creators/participators in totally different world of their own. Ascott gives an example of how the computer in the telematic world is like the heart inside the human body is considered the leader of the circulation system and it is invisible but the effects are visible. Basically, what Ascott is trying to say is that the digital media and the computerized world are being totally different that we have known about art and science. Itâ€™s a world of immaterial, shared, spiritual, creative, virtual, and concrete data and thoughts.

Bill Viola's "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?"

2005-02-12T09:18:00.000+03:00

Based on Bill Violaâ€™s experiences and knowledge about all sorts of architecture and electronic media, he believed in the ability of making non linear video presentation and from that he got his articleâ€™s title. He believes that the data space and memory idea function effectively based on the human mind and imagination. Viola states that everything is contained or needs a space to exist like our memories and the memory of a computer in order to be able to save and â€œrecordâ€ whatever is going on. Even if this space is an empty space or just a small portion of it is used, it still â€œexists in its entiretyâ€ and serves a function. Viola gives a good example of how a space can be serving a purpose when he says that even if you are recording emptiness with you video camera and itâ€™s videoing, that means it is still on and functioning, but if you turn it off itâ€™s not serving the data space concept. From this point, he based his article on the idea of video/film recording and editing and its relation to memory and how when watching a movie, the scenes become alive at the moment and seem continuos but when ending it and getting out of the mood it becomes past, yet kept in the memory. Thatâ€™s why when making a film, editing and cleaning up the boring and unwanted parts is crucial and vital to the whole process. He talks about the relation between art, video, architecture, and the computer and how all these relate to a similar context based on historical data about realism and structuralism. Viola explains how the computer emerged into structuring and arranging interactive videos and discs. These videos that take the participant into spatial navigations of different times, speeds, places, and moods. With the use of the computer and the technology we have today, Viola emphasizes on the idea that with the help of the human mind and creativity everything became possible to achieve in this computer/video world to make it seem as real and 3D as possible. the editing techniques and the non sequential, non linear storytelling appeoach of using the video and the computer is emphasizing on the idea of data space and the linkage between the memory and the computer. Although this approach of having condominiums in data space is very successful and has been kind of used in cable TV, it is still in its beginnings and it has a long way to go with the vast amount of technologies and human creativity.

"Heritage" poem

2005-01-19T09:15:00.000+03:00

Heritage

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of flesh that pass
Trampling tall defiant grass
Where young forest lovers lie,
Plighting troth beneath the sky.
So I lie, who always hear,
Though I cram against my ear
Both my thumbs, and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
So I lie, whose fount of pride,
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber flesh and skin,
With the dark blood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
That, I fear, must burst the fine
Channels of the chafing net
Where they surge and foam and fret.

Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest I perish in the flood.
Lest a hidden ember set
Timber that I thought was wet
Burning like the dryest flax,
Melting like the merest wax,
Lest the grave restore its dead.
Not yet has my heart or head
In the least way realized
They and I are civilized.

Ted Nelson "Computer Lib/Dream Machines"

2005-01-17T09:13:00.000+03:00

Computer Lib/Dream Machines summary1

Ted Nelson had changed the modern history of understanding media and the computer through inventing new multifunctional and personal computer thinking that is depicted in his book â€œComputer Lib/Dream Machines.â€ As a philosopher and a computer scientist, Nelson believed that personal computing can be a linkage between all sorts of media as long as the human memory is involved such as art, science, music, literature, and society. He believed that the human brain can operate without following a certain routine or specific typical way of thinking. From there, Nelson started giving other meanings to what he called Hypertext or Hypermedia. His theory implies that humans have the choice to understand and react to non sequential spontaneous scripts in different ways.

Also, he explains that there is no pure truth, but all the information and knowledge are based on facts, assertions, and ideas that we take for granted as the truth and document it in the form of text. Therefore, a lot of these facts and knowledge should be stored and saved digitally because of the many advantages. One example of the digital storing techniques is the digital branching or â€œHyperâ€ systems such as hypertext. Nelson defines hypertext as non-sequential writing and states the different kinds of hypertext such as the collateral, fresh, continuous, grand, and chunk. Nelson mentions that people are tired from reading and writing in stereotypical sequential way that is why the computer offers the possibility of using hypertext that adds more joy to the text itself. The article contains the influence of Vannevar Bushâ€™s ideas and Engelbartâ€™s system on the history of hypertext and personal computer intelligence including The Mouse. Nelson states the main hierarchical formats for Engelbartâ€™s design in terms of storage, display, and language and he explains fundamental examples for hypertext systems such as the â€œRETURN buttonâ€ technique.