Week OneNew Media 440New Media History and Jorge Luis Borges

Lynn Hershman, Digital Venus, 1996.

New Media Art Field: A Short History

• From Introductions to The New Media Reader -- Len Manovich and Janet Murray.

• Len Manovich is a Russian born author of The Language of New Media. He is a professor of Visual Arts University of California, San Diego, U.S. and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches new media art and theory.

• Janet Murray is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments. She is currently working Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design.

History and “Sociology”

• Looking at a cultural field “sociologically,” means measuring its standing by the number and importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications, conferences,

• In light of this, we can say that in the case of new media (understood as computer-based artistic activities) it took about ten years for it to move from cultural periphery to the mainstream.

New Media Works – The Gathering Places

• In the 70s Ars Electronica (Austria) and SIGGRAPH (USA) were main gathering places of artists working with computers.

• Field of New Media continued to take shape in the 80s with organizations like ZKM in Karlsruhe, and ISEA in Netherlands.

• In 1990 Intercommunication Center in Tokyo began its activities and throughout the 1990s, Europe and Japan were the best places to see new media works.

Counties other than USA

• Countries other than USA were first to critically engage with the new technologies that were *developed in the USA.* Why?

• 1. New Technologies are assimilated quickly making them “invisible” almost overnight – something that does not require much reflection.

• 2. There is only a very minimal level of public support (government funding) for arts in USA. “Commercial culture” (culture designed for mass audience) has adopted and experimented with new media.

The USA Pays Attention – End of the 90s

• Education Institutes. In mid-90s, starting on the West Coast, universities and art schools initiated new media programs.

• Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, SFMOMA and other museums started mounting online exhibitions and commissioning online projects.

• Book series on new media published by MIT and others.

• What had been a cultural underground 10 years ago was becoming an an established academic and artistic field in the 2000s.

The USA Pays Attention – End of the 90s

• Education Institutes. In mid-90s, starting on the West Coast, universities and art schools initiated new media programs.

• Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, SFMOMA and other museums started mounting online exhibitions and commissioning online projects.

• Book series on new media published by MIT and others.

• What had been a cultural underground 10 years ago was becoming an an established academic and artistic field in the 2000s.

A McLuhan Moment

“The ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content’.” MM

Like the engineers and “computer scientists” who were inventing the foundational technologies of the coming Internet, McLuhan saw media as “extensions of man,” a means to augment our powers of perception and communication.

A Vannevar Bush Moment (1940)“The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey

to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted either in original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvellously metamorphasized form in which they then proceed to the hand.”

Bush … cont

“Now, as peace approaches, one asks where will physicists find objectives worthy of their best? …

“There is a growing mountain of research … our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are totally inadequate.

“Using (this device), the user builds a trail of research interests through the maze of materials available.”

Many of New Media’s important ideas and influences first appearing in

unexpected contexts …

Jorge Luis Borges and Vannevar Bush

• Borges, the storyteller/librarian and Bush, the soldier/scientist speak to us out of a midcentury frame of mind, exhausted by war, exhilarated by dawning globalism. (Murray)

• Both expand on ideas that a massive branching structure is a better way to organize data and to represent human experience. (Manovich)

• Both aware of increased complexity of human consciousness and failure of linear media to capture the structures of thought.

Jorge Luis Borges

“The Garden of the Forking Paths”

– Referencing The New Media Reader, Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort

About Jorge Luis Borges 1899 - 1986

• Borges (pronounced “Horhay Borhayss”) Argentine poet, essayist, and librarian -- born in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

• Moved to Switzerland at 15, travelled to Spain, published his poems in Surrealist literary journals

• This work contributed to the genre of “magic realism,” where magical elements blend into a realistic atmosphere to access a deeper understanding of reality.

• Garden of the Forking Paths was first published as El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan in Buenos Aires, 1941.

Garden of the Forking Paths

• Is about a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek.

• As a combination book and maze, it can be read in many ways – a hypertext novel on many layers. Uses the genre of the detective story—a genre that requires clue-gathering and puzzle-solving

• Other matters that are handled in the story are race, war espionage, ancestry, and the nature of academic discourse about history, and existential philosophy in a universe where everything that is possible does happen in some branch of reality.

Definition of interest …

Can we accept for our purpose that labyrinth and maze are the same ie colloquial English?

• In colloquial English, labyrinth is generally synonymous with “maze,” but many contemporary scholars observe a distinction between the two: maze refers to a complex branching (multicursal) puzzle with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single, non-branching path, which leads to the center. A labyrinth in this sense has an unambiguous route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.

Student Links

1. Garden of the Forking Paths

2. (Trailer) Parallel Lives, Parallel Universes.

Part One Parallel Lives …

3. Mass Effect Death of the Council.