For the past 3 years, the Interactive Media Group has studied how we construct and inhabit spaces formed out of physical and symbolic structures and their peculiar transmogrication into what are currently called called software, or computational media. Our case studies have ranged over diagrammatic reasoning, VRML, science fiction, visual languages, "interactive" simulations, musical and video performances. The approaches have been inspired by by drawing eclectically from graphics, literary theory, linguistics, point-set topology, political economy, and science and technology studies (STS). These approaches reflected the interests and disciplinary background of the past participants.
For the next 1997-98 Workshop season, we would like to offer a year-long cycle of presentations on a set of themes focussed on the materiality of writing, where both "writing" and "material" are thematized in provocative, and, we believe, fruitful senses. This will be grounded in specific analyses of conventional and experimental technologies, inscriptional, constructive and notational systems as used in differential geometry, Laban notation in dance or musical scores.
We distill the energies from the previous seminars to an old-fashioned philosophical concern of what is a medium, how it evolves, and for whom?
Now, to address the philosophical/conceptual nature of the above questions, we do this by developing a an approach to media that starts prior to the usual dichotomoies of physical vs semiotical, historical vs. ________, epitomized in the dualism of the "two cultures." Our effort is to develop a terrain that can be shared by humanists, scientists and artist-engineers. Of course we will build on the energy and good will of the various participants from past seminars which we see as preparing both the conceptual and social ground for this new endeavour.
We offer this as a fresh series of discussions to which we would like to invite faculty, student and professional colleagues in the humanities who have expressed interest in these issues. We wish to make it possible for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to take this seminar for credit.
We intend to meet weekly. The new seminar will be structured differently fom the IMG seminar in that we propose to designate a facilitator (Master of Continuity, Niklas Damiris) who will prepare and coordinate a main series of philosophical discussions on the themes we've described. Sha Xin Wei will prepare a sub-sequence of discussions thematizing mathematical structures and processes as they bear on writing and materiality, and vice versa. We hope to prepare notes and references for each discussion. These discussions will be held every two weeks. In the alternate weeks, we wish to leave the agenda open to allow ample room for seminar participants to present their own work or their responses in a substantive manner, in the form of papers, readings, presentations of artwork and so forth. This way, we believe we will enjoy a thematic continuity, and retain the quality of open experiment that energized the past seminar in a deeper call and response.
Sha Xin Wei
Niklas Damiris