WritingTechnologies: Rethinking Materiality and Performance
IMG's Science Humanities Ethics Seminar 1997-1998
14 July 1997

For the past three years, the Interactive Media Group has studied how we construct and inhabit spaces formed out of physical and symbolic structures and their peculiar transmogrification into what are currently called software, or computational media.  Our case studies have ranged over diagrammatic reasoning,Virtual Reality Markup Language, science fiction, visual languages, "interactive" simulations, musical and video performances.  The approaches have been inspired by drawing eclectically from literary theory, theater, graphics, topology, political economy, and science and technology studies.  These approaches reflected the interests and disciplinary backgrounds of the past participants.  From the previous seminars we distilled some old-fashioned philosophical questions -- what is a medium, how does it evolve, and for whom?

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 or musical scores or in performance.

Now, to address the philosophical/conceptual nature of the above questions, we develop an approach to media that starts prior to the usual dichotomies of semiotical vs.  physical, historical vs.  universal, 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 also 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, 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 will 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 seminars.