This year, the Interactive Media Group's seminar comprised a core group of eight participants, plus about twice that number of network mailgroup subscribers, supplemented by visitors for special workshops and public forums.
In the Fall, we treated themes related to writing, speech and gesture; material alternatives to semiotic and linguistic approaches to media; and the possibilities of friction and resistance in computational media. At another level, we took a critical look at popular notions of interactivity, often equated with freedom or verisimilitude, and at the narratives of abundance and transcendence to which the rhetoric of network hypermedia technologists appeals. As an exercise, we compared presentations of the Gulf War in different media: newspaper accounts, videogames, and websites. Tim Lenoir led a series of discussions around readings from McLuhan, Peirce, Kittler and Leroi-Gourhan, which provided a staged entry into some of the conceptual problems. Helgi Schweizer's talk and workshop on interaction, timing and neurophysiology provided us an opportunity to read Maturana and Varela. Late in the Fall, we participated in Discourse Networks 2000's inaugural discussions and lectures. We started the Winter quarter by revisiting the tension between design and criticism. We specialized our discussion of computational media to the technologies described by their inventors as "smart clothing," and considered what these practitioners intended by a reactive space or prosthetic technology. We considered the expansion of these notions to alternative social practices, such as, the formation of public parks, personal advertisments, "self-hacking," news, sketching, cooking. Out of this, we identified a set of useful notions, here marked by terms such as boundary, rhythm, topology, transformation, social field, and decomposed or emergent theater. We started to audio-tape and video-tape some of the discussions to document the lively exchanges, but also with an eye to using some of it as raw material for future media constructions. This took us into the Spring term, when we conducted a sequence of gedanken design exercises around the following questions: (1) How can we come up with a common language for describing computational media and in which we can construct hybrid computational and material artifacts? (2) Can we inscribe our understanding in different modes, eg. as a two-dimensional map, or as a table of contents indexing into hybrid media? (3) How do the relations among the seminar participants evolve under the perturbation of this exercise of language construction? Our Spring term concluded with two public lectures, one by Niklas Damiris on "Internet, the New Agora?" (co-authored with Helga Wild), and another by Brian Rotman, "Beside Onself, From the Serial to the Parallel."
We are continuing our discussions through the summer, and have planned another seminar, under the banner of "Science, Humanities, Ethics: Technologies of Writing as Material and Performance," which will be the subject of a subsequent proposal.
We thank the Humanities Center for its generosity, and Prof. Larry Friedlander for sponsoring the seminar's activities over these past two years. Special thanks also to Felix Yeung, who served as the workshop assistant.
The Interaction and Media Group (IMG) 1996-97
Niklas Damiris
Laura Farabough
Glenn Kurtz
Tim Lenoir
Ben Robinson
Chris Salter
Sha Xin Wei
Ann Weinstone
Helga Wild