Saturday, September 19, 2015

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] the nature of code as a disrputive medium

Roger
I have not read Ascott's paper yet, but based on your review, I should.
My point was different — that the movement toward citizenry knowing about
"code" and "model" should have a democratizing effect. So, my point with
Processing was that the apparently minor default of "click here for the source
code" was a big deal for me— it was an explicit suggestion to share code, and thus
for more people to understand it as yet another language; a medium in which
to understand the world. Similar arguments can be made of the "code proselytizers"
such as Khan Academic and Code.Org. I fully endorse what they are doing—by
making the black box, a white box.
So, the issue is that what goes on inside the black box is a "medium of disruption"
since what goes on in there is becoming part of our language set in which we understand
the world.
-p

> On Sep 18, 2015, at 8:48 PM, roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> paul
>
> thanks for your pointing to your discussion on underlying code as a disruptive
> movement in art-science- picking up william joel's initial post
>
> I guess my question is what is different today than
> 10 years ago , pr 20 years ago- what is an emerging new art/science or
> art/technology trend
> in this area ?
>
> telecommunications and software have a long and distinguished history in our
> community- from rabinowitz and kit galloways' Electronic Cafe in 1984,
> to roy ascott's plissure du text=
>
> Leonardo published a special issue on art and interactive
> telecommunications back
> in 1991 Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, eds."Connectivity: Art
> and Interactive Telecommunications"
> LEONARDO 24:2, 1991
>
> I guess once answer is the dramatic increase of on line code
> developers - how many people write code
> today - and visionaries like roy hoped there would be a threshold at
> which planetary consciousness emerged-
> and certainly we now see large scale collective projects- and as you
> point out languages like processing enable
> code sharing in seamless ways
>
>
> here is what roy was saying then
>
> Roy Ascott sees our age as one that includes an art of interactivity,
> involving the human use of computerised communication and electronic
> telepresence. He believed this approach carries great potential and
> hope for our emergence into the next millennium as caring, cooperative
> and creative human beings…
> Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications
>
> Telematic systems have brought us to the edge of another virtual
> reality. The last one, conjured out of the thinking of the
> Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, presented a world of
> certainty and determinacy in which subject and object, mind and
> matter, art and science were all quite clearly defined, separated out
> and neatly categorised. That world is in many ways crumbling; we see
> now that it was not the world after all. It was a virtual
> world-necessary to com- bat superstition, sufficient in its
> mechanistic determinism to feed the dream of reason-but virtual
> nonetheless. This certainty and solidity seemed at the time to be the
> real thing. For centuries artists seemed to think so too. But "all
> that is solid melts into air." [1] The real was only virtual after
> all. Now we have a different paradox to deal with-actually to
> celebrate: the virtual is becoming real. With computer-mediated
> systems of perception, memory, intelligence and communication, we are
> redescribing and reconstructing the world; we inhabit increasingly
> what is essentially a dataspace, a telematic environment, a virtual
> reality.
>
> roger malina
>
>
> I hope I am not gate crashing with a response to the
>
> "What one might call disruptive media?"
>
> but what about media that is often hidden from view, but media
> nonetheless? I allude
> to it a bit in a recent blog post:
> http://creative-automata.com/2015/09/16/modeling-coding-for-understanding/
> <http://creative-automata.com/2015/09/16/modeling-coding-for-understanding/>
>
> In closed systems, this media may be known only to certain people. In
> open systems
> (open source software and hardware), the media are present in places
> like source forge
> and github, but increasingly in places like codepen, codio, jsbin, and
> jsfiddle (the javascript
> development environments).
>
> There is also Processing which has had a long following in the arts.
> One of the first things I noted
> about Processing was that it *automatically* put in a "link" to the
> source code. Imagine that! Sharing
> code by default with others. I also like the patch sharing and patch
> edit/presentation duality
> in Max/Msp.
>
> Systems theorists and software engineers may surface notions such as
> white box vs. black
> box.
>
> This type of media is running your lives.
>
> paul
>
>
>
> Paul Fishwick, PhD
> Chair, ACM SIGSIM
> Distinguished University Chair of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication
> Professor of Computer Science
> Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
> The University of Texas at Dallas
> Arts & Technology
> 800 West Campbell Road, AT10
> Richardson, TX 75080-3021
> Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick <http://utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick>
> Blog: creative-automata.com <http://creative-automata.com/>
>
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Paul Fishwick, PhD
Chair, ACM SIGSIM
Distinguished University Chair of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication
Professor of Computer Science
Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
The University of Texas at Dallas
Arts & Technology
800 West Campbell Road, AT10
Richardson, TX 75080-3021
Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick
Blog: creative-automata.com


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