MEDIA HISTORIES 1850-2050 Winter 2018 DESMA 8 Media History Week 8 Dr. Peter Lunenfeld [lunenfeld@ucla.edu] The Fourth Wave: Digital (2000-2050)
The Fourth Wave: Digital (2000-2050) The computer is the first media machine that serves as the mode of produc@on (you can make stuff), the means of distribu@on (you can upload stuff to the network), the site of recep@on (you can download stuff and interact with it), and the locus of praise and cri@que (you can talk about the stuff you have downloaded or uploaded). This culture machine inaugurates the fourth wave of op@cal media.
And now we need to go back to see if there are prehistories of computing [A great reference for this is the ACM’s timeline of he history of computing, which you can find at http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/Publications/ timeline.pdf among other places on the Web]
People have been building calculating machines for millenia. Here an ancient Chinese abacus above an ancient Roman one
This is the German philosopher Gottfried Liebniz’ Step Reckoner first built in 1673, which did multiplication by repeated addition and shifting. Though he was interested in binary numbers, this machine used decimals.
A silk book, woven, not printed… The Livre de priers manufacured in Lyon by A. Roux between1886-87
The French Jacquard looms were programmable weaving machines, using punchcards for intructions
Charles Babbage and the Di ff erence Engine #2 (orig. plans 1823-42, reconstruction 1991)
Lady Ada Byron, “the Enchantress of Numbers,” as Babbage called her, the patron saint of programmers
Konrad Zuse was a 20 th century computer pioneer from Germany best known for the Z3 (1941), the first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer. Zuse’s machines read their instructions from celluoid filmstrips
“The pretence of modern media to create simulations of sensible reality is… cancelled; media are reduced to their original condition as information carrier, nothing less, nothing more… The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favour of the more e ffi cient binary one. Cinema becomes a slave to the computer.” Lev Manovich on Zeus’s use of celluloid filmstock as a medium for computing
"The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer." Alan Turing (1912-1954) He formalized our ideas about “computation” and “algorithms” and proposed the famous Turing Test for artificial intelligence
Turing proposed a universal machine that functioned as a stored program computer; in this set-up, the programs, or software, could be swapped and modified, improved and abandoned, just as the hardware could and would be. But, in combination, hardware and software have become ever more adept at simulating other machines. Here then is the origin of the dream: a quest for universality and creative potential.
The Imitation Game : the reduction of complexity to biography
ENIAC (1946) - Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer Americans Presper J. Ekhert and John Mauchy, developed ENIAC, the room sized machine at the U of Pennsylvania that is really the first computer that we can recognize today.
Life was simple before World War II. After that we had systems.
Generations: Tales of the Computer as Culture MAchine
The Patriarchs Vanavar Bush J.C.R. Licklider
The Patriarchs: Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it. —Vannevar Bush People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in five to ten years. —J.C.R. Licklider
The Patriarchs Bush’s Memex
The Plutocrats Two Men Named Watson
The Plutocrats: Two Men Named Thomas J. Watson Think. —Thomas J. Watson Sr. Our future is unlimited. —Thomas J. Watson Jr.
The Aquarians Douglas Engelbart Alan Kay
The Aquarians : Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world. —Douglas Engelbart It’s not the technology that lives. It’s the dream that lives. —Alan Kay
The Hustlers Steve Jobs Bill Gates
The Hustlers: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Who can a ff ord to do professional work for nothing? —Bill Gates, 1976 Real artists ship. —Steve Jobs, 1983
The Hosts Tim Berners-Lee Linus Torvalds
The Hosts: Tim Berners-Lee and Linus Torvalds You a ff ect the world by what you browse. —Tim Berners-Lee Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free. —Linus Torvalds
The Searchers Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google, Founded 1998)
MEDIA HISTORIES 1850-2050 Winter 2018 DESMA 8 Media History Dr. Peter Lunenfeld [lunenfeld@ucla.edu] The Fourth Wave: Digital (2000-2050) Part 2
Fourth Wave: Digital 2 In the fourth wave, rather than early, high, or post, the networked computer and its digital relations produce and consume a unimodernism.
Our moment is unimodern in the sense that it makes modernism in all its variants universal via networks and broadcasts, uniform in their e ff ect if not a ff ect, and unitary in terms of their existing as strings of code. In the unimodern era, as bits, on-line and in databases, a photo is a painting is an opera is a pop single.
The unimodern culture machine produces vast databases of texts, images, sounds, and other media. Downloading mindfully from this enormity, much less uploading to it in any meaningful way, requires the development of new habits. Liz Larner Untitled, 2001
Unimodernism describes the ways in which modernism in all its variants and historical strains comes together with the networked cultures of electronic unimedia. Unimodernism assumes that which we archived as early modern fervor, high modern sophistication, and postmodern pastiche will now co-exist co-temporaneously in global networks, accessed at the whim of the downloader and deployed as the user sees fit to be uploaded yet again in an ever-increasing blur of style churn.
While industrial machines popped a hundred years ago, information has emerged as the key figure for this new century. There are historical parallels between the emergence of the machine aesthetic in the first decades of the twentieth century and the nascent aesthetics of a digitized, unimodern culture in the twenty-first. The second half of the nineteenth century developed a market economy that produced and consumed machines. The early decades of the twentieth century saw artists, architects, and designers responding to this fever of material production by Giacomo Balla figuring the machine in their art, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) architecture, and design. The second half of the twentieth century, in turn, became an ever-accelerating feedback loop of information.
Thus, we should not be surprised that the past few years have seen our culture machines producing information-based art, architecture, design, and media; a digitized, interconnected society produces objects and systems that deal with software, databases, and the invisible flows of communications technology and computing algorithms. The great-grandchildren of those obsessed with Victoriana in the 1920s may look back with bemusement on their forebears’ archaic tastes, but they are the ones flocking to modernist emporiums like the Conran Shop and Design Within Reach to purchase the highest expressions of the machine age at the very moment that the info- aesthetic is on us. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1911)
Walker Evans Sherrie Levine Modern Postmodern
Walker Evans Sherrie Levine Michael Mandiberg Modern Postmodern Unimodern
One way to develop these habits of mind is to think in terms of figure and ground relationships. Gestalt psychology’s figure/ground experiments were provocative: the drawing that can be either a vase or two faces in profile; the rabbit that’s a duck that’s a rabbit; the old woman who is a young woman who is an old woman. When you look at an image, the figure is what is supposed to have the definite shape, the prominent contour.
The dynamic between figure and ground is akin to a paradigm shift, but it is less about the singular figure exploding the system through invention than the collective recognition of things that were already present although not central to the culture’s perception of itself.
If we accept that the digital computer is our culture machine, we can understand the ways in which information has popped to the forefront of our consciousness by using figure/ground relationships to analyze how electronic databases have transformed our expectation of stylistic “progress” and warped our cultural memory. Aaron Koblin, Flight Patterns (2006)
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/ Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk, coordinators, (2010)
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/
Games: Pac-Man, introduced 1980
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