Digital Media: Time and ProcessHypermedia and Interaction

Elizabeth LoshVIS 145a

Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011)Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986)Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997)Optical Media (2002)

Vilém Flusser (1920-1991)The Shape of Things (1986)Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1997)Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985)

“I raise the prospect of a future society that synthesizes electronic images. Seen from here and now, it will be a fabulous society, where life is radically different from our own. Current scientific, political, and artistic categories will hardly be recognizable there, and even our state of mind, our existential mood . . . Utopia means groundlessness, the absence of any point of reference.” (3)

“Taking contemporary technical images as a starting point, we find two divergent trends. One moves toward a centrally programmed, totality society of image receivers and image administrators, the other toward a dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors . . . It will no longer be found in any place or time but in imagined surfaces, in surfaces that absorb geography and history.” (4)

“When images supplant texts, we experience, perceive, and value the world and ourselves differently, no longer in a one-dimensional, linear, process-oriented, historical way but rather in a two dimensional way, as surface, context, scene. And our behavior changes: it is no longer dramatic but embedded in a field of relationships.” (5)

“. . . technical images are inherently different from early pictures, which will be referred to here as ‘traditional.’ More specifically, technical images rely on texts from which they have come, and, in fact, are not surfaces but mosaics assembled from particles.” (6-7)

“The difference between traditional and technical images, then, would be this: the first are observations of objects, the second computations of concepts. (10)

For although they show only the surfaces of things, they still show relationships between things that no one would otherwise suspect . . . Images don’t show matter; they show what matters.” (11)

“the individual technical elements of film – the recording device, the storage medium, the projection apparatus – were combined with one another very gradually and in stages. Technical media are never the inventions of individual geniuses, but rather they are a chain of assemblages that are sometimes shot down and that sometimes crystallize.” (153)

“From Plato’s cave to the peep show theater, spectators were and are fixed in place – not out of old European sadism, but rather because before the invention of computers the calculation of moving gazes would have exceeded all computational capacities.” (169)

“rules for computing or algorithms on optical signals, which could be applied just as well in acoustics or cryptography because they are perfectly indifferent towards medial contents or sensory fields.” (225)

“In short, World War II was colorful.” (202)

Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011)Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986)Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997)Optical Media (2002)

Vilém Flusser (1920-1991)The Shape of Things (1986)Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1997)Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985)

Ars Electronica 1980s in Linz

University of Bochum (1987-1993 Kittler is professor –

1991 Flusser lectures)

“At any rate, the generation of 2000 likely subscribes to the fallacy-backed by billions of dollars-that computers and computer graphics are one and the same. Only aging hackers harbor the trace of a memory that it wasn't always so. There was a time when the computer screen's display consisted of white dots on an amber or green background, as if to remind us that the techno-historical roots of computers lie not in television, but in radar, a medium of war.”

Kittler, “Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction” (2001)

“In other words, wars have implied espionage, communications technology and war games for a long time now. The only thing unheard of in Information Warfare is the fact that espionage, communications technology and war games all fall together in a global information network.”

Kittler, “On the History and Theory of Information Warfare” (1998)

“What was once written can now be conveyed more effectively on tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or computer disks, and a great deal that could not be written until now can be noted down in these new codes. Information coded by these means is easier to produce, to transit, to receive, and to store than written texts.”

Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? (2002)

“Ever since film, television, computer graphics, and virtual reality have made pictures move at ever faster rates, media theories have exhibited puzzling outbursts of delight. Writing in general and books in particular are said to be obsolete, while the image, more powerful and unifying than ever, is poised to reclaim its old rights. I would like to challenge this enthusiasm and the diagnosis it is based on with the counterargument that the book is not simply at the end of its tether.”

Kittler, “The Perspective of Print” (2002)

Ted Nelsen, Xanadu

Stretchtext Examples• Joe Davis, “I Made Tea”• Jeremy Douglass, “Eight Was Where

It Ended”

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Raymond Queneau and Oulipo

Fluxus

Hypertext Fiction at Brown University

Robert Coover, Hypertext Experiments

Choose Your Own Adventure Books

Michael Joyce, Afternoon (1987)

Shelly Jackson, Patchwork Girl (1995)

Andrew Plotkin, Shade (2000)

Scott Rettberg,The Unknown