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William Poundstone and the Aesthetics of Digital Literature
This paper will discuss the work of Los Angeles-based writer and digital artist William Poundstone. Poundstone, who makes his living writing books for a popular audience on subjects such as cryptography, philosophical and mathematical conundrums, economics and even a biography of Carl Sagan, has a growing, but still quite small, reputation as one of the most intellectually challenging, playful, and artistically distinctive web artists. His “New Digital Emblems” is probably his most ambitious work, and operates somewhere between a documentary about the history of visual and ludic writing—ranging across centuries and focusing most profoundly on the Renaissance emblem books—and an original artistic creation, as it includes several of his own “digital emblems.” Other works, such as “Project for Tachistoscope,” challenge our ways of reading as this narrative is presented as a mix of basic “Wing Dings”-style iconography and text, presented in synch one image/word combination at a time.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 12:53
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Machine Subjectivity, Politics and Digital Arts
Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:42
