The Digital Aesthetic

from an AP article, August 17, 2004:

. . . .
More than a million jobs have been added back to the 2.6 million lost since Bush took office, but many pay less and offer fewer benefits, such as health insurance. The new jobs are concentrated in health care, food services and temporary employment firms, all lower-paying sectors. Temp agencies alone account for about a fifth of all new jobs.

Three in five pay below the national median hourly wage of $13.53, said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo.

On a weekly basis, the average wage of $525.84 is at the lowest level since October 2001.

The income gap is showing up in booming sales of luxury items. Porsche Cars North America says sales are up 17 percent for the year. Strong sales at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes.

Real-estate agent Lance Anderson, 38, of Overland Park, Kan., expects a record sales year, as homeowners upgrade to more expensive homes and commercial clients expand. He recently took his family to Florida for a two-week vacation.

“My clientele, it seems as a whole, has seen positive growth,” he said. So his family, including three children, now eat out more often and spend more on clothes. The Andersons recently bought two new cars and expect to buy a larger house in the next few years.

Economists say wages should rise as companies boost hiring. But the growing gap between the haves and have-nots will remain.

Technology has eliminated many U.S. jobs, as has global competition, particularly from low-wage countries such as China. Highly skilled, educated workers in America will thrive as demand rises, Sohn said, while low-skilled jobs remain vulnerable to outsourcing.

“This really has nothing to do with Bush or Kerry, but more to do with the longer-term shift in the structure of the economy,” Sohn said. (Italics added.)

Here’s the graph, as of 2002. Note that, unlike the graphs you’ll find on some web sites, this one adjusts for inflation:




Photo by Joe Pickard

I appreciate the ridiculous character of my having printed out blog entries so that I could write comments on them with a pencil, and I blush.
But what else could I have done? I thought a comment on the blog inappropriate because criticism and grading of an individual’s work are private matters. So I had to turn a public document into a form that allowed private communication.
Didn’t I?
(And by the way, this is the sort of thing I’d really like to put on a Peanut Gallery-like page. Feels more like a chat post than a blog post. Can something be done about that?)

A bad habit of mine as a teacher is to do something so that people (sometimes including me) get to figure out what it means. I realize that can be unnecessarily frustrating, and I will do it less in future.

I wanted to do the cyberdiscussion for the same reason I wanted you to make an LMK generator: it is a way to connect us _experientially_ to the new media. In using the LMK, you all gained the experience of being programmers, or as Aarseth calls it, Administrators. You made relatively complex new media objects.

Monday, I wanted to experiment with adding new media to an ancient media object: “the serious pursuit of the dialectician,” as Socrates puts it, “who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.” In a good discussion, we all do this with one another. Could new media, (Vannevar Bush’s means of growing in the wisdom of experience, as Theuth thought writing a means of increasing human wit and memory) be integrated with this ancient practice — or would it get in the way?

Well, both. Some of you were painfully distracted, and we need better technology. But I think the transcript shows that Clay, Jon, and Phil added to the intellectual quality of the discussion. Moreover, Phil in Florida was able to calm me right down after I got upset with Joe’s collapsing my distinctions from ten feet away — a profoundly unexpected event for me. New media made possible a humane action which had beneficial emotional consequences directly affecting an on-going discussion.

I could say that AT&T has been telling us this for years in their commercials, but I think I’d be wrong. What I’m increasingly coming to think of as a new media vision (appearing for us first in Turing’s attitude toward machine power) gives up some human control in an attempt to explore. Phil’s intervention didn’t just calm me down; it calmed me down by opening my mind a little, in a way only a former I.S. student who had access to Peanut Gallery on February 20, 2006, could have caused.

There is for me a hint here of new media’s particular beauty, but not in the ways it enhances our powers as makers and choosers. Monday’s class was an object designed to invite the unexpected.

1. Queneau’s works are non-linear texts. They do not represent new media because they are not numerically represented and therefore not displayed on a computer. Well done, those of you who pointed this out (some with asperity).
2. These non-linear texts offer multiple optional scriptons: unbroken sequences of textons (textual units) chosen from the non-linear text.
3. The Queneau objects are in our anthology because their variability and the modularity of “Poems” are two important characteristics of new media.
4. I have summarized the criteria you proposed in your discussion papers with these terms in mind, below:
David:
Conscious user choices are better than automated variability.
“Yours”
Nora:
The better non-linear text has optional readings that show more formal variety.
“Yours”
Ryan:
The better non-linear text has more optional readings that best mimic a linear text created by a human.
“Poems”
Emily:
An object that revolutionizes a conventional form is better than one that exploits conventions like sonnet form.
“Yours”
Shawn:
The better non-linear text offers more options that do not sacrifice coherence.
“Poems”
Jessica:
Modular variability is better than non-modular variability.
“Poems”
Frank:
Many equally powerful optional readings are better than one or two better readings among several.
“Poems”
Jordan:
Interactivity (active choices) is better, but so is a greater number of optional readings.
Split decision
Jeff:
More elegant variability is better.
“Poems”
Taz:
A text the reader can fully encounter is better.
“Yours”
Mikael:
The better non-linear text has options that yield readings that sound like human-created linear texts.
“Yours”
Joe:
Opportunities for conscious reader choice and a pleasing designer style are better.
“Yours”
Claire:
Better and worse are purely matters of personal taste.
“Poems”
Jacqui:
A sense of teamwork with a designer who skillfully shapes reader response indicates the better work.
“Poems”
Tiffany:
Options in the better work yield more compete & coherent readings.
“Poems”
Bo:
Options in the better work yield many poetic readings.
“Poems”
Brian S.:
No non-linear text can produce an experience as satisfying as that provided by the best linear texts, but cutting pages is better than flipping pages.
“Poems”
Chris:
Options in the better work yield more complete & coherent readings.
“Poems”
Liz:
The best non-linear text offers the most satisfyingly close encounter with an attractive, amusing designer.
“Yours”
Bryan W.:
The best non-linear text gives the reader most power to shape its readings.
“Poems”

Article link

This is a story in today’s NY Times online which should be accessible, though you might have to register. Please let me know if you cannot get to it.

According to the definition proposed today, new media are composed of digital code, and the other four proposed characteristics of new media follow from that. Neither of the Oulipo objects is composed of digital code, and therefore neither is a new media object. Nor is paper-pencil-and-odd-dice Dungeons and Dragons. But as both Aarseth and Manovich note, new media have offered a ready home for such forms, perhaps enhancing (emphasizing? improving?) some of their formal qualities.
One of their formal qualities is that they are non-linear. No single user can simultaneously experience all of the scriptons offered by any of them. Every individual “story” experienced (sonnet read, story-path chosen, role played in a cooperative story) is linear, as some of you have pointed out. But each object offers — by design — multiple scriptons, some unpredictable. And any old media or new media object constructed by a designer to make that kind of offer is non-linear.
So now we have three terms that can broadly fence out the territory: designer, material, and form. None of these negates the terms you discuss in your essays, but perhaps most of your terms could be said to fall under one of these heads. Manovich’s first four terms, for example (numerical representation, modularity, automation, and variability) seem to me after our discussion today all to be characteristics of material. And such material seems very friendly to non-linear forms. (As with PageMaker and GarageBand, you can also use it to make linear forms: the LMK anthology; a particular tune; a sequence of high-pitched speech.)
For me, at any rate, this way of talking is beginning to make sense.

Digital imagery doesn’t breathe the way film imagery does: blocks of color feel a little congealed, the flesh tones almost too smooth. But it would be downright Ludditic to say that digital doesn’t possess special qualities of its own. The focus is not only sharp; it’s sharp deep into the shot, at distances of thirty feet or more from the camera, and under minimal light conditions. But there’s more at stake than technique. . . . [According to Andre Bazin in the 1950s,] the expansion of depth of field by directors such as Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane, and William Wyler, in The Little Foxes, both working with the cinematographer Gregg Toland, greatly expanded depth of field — expanded it so much that the audience was suddenly free to direct its gaze to the foreground or the middle distance. . . . Deep focus, Bazin said, liberated the spectator from the coercion of montage. . . . [And in Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble,] deep focus gives us the freedom to observe the characters’ unfreedom. I can’t see any reason, however, that happier moods than Soderbergh’s can’t be wrung from high-definition digits. Soderbergh has begun the revolution, and it’s up to others to make the zeroes and ones sing like angels.
— from David Denby’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble in The New Yorker, Feb 13 & 20, 2006, 176-77.

Four quick points before Friday, aimed at organizing our discussion a little.

1) At this point, I agree with Jeff that any object generated by an algorithm is linear because the algorithm mathematically specifies all possible outcomes. For example, GarageBand will not tell you that your voice is unusually pleasant. And while you cannot predict whether a story from Brian’s “Helena” generator (pp. 12-13 in the Anthology) will end happily or sadly, you can predict that there will not be any cowboys in it. Similarly, the “100 thousand billion poems” generator will not produce any epics or ballads or limericks, and Nora’s Chicklit generator (18-19) will not produce any of the spies we meet in Jordan’s Espionage Short Stories generator (uncredited, 11-12), none of whom, in turn, will have a pregnant girlfriend.

2) But also at this point, I agree with Bryan in class (or Brian; can’t remember) that Jeff’s presentation showed that the LMK does incorporate animation in the same way that GarageBand does. The difference, I think, is that in your experience with the LMK, you’ve been the programmers. With GarageBand (or Photoshop or Word, etc.), you’re only users. A mere user of your LMK generator would only be able to use the Generate command. The output that command gets is fully specified (as Jeff argued), but by the generator’s creator, not by its user. Similarly, GarageBand’s or Word’s output is completely specified. When I touch “g” on my keyboard while using Word, I won’t get Jeff’s modified voice in response.

3) So what is the Internet? Linear or non-linear? How about a MUD (or a MURPG)?

4) A consequent hypothesis:

Liz wondered on her blog: “There are . . . studies that suggest men’s brains are hardwired for a certain type of reasoning that makes it more likely for men to excell at spatial/mathematical tasks than women and makes computer use more intuitive for men than for women. . . . Now let’s look at the idea of transcoding, which . . . seems to suggest that the logic and organization of computers could start to shape, not merely record, store, or express, media objects. So if this logic and organization is fundamentally ‘male,’ are we creating a fundamentally male new media, a system of art and language objects shaped by a ‘male’ system of mental organization?”

I have not read the studies (has anyone? link to a summary?). But I am predisposed to think that nothing biological makes math more difficult for women. Rather, a linear object has power over its user because it specifies (a) all acceptable inputs and (b) all possible outputs. And in our society, for good reason, we associate power with the masculine. So it’s not a fundamentally male new media but a new media that has a kind of power over its users to which old media did not aspire. A story constructs its narratee, but a reader/user can consume the whole story without once becoming its proposed narratee. (I could read a horror story with contempt for its efforts to frighten me.) Not so for Adventure, as I demonstrated in class. If you can’t play by its rules, become its specified narratee, you’re shut out; you’ll never get to the plot. That’s why “transcoding” is such an important concept and why any discussion of the new media must address political issues.