Thursday 31 December 2009

Wild optimism about new technologies



New technologies are often greeted by wild optimism which later seems misplaced. Here is an extract from Our Iron Roads of 1852, extolling the moral benefits of the railways:
The individual benefits conferred by the facilities of travel now enjoyed are most important. To make the tour of Europe was once regarded as essential to the completion of the education of a gentleman; and still very many will declare, with old Du Bartas :—
“O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares
Of city troubles.”
[...] The change already effected in our own land by the Railway System is most surprising. The country may now be traversed from the South coast to the Borders in a few hours. The extremities of the island are now, to all intents and purposes, as near the metropolis as Sussex or Buckinghamshire were two centuries ago. The Midland counties are a mere suburb. With the space and resources of an empire, we enjoy the compactness of a city. Our roads are contracted into streets, our hills and dales into parks, and our thousand leagues of coast into the brief circumference of a castle wall. Nineveh was a city of three days’ journey round, Great Britain can be traversed in one, in its longest dimensions, during the same time. For questions of distance, we are as mere a spot as Malta, St. Helena, or one of the Channel Isles, or as one of the little states of the ancient Ægean. One circumvallation includes  all the cities of the island. “A hundred opposite ports are blended into one Piræus, and to every point of the compass diverge the oft-traversed long walls that unite them with our engirded acropolis.”
By the union of activity and sympathy thus promoted, the great social, commercial, and political interests of the nation are drawn nearer together. Local distinctions and district prejudices are disappearing for ever, and the unit of British enterprise, wealth, and wisdom, is becoming more compact, energetic, and potent, and more promising of prolonged health and permanent stability. Men who but a few years since scarcely crossed the precincts of the county in which they were born, and knew as little of the general features of the land of their birth as they did of the topography of the moon, now unhesitatingly avail themselves of the means of communication that are afforded to visit spots and explore regions; to which the solicitations of friends, the beauties of scenery, or the charms of historic association, may offer attractions. The spread of ideas, as well as the conveyance of persons and of merchandise, depends greatly on means of transit; men become better acquainted with the condition and habits of their fellow men, and ignorance is diminished before the onward and resistless march of knowledge and of truth. The same principle is applicable to the affairs of other lands. Long-cherished national animosities are lulled, and wither away as the intercommunion of people extends; the once oft-repeated axiom, that proximity of situation between empires necessarily makes them hereditary foes, is repudiated as a defunct absurdity—friendships are making sacred the intercourse of families, who, debarred of means of communication, would otherwise never have met-a selfish patriotism will at length be lost in an enlightened and generous philanthropy! In proportion as intercourse is diffused, the happy period will be hastened when countries will become but as counties,—when, united by the same feelings which now actuate different portions of the same nations, they will regard the practice of settling a disputed question by a mutual slaughter as absurd as it is inhuman,—and will see, that though they may be separated by a diversity of tongue, or by the barriers of an arbitrary geography, yet that they, the children of a common Father, brethren of one great family, are heirs of the same destiny, and that their own highest interests are best advanced by the promotion of each other's welfare, and by the assiduous diffusion over the earth of peace and good-will among men.
Williams, Frederick S. 1852. Our Iron Roads – their history, construction and social influences. Ingram, Cooke and Co, London. 284-285.
Related themes are taken up in these three excellent books:

Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New – thinking about communications in the late nineteenth century. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: the industrialisation of time and space in the nineteenth century. University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
Standage, Tom. 1998. The Victorian Internet. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London

Thursday 24 September 2009

Open play

Computers are systematic machines – though the question of whether they are inherently limiting has been debated since the protocomputing of Babbage and Lovelace.

Since programmes are so easily conceived as sets of rules and mechanisms for applying them, there seems a particular tendency when play is offered though digital systems to opt for those forms of play which are already most systematised. They favour what Callois termed ludus, the goal-oriented, structured game, over paidia - freeform, exuberant play (Caillois 1958). This tendency appears as staged objectives, such as the levels typical of so many videogames, or as the imitation in digital media of games which are already highly systematised in their real world forms.

Ere be Dragons, a project at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, funded by the Wellcome Trust 2005/06. 

I discussed this briefly in an article for Digital Creativity on our project Ere be Dragons. Dragons is an open work, in the sense Eco uses the term (1979, p.50) to refer to both openness of interpretation and the more literal openness made possible by interactivity.

The Open Work is also a theme of the ongoing Lansdown Centre project Scambi, centred on the work of Henri Pousseur. See http://www.scambi.mdx.ac.uk/.

References
Caillois, R. (1958) Man, play and games. Translated by M. Barash. University of Illinois Press. See on AbeBooks.
Eco, U. (1979) The role of the reader: explorations in the semiotics of texts. Hutchinson, London. See on AbeBooks.

Monday 31 August 2009

Chronographics blog begins today

I have started a blog devoted to thoughts, research and links on chronographics.

It is at http://chronographics.blogspot.com/

The first two posts introduce the subject and provide links to material about the timeline of Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg.

Princeton and Basingstoke?!

Princeton is architecturally stunning, principally for its 19th century gothic buildings on an almost industrial scale. There are innumerable walkways between the buildings and I spent an hour just wandering about and gazing.



 

John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was the only college principal to sign the Declaration of Independence.
 
Newton, Locke and Hume, key Enlightenment figures, depicted as inspiration for Witherspoon. What is the unnamed volume? It's impossible to see its name from the other side either.
 
Rather improbably, the statue of Witherspoon was cast in 2001 in Basingstoke, one of the ugliest towns in England.

iARTA at University of North Texas

iARTA, the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts, is a project by University of North Texas in Denton TX to bring art, design and music together with computing science and engineering in a university research cluster. Five visitors discussed with an internal team from the university how this could best be brought about.

The other participants were:

Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities.

Dick Rijken, Stephen Boyd Davis, Alain Depocas, Chris Csikszentmihályi, Mark Tribe


Alain Depocas, Head of Research and Documentation Centre, The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal, Quebec. Alain’s work at the Langlois Foundation focuses on the documentation and preservation of technology-based artworks and practices and on Web dissemination.

Dick Rijken, Director of STEIM in Amsterdam. In addition, he is the chair of an official EU workgroup on the creative and cultural industries, which focuses on national and European policies, and he is a professor at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, where he researches innovation in the traditional culture sector.

Mark Tribe at the Center for Culture and Media, Brown University, is a founder of Rhizome.org and serves as a Board Member for ISEA.

David Bithell, one of the leaders of the iARTA initiative


iARTA site

Sunday 30 August 2009

Chronographics at Princeton

I was lucky enough to be in the States last week with enough time to go to the Rare Books collection at the library of Princeton. They have a very rare example of an early timeline - in fact it may be unique. It was created in 1753 by a Frenchman, Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg.  I'm very grateful to Stephen Ferguson, curator of Rare Books, and other staff who helped me at the Library.
Outside the Firestone Library at Princeton, August 2009


The timeline is special for two reasons. It may be the first to use a constant numerical scale for an entire historical period - and that's a lot, because it starts with the beginning of time (God, Adam etc.) and extends right through to Barbeu Du Bourg's own day. And it is interactive - slightly. Du Bourg's timeline is built into a very simple wooden machine with two crank handles so that you can move time back and forth.

I hope to organise material about this and related topics in a Chronographics blog, but for now here is a link to my translation of Diderot's article* from the Enyclopedie which describes the machine.

* Diderot, Denis. "Chronological (machine)." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2009. Trans. of "Chronologique (machine.)," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 3. Paris, 1753.  http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.081 (accessed 14 August 2009).