Sophomore Dialogue Seminar Syllabus

Course Description

New media technology such as the printing press, photography, film, and, more recently, computer-mediated communication as well as computer-generated visualization and simulation: all these have had profound effects on our conceptions of objectivity, agency, the self, and the body. This course explores several historical episodes in which technologically mediated virtual worlds have transformed our experience of the "real." We will begin with a brief introduction to theories of mediated experience, and then move to a consideration of the invention of graphism in paleolithic times and the relation between linear writing and graphic presentation. We will then move to 17th century considerations of technologies of "virtual witnessing" in constructing arguments about scientific facts, followed by a consideration of the 18th century fascination with the disembodied subject in works such as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment. Questions of embodiment will guide our consideration of the "interpretant" in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, and focus on material media-grammophone, film, typewriter-will frame our consideration of Freud's notions of the subject. Our final set of topics will focus on visualization, the "second computer revolution," in several fields of biomedicine, including new developments in "virtual surgery." With VR scientists and artists at the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Sun Microsystems, we will engage in a hands-on laboratory exercise in the problems of constructing virtual worlds, while readings on hypertext, cyberspace, and cyborgs will frame our exploration of the shifts new hypermedia may introduce into our practices of reading and rhetoric.

Calendar

1. Tu Jan 5 Introduction

Media

2. Th Jan 7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 3-63.

 

3. Tu Jan 12 André Leroi-Gourhan, Speech and Gesture (Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 1993), pp. 187-266.

 

4. Th Jan 14 Alberto Manguel, "The Silent Readers," from A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 42-53.

 

 

Virtual Witnessing

5. Tu Jan 19 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, "Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts," in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 23-79.

 

6. Th Jan 21 Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 80- 117; 199-230.

John Bender, "Enlightenment Fiction and Scientific Hypothesis," Representations, Vol. 60 (Winter 1997), pp. 1-23.

 

7. Tu Jan 26 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 9-66; & Part III, Ch. I, pp. 1-3.

Recommended: David Marshall, "Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 592­613.

Imannuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Selections

 

 

Material Semiotics

8. Th Jan 28 Charles Sanders Peirce, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," Peirce: Of Signs. (Chapel Hill:Univ of North Carolina Press, 1991).

 

9. Tu Feb 2 Brian Rotman, "The Emergence of the Metasubject," Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 27-56; "Absence of an Origin," pp. 87-107.

 

10 Th Feb 4 Brian Rotman, "The Technology of Mathematical Persuasion," in Tim Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) in press.

Writing and Postmodernism

11. Tu Feb 9 Jacques Derrida, "Différance," Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-28.

 

12. Th Feb 11 Mark Poster, "Derrida and Electronic Writing: The Subject of the Computer," The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 99-128.

 

 

Materialities of Communication

13. Tu Feb 16 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Translated by Geoff Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1: Gramophone.

David Wellbery, "Post-Hermeneutic Criticism," Forward to Discourse Networks, pp.vii-xxxiii.

 

14. Th Feb 18 Field Trip: Computer Graphics Lab

We'll take a field trip to the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab to see Professor Pat Hanrahan's work with the Responsive Workbench, Professor Marc Levoy's work on 3-D imaging, and possibly the Phantom Haptic Feedback system.

 

 

Computer-Mediated Communcation

15. Tu Feb 23 Vaneevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Magazine, August,1945, in SiliconBase.

Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," Stanford Research Institute Report AF 49(63-8)-1024

 

16 Th Feb 25 George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporay Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 2-119.

Tim McLaughlin, Notes Toward Absolute Zero, a piece of interactive fiction, using Storyspace by J. Bolter et al. (1 MB, Mac binhex compressed)

 

 

Habitat and Virtual Community

17. Tu Mar 2 Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-184.

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, "The Lessons of Lucasfilmís Habitat, in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 273-302.

Habitat: on course website

Moira, "Colony Alpha: Making Active Worlds." On course website.

Virtual Reality to Virtual Surgery

18. Th Mar 4 Roger Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 147-202; 249-302.

Hands on stuff.

Coursework and Requirements

This class is intended for heavy reading and interaction with media. We will ask students to form teams of two to make presentations of the material. We would like you to bring in additional perspectives on the material listed in the syllabus, but aimed at focussing our discussion for the day. Ideally we would like this material to be developed into an interactive course website. Presentations will begin at the fourth class meeting in order to give you time to work up something interesting.

Each student will also be required to produce a term project. The project can be in the form of a term paper, a website or simulation. We encourage students to work together on the course projects. We will assist in clarifying the project as we proceed, but below are a few ideas of the sorts of things you might contemplate as a term project.

Ideas for Term Projects

A. Study an artifact (traditional paper format is fine, but think about how to cite non-print artifacts) --

1. Contrast the UNIX or DOS shell with the Mac or Windows interfaces. What ontologies are implied? What is the status of the subject, the witness, the body?
   
2. Examine an existing piece of VR, such as
1. Habitat --
2. MERL 's social vr -- http://www.merl.com/threads/social/
3. SimCity
4. ...

Compare it with traditional virtualities (eg. Crusoe, the debit card). How is it authored? How is it received, read, experienced?




3. McLuhan says that the medium is the message, but maybe the message of online text is that the natural medium for large masses of text is paper. Current computer interfaces are not well-suited for intense readings of book-sized assemblies of text. But there are people (at Media Lab and maybe GA Tech) who are playing with small fragments of dynamic text for poetic and other purposes. We see dynamic typography in TV ads. A topic for a creative or analytic project could be dynamic typography. Check out the work at the MIT Media Lab.
   

B. Do a creative piece --

Using a computational authoring system of your choice, such as any HTML editor

• mTropolis -- http://www.mfactory.com -- in Meyer
• Extreme3D -- to be installed in Meyer CDL
• VRML -- http://vag.vrml.org/www-vrml/, http://vag.vrml.org/www-vrml/concepts/pesce-www.html
• MAX -- MIDI composition, CCRMA

create a piece of fiction, or a simulation, or a visualization. Compare it with more traditional writing technologies. How might your creation be different? One good way to do this project might be to create alternate treatments of a given theme in different "media," eg. a photo essay vs. a hypertext.

C. Write an analytic work (traditional paper format is fine) --

1. Does a nonlinear system of writing shape the way we think about or experience the world differently than linear systems of writing? What does linearity mean to you in this context? Choose some examples from recent technologies (eg. word processor or musical score editor) and pre-computer technologies.
   
2. Trace the evolution of the notion, role and locus of the subject in some recent technologies. Consider, for example, what ubiquitous computing, or embedded cognition might imply.
   
3. Read Jaron Lanier's comments about post-symbolic communication. Is it possible? What are some reasons to believe or disbelieve his claims? (http://www.well.com/user/jaron/columbia.html)
   
4. Compare a pictographic/ideographic writing system (like Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chinese) with a phonetic writing system like English. Speculate on the evolution of graphical user interfaces. Why are computer interfaces so ocularcentric? (See A1.)
   

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