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.
Wed Jan 8 Introduction
Media Wed Jan 15 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 3-63 André Leroi-Gourhan, Speech and Gesture (Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 1993), pp. 187-266. Alberto Manguel, ³The Silent Readers,² from A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 42-53. Virtual Witnessing Wed Jan 22 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, ³Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts,² in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 23-79. Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 80- 117; 199-230. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 9-66. Recommended: David Marshall, ³Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,² Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 592-613. Material Semiotics Wed Jan 29 Charles Sanders Peirce, ³Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,² Peirce: Of Signs. (Chapel Hill:Univ of North Carolina Press, 1991). Brian Rotman, ³The Emergence of the Metasubject,² Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin¹s Press, 1987), pp. 27-56; ³Absence of an Origin,² pp. 87-107. Brian Rotman, ³The Technology of Mathematical Persuasion,² in Tim Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) in press.
Writing and Postmodernism Wed Feb 5 Jacques Derrida, ³Différance,² Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-28. Mark Poster, ³Derrida and Electronic Writing: The Subject of the Computer,² The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 99-128. Materialities of Communication Wed Feb 12 Friedrich Kittler Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 206-346. David Wellbery, ³Post-Hermeneutic Criticism,² Forward to Discourse Networks, pp.vii-xxxiii.
Computer-Mediated Communcation
Wed Feb 19 Vaneevar Bush, ³As We May Think,² Atlantic Magazine, August,1945, in SiliconBase. Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,² Stanford Research Institute Report AF 49(63-8)-1024 George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporay Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 2-119. Habitat and Virtual Community Wed Feb 26 Jean Baudrillard, ³Simulacra and Simulations,² in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-184. Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, ³The Lessons of Lucasfilm¹s Habitat, in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 273-302. Habitat: on course website Moira, ³Colony Alpha: Making Active Worlds.² On course website.
Wed Mar 5 Virtual Reality to Virtual Surgery 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 types of term project
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 Habitat -- MERL 's social vr -- http://www.merl.com/svr.html SimCity ... Compare it with traditional virtualities (eg. Crusoe, the debit card). How is it authored? How is it received, read, experienced?
B. Do a creative piece --
Using a computational authoring system of your choice, such as any HTML editor mTropolis -- 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.)