Re: [-empyre-] old discussion, new discussion



Hi again -- I just got back from a weekend of writing out on Brigantine
Island in New Jersey. I haven't had time to reply, but have enjoyed
reading people's comments.

First, regarding some of the "new" (or actually, earlier) discussion, it
seems strange that many of the emails have seemed to view new media
exclusively through the arts and solely as an artistic practice. The work
of computer scientists such as Ivan Sutherland, Joseph Wiezenbaum, Douglas
Engelbart, and Alan Kay seems quite relevant to the creative and artistic
uses of the computer. I'd hate to reduce new media to just being computer
science, however, just as I think it shouldn't be reduced to only what
artists have done or to the artistic perspective alone.

Regarding Jill Scott's opening statement, I'm very interested in how
exactly science is important today in new media art.

In recently reading Jill Walker's thesis, I learned how Dream Kitchen has
a segment that riffs on Stanley Milgram's famous "obedience to authority"
experiment, presenting a "obedience to interface" report card that
describes how cruel the interactor has been with the tools provided
on-screen. This seems to play on HCI methodologies and behavioral
psychology methodologies, but perhaps doesn't critique the principles of
psychology or the results of Milgram's experiment. (Or maybe it does?)

So, I wonder if new media art will be able to enlighten the scientific
mainly by dealing with the tools and techniques of the sciences, or
whether it will tend to focus more on science as a world-view and on the
ideas of natural order that science offers?

-Nick Montfort
 http://nickm.com  nickm@nickm.com
 My new book, Twisty Little Passages: http://nickm.com/twisty






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