Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 396.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 08:46:29 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Ramble on the Random Slide
Willard
Months drift by. Years come to an end.
The bounty of demonstrations, resources and ideas exchanged at the annual
meeting of the COCH/COSH meeting at the end of May 2002 may perhaps excuse
my providing a late sampling of the rich offerings examined at that spring
gathering.
http://web.mala.bc.ca/siemensr/C-C/2002/Program.htm
It is a selective sampling from four days of presentations devoted to
Humanities Computing and Emerging Mind Technologies. I'm never quite sure
how to parse that last bit: whether it is the technologies that are
emerging or the mind or both (in some proposed sequence). Parsing is one
way of threading two related groups of sessions: the one clustered around
the model of games and the other around the boundaries of perceivable
structure (that's my translation of some of the concerns raised in the
information aesthetics stream.
Marshall Soules through Computer Gaming and Protocols of Improvisation
offered a very suggestive presentation on "the voluntary discipline
required of improvised performance" Andrew Mactavish, the organiser of the
theorizing computer games sessions, nicely paired Soules's concerns with
performance as a procedural method with a paper presented by Patrick Finn,
Half-Life, Full Theory: Formalizing Video Criticism, where the audience
was quick to replay a familiar boundary question (user/coder) along the
lines of player/maker. The discussion raised interesting epistemological
questions: just how far do researchers need to position themselves as
participant-observers in and around the discursive communities they
investigate? what authority does the non-expert have to formulate
hypotheses and interpretations about the behaviours of expert or
specialist groupings?
The ideological dimensions of games were an overt theme of the other
session devoted to social and cultural frameworks of theorizing computer
games. James Campbell problematized any easy answers in the examples he
presented in examining Computer Games as Complicitous Critique of Global
Capitalism. Gendered-perspectives offered by Carolyn Guertin and Aimee
Morrison with respectively From Complicity to Interactivity: Theories of
Feminist Game Play and Nerds Heroic and Social: Cinematic Video-gaming and
the Domestication of Computing led a consideration by those in attendance
of a distinction reminiscent of the literary criticism of Northrop Frye
(inspired perhaps by coincidence/remembrance that this part of the
COSH-COCH proceedings being held on the premises of Victoria College where
Frye taught). I cannot help but thinking that the matrix vs maze
distinction that emerged needs to be mapped onto the
procedural/declarative types of
languages. The maze was identified as the spatial pattern that suited the
directed quest. The matrix holds out other possibilities of movement and
brings the notion of game closer to Soules's considerations of
improvization.
Theorizing games can become rather giddying much like the engagement with
actual play -- just as pleasurable and cognitive challenging as the
aesthetics of codework which exposes the "generative material substrate"
of cultural-textual productions in their digital incarnations. Something
like a return of materialist-structuralist film making. The presentations
of Talan Memmott and Alan Sondheim (especially Sondheim's) demonstrated
the limits of de-cuing expectations. The currently accessible technology
allows for greater ease of shuffling images than sounds. Simply closing
one's eyes during an information overload session that is screen-centred
helps pace the cognitive apparatus. So does mediation. By happy
circumstance Maria Damon one of the organizers of the session read Rita
Raley's paper, The Object as Code. It was an interesting exercise in what
may be akin to sight-reading a score. A paper read in absentia of the
author gives the audience a sense of what carries. Together, these
i-provizations, indicate how difficult it is to turn off sense making ---
there always seems to be a pattern to frame the noise.
I missed the other Information Aesthetics session. And it is too bad that
one of the presenters there missed the Sondheim, Memmott,
Raley-read-by-Damon pieces.
With a title offering an intertextual parody of Hayles's "posthuman" buzz
word, How We Became Automatic Poetry Generators, Katherine Parrish,
drew me in to discover some deliciously crafty MOOwerk
http://www.meadow4.com/moolipo Unfortunately, I missed the panel &
discussion. Any subscribers in attendance care to report, rift or
improvise?
Parrish entices exploration. I think she is wrong in invoking: <cite>
In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles asserts that pattern and
randomness are bound together in "a complex dialectic that makes them not
so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another" (Hayles
25).
The relationship between authorial control and its
relinquishment as it is realized in textual production involving random
procedures is characterized by a similar supplementarity. Operating in
this splice, these procedures point to an emergent posthuman subjective
agency. <cite>
Post human? I wonder if any distinctions was made during the discussion
period to indicated the possibility that the procedures are not random,
the selection of the next procedure might be.
Loop back to Aimee Morrison who inspired me to go off and read Charles
Bernstein's essay, Play It Again, Pac-Man (collected in A Poetics), In the
subsection entitle "The Computer Unconscious" Bernstein invites readers to
contemplate the statement that "[t]he experiential basis of the
computer-as-medium is _prediction and control_ of a limited set of
variables. The fascination with all computer technology [...] is figuring
out all the permutations of a limited set of variables."
And so circling round the interplay between games and digital
performances/deconstructions, one can generate the sequence:
improvizaton --- i-provization --- hyperprovization
In Bernstein's discursive context, the military-industrial complex origins
of computer the aim is prediction and control. (This seems to hunt
Hayles). However the two activities may need to be separated out. The
aesthetic pleasure of figuring out the permutations may just complexify
notions of control. From there it is just a friendly disciplinary boundary
hop to cognitive psychology and the concerns of embodied knowing and
digital representations (a topos of many a post to Humanist).
Carolyn Guertin and Andrew Mactavish organizers of some very stimulating
sessions are to be thanked for some fine planning -- providing for some
hyper-improvisations worthy humanist scrutiny and ecoute.
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large,
knows no "no exit" in a hypertext
every cul-de-sac is an invitation to turn
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/miles/five.htm
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