Category: Multimedia Theory

The Flâneur and the Arcade: Hypertext on Walter Benjamin’s, The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk: Reading in the Ruins by Giles Peaker is a hypertext project that brings together passages from Benjamin’s The Arcades project on themes like the the flâneur and the prostitute. Benjamin’s project is about fragmentary spectacle in the city, it is itself a collection of fragments, and the hypertext by Peaker re-represents thus. In some sense, this pre-modern moment of the flâneur and the arcade, is the urban precursor to the liesurely browser in the arcade of the web – watching, and through his (her) blog, posing for others.

The arcades were replaced after the convulsions of 1848 in the Second Empire by the great halls of industry of modernity according to David Harvey in Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003). The arcades were scaled up to the modern exhibition spaces from Les Halles to the Crystal Palace. The Paris arcades, thanks to critical interest Benjamin, have become a way to think through the spectacle of the hypertextual (and therefore fragmentary) web. Thanks to Marcel O’Gorman for pointing this intersection out to me.

Interactivit?© et formes narratives

I’m behind on blogging as I’ve been busy at conferences. I was invited to speak at a special session of Association francophone pour le savoir – Congr?©s on Interactivity and Narrative. The papers were excellent – well theorized and provocative. Some worth noting:

If there was one problem with the papers it was that everyone was connecting interactivity to narrative and few questioned whether narrative was appropriate. Sometimes the fit seemed forced.

Quaero: French Google Challenger

According to Guardian Unlimited story, Does France really need its own search engine?, by Bobbie Johnson (April 27, 2006), France is backing a Franco-German challenger to Google called Quaero. If they build it will users switch? How could Quaero duplicate the success of Baidu.com in challenging Google in China? I’m guessing that if Google’s search techniques is based on features of English, Quaero could compete by handling French searches better. The Wikipedia article on Quaero says they will focus on multimedia search.

Too Much to Read: Science and City

McMaster has a great lecture series supported by the Hamilton Spector called “Science in the City”. Yesterday I gave one of the talks on “Too Much To Read: Using Computers to Cope With Information Overload” (see the Spectator article beforehand, Spectator interviews Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell.) It was encouraging how many people are interested in a topic like this. There really is broad interest in questions around information, reading, and the Internet. The questions at the end ranged from “should I switch to Firefox?” to “how can I use a concordancer on the information I have?”

Declassification in Reverse

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Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program is a page edited by Matthew M. Aid that discusses the extraordinary reclassification program by the U.S. intelligence community. Previously declassified (public) documents are being withdrawn from public view in addition to the exploding amount of information that is not being reviewed and declassified in the first place.

The National Security Archive is a non governmental non-profit institution that documents and advocates for freedom of information.

Poetic Research

The notion of poetic research emerges from a questioning of practice (design) which tries to locate parts of its creative drive so that it may be brought through in regard to research. The poetic in research can be seen as an attempt to develop a technicity of the “hunch”.

Can a tradition of reflecting on “poesis” (poetics – or the making of art) help us understand research/creation? Drew Paulin, reading my entry on Research/Creation, Again pointed me to a paper by Terence Rosenberg titled, “‘The Reservoir’: Towards a Poetic Model of Research in Design”. What is interesting is how for design students the challenge can be how to weave the creative into research projects, rather than the other way around. Further, a poetic model is, to some extent, always about creative practices, whatever else it is. The practice is part of the object of research/creation. (There is much else to reflect on too in this essay.)

What matters

Christopher Alexander is his 1996 talk to OOPSLA on The Origins of Pattern Theory ends by calling on programmers to reconceive what they are doing with a view to the living good.

It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

New media and multimedia likewise have to ask about the ethics of what we do. Are multimedia designers just the rhetors of the digital age – packaging the message of anyone who pays to be as entertaining as possible? Or, are we committeed to coding a living world along with programmers?