timeline+25: Ars Electronica

timeline+25 is a project of the Ars Electronica Festival starting tomorrow in Linz, Austria. Wired News has a story on the festival with intriguing pictures here.
Ars Electronica is now 25 years – probably the most important art and technology show in the world. The Linz centre has a “futurelab” (that can’t be visited), an archive, they put on the festival, and have a museum with activities. Their web site has an interesting approach where you identify what you want to do with them (learn, visit, contribute, cooperate …) and they show how to engage.

WORDCOUNT

fuck sex granulation love the shit god

WORDCOUNT and its companion QUERYCOUNT are two text-art experiments by Jonathan Harris of Number27. (StÈfan Sinclair pointed this out.) WORDCOUNT uses the Britich National Corpus to present an interactive Flash view of all the words sorted by frequency (thus “The” starts the list of 86800 words.) QUERYCOUNT tracks the words people ask to see in the WORDCOUNT list, not surprisingly starting with “fuck” and “sex”, but followed (when I checked) by “granulation”. (There must be some group repeatedly asking for “granulation” or a bug for that to show up so high.) What does the list of words we look for (quoted at the start of this entry) say about us?
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I Love You rev.eng: Viruses as Art

Wired News: Exhibit Features Viruses as Art is a story about an art exhibit about and with viruses that is being mounted at Brown. It was first presented in 2002 in Germany and has been updated. The Wired story (by Michelle Delio, Aug. 27, 2004) has images and screen dumps. Many of the works seems to play off the “I Love You” virus, called the “computer virus family’s first media stars” by curator Franziska Nori.

Visitors to the exhibit will get a close-up view of the trouble a malicious virus writer can cause. One section of the show, dubbed "The Zoo," will feature a dozen non-networked terminals that visitors can infect with an assortment of viruses in order to observe what malware does.

This is from Matt Patey.
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HC Summit, Illinois: Trip Report

This weekend I have been at a summit around humanities computing at the University of Illinois that was organized by John Unsworth, Orville Vernon Burton and the folks at the NCSA.
One difference between HC in the US on the one hand and HC in Canada and Europe on the other, is that in the US there hasn’t been a national organization that could help organize the various centres for the purpose of presenting ideas to national funding agencies. (Perhaps the ACH once functioned that way, but now it is international.) One set of questions we discussed was the need, the scope, and the activities a national (US) gathering. I also got a quick tour through a number of NCSA initiatives of interest to humanities computing. The following are some of those of interest.
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Mahoney on the History of Theory in Computer Science

I’m reading an article by Michael S. Mahoney in The First Computers. It is titled “The Structures of Computation” and Mahoney (who is one of the best historians of computing I have read – see my previous entry, History of Computing) makes a closing point,

The history of science has until recently tended to ignore the role of technology in scientific thought, … The situation has begun to change with recent work on the role and nature of the instruments that have mediated between scientists and the objects of their study, … But, outside of the narrow circle of people who think of themselves as historians of computing, historians of science (and indeed of technology) have ignored the instrument that by now so pervades science and technology as to be indispensable to their practice. Increasingly, computers not only mediate between practitioners and their subjects but also replace the subjects with computed models. … Some time soon, historians are going to have to take the computer seriously as an object of study, and it will be important, when they do, that they understand the ambiguous status of the computer itself. (p. 31)

I would go further and say that not only historians, but philosophers, and for that matter other humanities disciplines, are going to have to take seriously the ambiguous nature of the computer as instrument and extension in all knowledge disciplines.
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Canadian Early Information Technology: Marconi and Nova Scotia

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On our trip out East we visited a number of sites associated with the early history of telecommunications. At Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, a depressed and exhausted mining town (with a great mining museum) there is a small Marconi National Historic Site of Canada managed by Parks Canada. It is a one room museum on Table Head, a flat windy site above the ocean. Here, in 1902, Marconi established reliable radio transatlantic radio communication. (He had successfully recieved the first signals at Signal Hill in Newfoundland a year earlier, but was forced to move.) For more see the Parks Canada History page.
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Polarfront: Graph Blog

Polarfront is a fascinating experiment using an interactive tree-graph view of a site, including blogs, as the interface to the site. You can click, scrub, and dismiss things. While it takes a while to get used to, I particularly like how the author handles images in the section “Japan 2002”. Is this an improved interface for a blog? Not sure, but it works for me for image navigation.
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