Month: August 2004

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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Hacking: Historical Ontology

One of the books I read on vacation was Historical Ontology by Ian Hacking, who I met once or twice when I was a grad student at U of T. (Neither of us understood what the other was up to, but that’s another story.)
While Hacking doesn’t do the philosophy of computing, he does philosophy of ideas, especially mathematical and scientific ideas. Historical ontology (or “dynamic nominalism”) is the name for his style of reasoning that he acknowledges is from Foucault.
His work is important to the philosophy of computing in a number of ways. First, he describes a style of historical analysis that we need to practice on the concepts of computing. It is looking at thick concepts and their instruments. Second, his historical ontology is the critical mirror to the simulation view of computing. The simulation view is that you understand by simulating objects or modelling virtually. Object oriented programming is a deeper version of this – programming is the defining of objects and behaviours, a description of a possible world – historical ontology is the analysis of such possible worlds. Object making vs object understanding.
Thus what he says about how we invent things (or construct them) has an explicit application to computing. In some science cases he argues that we invent physical things; for example when we create a new element that was potentially there, but doesn’t exist in nature. He pushes this further to a paradoxical view to the effect that as we invent (or develop) the concepts for things we, in effect, bring them into existence (as something to be thought about.)
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Feel Good Anyway

Feel Good Anyway, besides have a great name, develops some interesting interactive works, identity systems, and posters. They have a kids animation look that works well in Flash. I think the kids look has some connection to J.otto Seibold. (See jotto.com.)

I discovered one of their works at receiver. Vodaphone, that funds reciever magazine as an idea forum, commissions neat interactives for the cover screens like the one from J.otto and a neat one from HORT.
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