Plowing the Dark of Virtual Realities

Is there a difference between the halucinations of a confined imagination and virtual reality?

This is one thread in Richard Powers’ brilliant historical fiction about 80s VR and politics, Plowing the Dark. Two narrative threads are intertwined in this book: an artist recruited to develop compelling demos for a VR cave being developed at Seattle R&D lab in the mid-80s; and a Lebanese-American who is kidnapped after going to Beirut to teach ESL. The artist reaches back through the history of art (Rousseau, Lascaux cave paintings, and the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium) to create sites for the VR cave. The kidnapped man reaches back through memories until an ex-girlfriend becomes present. Powers reaches back to that moment in the 80s when VR technology was going to be the next paradigm shift.

The first Gulf war brings all this to an end. The war that may have been virtual in popular imagination.
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The Producers, “If you’ve got it flaunt it!”

How would a Broadway production engage the production and consumption of film, theatre, and the imagination in general?

Well, you could make a play of a film about the making of a play that is designed to be so bad that it flops (in order to make lots of money!) You could make musical theatre version of the classic Mel Brooks, The Producers! Of course, the show was a hit, despite ironically stereotyping major groups from Jews, women, gays and, yes, even Nazi sympathizers.
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Blogging and Janice’s blog

What is a blog, really?

Janice P. talked to me about blogging for an article for a McMaster publication and we got talking about guilt and blogging. Like the journals I used to keep and the research note books I kept up until I started this blog, I feel guilty if I don’t post on a regular basis (lets say once a week.)

On her blog she comments on guilt and blog death. (Hi JP!)

I wonder if the blog hasn’t reopened all our worries around journals and immortalizing everyday thoughts. Someone must have written on this.
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Independent Activities

How can Multimedia contribute to open learning at McMaster? If I am right that we have to create learning activities outside of classes in response to the increases in class sizes and the lack of opportunities to teach small classes then we need to imagine a venue for small learning activities.

IAP 2004 Activity: Getting Started with Weblogs is an example of something that seems to happen at MIT. It looks great and the site shows the potential for linking lots of these little courses. Hmmmm… something to think about.

History of Computing

M.S. Mahoney – Articles on the History of Computing is a page of links by the Princeton historian to articles about the history of computing. He argues in “The History of Computing in the History of Technology” that “the history of computing has yet to establish a significant presence in the history of science” (p. 1 of the PDF). As a result a lot of the popular history of computing out there is “heroic” and focuses on people or companies and insider knowledge.
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Hayle(s) The Humument

Katherine Hayles dedicates a chapter of Writing Machines to Tom Phillips’ original treated art book A Humument.

Humument began as A Human Document a forgotten novel that itself purports to be an edited version of the journals and scapbook of lovers. Phillips paints over the pages letting rivers of text flow through to produce a new material work of art and literature. Hayles uses Humument to bring forth the materiality of textuality – a materiality that helps us understand problems for electronic literature. There is always a technology of inscription, even when we forget it.
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