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Jaron Lanier says, "Pay Me for My Content."
Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!
That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.
Jim Benson visits The Email Mall in Shanghai, and find an eerily familar-looking store in Xi'an.
yatsiu flickrs the same store:
via flickr
Technorati Tags: China
Søren Pold, "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form," Postmodern Culture 15:2 (2005).
The graphical user interface (GUI) as we know it does not stem from an aesthetic tradition, but from an engineering tradition that has paradoxically tried to get rid of it.
. . .
If the computer and the interface really had become truly invisible and transparent, computers would mingle almost seamlessly with the world as we know it--perhaps making it a bit "smarter." If this were true, digital technologies would probably not have any paradigmatic effect on culture and aesthetics since they would not make a marked difference, but of course reality has proven otherwise, and we can now begin to acknowledge the massive cultural and aesthetic impact of digital technologies.
. . .
What is an interface? The purpose of the interface is to represent the data, the dataflow, and data structures of the computer to the human senses, while simultaneously setting up a frame for human input and interaction and translating this input back into the machine. Interfaces have many different manifestations and the interface is generally a dynamic form, a dynamic representation of the changing states of the data or software and of the user's interaction. Consequently, the interface is not a static, material object. Still it is materialized, visualized, and has the effect of a (dynamic) representational form.
. . .
The interface aims to visualise invisible data. It is a new kind of image originating in an engineering tradition and can be understood as an extension of instruments like radar and scientific tools, which do not represent any analogue image of reality but rather sheer data.11 As formulated by Scott deLahunta, the interface is "more information than likeness; more measurement than representation." Consequently, realism is the dominant representational mode of the interface, even though it is a complex, informational, and postmodern realism.12 In the following, I shall point out three rather different kinds of interface realism: illusionistic, media, and functional realism.
Technorati Tags: design, digital culture, interface
Søren Pold, "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form:"
The interface is the basic aesthetic form of digital art. Just as literature has predominantly taken place in and around books, and painting has explored the canvas, the interface is now a central aesthetic form conveying digital information of all kinds. This circumstance is simultaneously trivial, provocative, and far-reaching--trivial because the production, reproduction, distribution and reception of digital art increasingly take place at an interface; provocative because it means that we should start seeing the interface as an aesthetic form in itself that offers a new way to understand digital art in its various guises, rather than as a functional tool for making art (and doing other things); and, finally, far-reaching in providing us with the possibility of discussing contemporary reality and culture as an interface culture.
Technorati Tags: culture, design, digital culture, end of cyberspace, interface
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
This blog is about what happens next. It's about the end of cyberspace, but more important, about what new possibilities will emerge as new technologies, interfaces, use practices, games, legal theory, regulation, and culture adjust-- and eventually dissolve-- the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is an historian of science and futurist.
Part of the Corante Innovation Hub.
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