9/3 on-line copy of handout for discussion

9/3: What is New Media? What’s New About New Media?

What is New Media, then?

Manovich: new media is a mix between existing conventions and conventions of software.

Most of these new media forms rely on “remediation”:

• See Powerpoint 9/3 images on Renaissance perspective and gaming environment perspective
• Perspective is an example of “remediation” because the earlier mathematical, perceptual, aesthetic, and metaphoric principles of perspective are employed in the software devices that allow for 3-D projection in gaming environments.

Question: how do we think about Manovich’s comments on how “quantity” results in a new “qualitative” experience?
Notice that “new” in this sense is more about paradox (def?) and overlap.

The complicated relationship between new technologies and physical forms and spaces and imaginative/metaphoric space (Vannevar Bush’s Memex “desktop” – see image below)

While we may think of Bush’s concept as an anticipation of the progress of technological development, his innovation really relies on the materialization of poetic thinking: associative; images linked with texts; non-linear thinking and retrieval

Two things (among others) that we will focus on in this course: 1) What kinds of transformations in creativity and culture are possible at moments when metaphors become new physical realities? (Are metaphors always already “physical” in some sense, though?) 2) How do these transformations become “naturalized” (def?) – for example, the on-line piece we looked at on “The Original Author”?

See Bush’s memex here

Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths”

Time?

“Feedback”?

How related to the historical moment in the piece? And what comparisons might be drawn with Vannevar Bush’s interest in structure and content and associative poetics – both were written within a year of one another: 1945 (Bush) and 1946 (Borges)?