| Lev Manovich on the Interface |
RSS feeds, Profile photos, and Facebook before-and-after assignments. First grades will be coming up! A sample student blog: Art +-Technology Looking ahead to electronic literature - an extension to Friday Fun with fonts: Pulp Fiction in Typography (and The Eight Rules of Fight Club and Full Metal Jacket - Lemme See Your War Face), Adoph Hitler Speech Using Kinetic Typography, and Cunnilingus in North Korea. How's My Driving? Don't forget to evaluate this class on My EEE! You can earn extra credit! Interfaces Closer to the user's experience and our awareness: 1) Reception/operation 2) Interface, 3) Form/function, 4) Code, 5) Platform. A history of interface development: machine language, symbolic input (programming languages and punch cards), text input, graphical user interfaces. (The first computers I saw were at Cal Tech and worked with punch cards; this was my first personal computer.) Why the desktop with cut, copy, paste, and the wastebasket? Ted Nelson is a famous critic of this model, who wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Why not Stretchtext? (Check out "I Made Tea" and "He Began / She Ended"!) Why not PacMan? Manovich Ch. 2, "The Interface" What do interfaces include and exclude? What possibilities are foreclosed? The interface "brings with it strong messages of its own" (65) "tools and metaphors of GUI" (65) Not "clear separation between the field of work and the field of leisure" in industrial society (65) the "nontransparency of the code" (66) form and content distinctions (66-67) the difference between art and design (67) Defining a "cultural interface" (69) Simulation of "typerwriter, paintbrush or drafting ruler" (69) Written codex as historical (74) No role for rhetoric (77) - I disagree with Manovich here The spatialization of every cultural experience (87) VisitorVille for web traffic statistics and 3DMailbox for e-mail Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin - Media that remediate "translating, refashioning, and reforming other media, both on the level of content and form" (89) The concept of the screen (80 and 90) -- for more you can check out Anne Friedberg's work on The Virtual Window Using a computer to represent "cultural memories, values, and experiences" vs controlling weapons or analyzing statistical data (93) Why Interfaces Matter: Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface Earlier Ads,and The Microsoft Surface Parody Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse? What about new input devices or controllers like the Wii? (Making fun of that too here.)
When it comes to interfaces, why hasn't electronic voting encouraged change in the ways that votes themselves are counted? This is an argument from Chris Kelty. Review Manovich's "Generation Flash" The role of remix culture - quoting and sampling - does it need any special name since it represents "the basic logic of cultural production" The role of the loop More than images from the Internet Programming becomes cool Artist vs. Media Artist vs. Software Artist - reusing the language of modernist abstraction and design (The FWA) Games and HCI for "active amplification of user's actions" Music leading the way - emergent logic Praystation.net forwards here. PowerPoint Readings Looking back to Lawrence Lessig |