Johnson's "The Desktop"

This article was for me, an insight as to how the specific area of “personal computer interface design” was transformed as came to be known as the desktop. The specific examples and history is informative a relative to the area of computer science, but can also be a model for other uses of social/environmental interface. But it is at this point when the author relates this specific history to the works of Igor Stravinsky and James Joyce that I zoom out of the context of this revolutionary machine and lump this way of interacting or understanding into a category of “ahead of it’s time for the genre.”

I do however think the examples of “giving depth” to the screen, “seeing menus and icons as natural allies” as an alteration to the way we transcend our selves and the spaces we are in, to a virtual/imagined space. This space allows for information to define how we navigate and understand.

Project One

Person, Place, Thing
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www.daniel-bennett.com/personplacething.html

RE: Vannevar Bush "As We May Think"

Like Bush I have a strong belief in using various technologies that exist in the real world as fodder for art and a basis for cultural commentary. In my own practice I recontextualize current, archaic, and even foreign processes to reveal concept. However respectable the call for specialized professions to lend their jargons and lexicons to those who might be able to use it for their own ends (and to benefit others), the interpretation of the raw data is how most have always learned when trying to understand the world around them. Example: on a spectrum of data and research for how the universe operates you can have something as framed and generalized as Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time to something as specific as Hugh Everitt’s theory of “mulitverses” as an explanation of how the world exists. It is all how the information is framed, in what context you situate it, and when you make information more available by eliminating specialized terms for understandable analogies you change the actual content. This is why physicists get so pissed when artists borrow their theories.

In contrast to what I’ve just said, I found Bush’s analogy of the car being feasible in Egyptian time yet requiring vast amounts of resources interesting. This also fits into the idea of a tipping point and various other philosophies that, events can be constructed and set up, but inherently rely on outside factors that are more intertwined into society.