Assignment 1: Read the articles in the “Assignment 1” folder in the Dropbox Library. Focus on how these articles could relate to your thesis topic. Connections may not be obvious in specific content; make extrapolations in terms of method, methodology and theory. Write a short (300 word minimum) blog entry for each article showing the connections between your Masters research topic and the article. Your essays must be uploaded to the class blog class time, Friday September 18th. 10% of total grade. Reading 1: Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation Constructive design research: design activity is a central research activity. - one type is critical design, which seeks to disrupt or transgress social & cultural norms - critical theory supports critical design - constructive design research/research through design – making stuff becomes central to the research ????. can start from fieldwork, theories, or design approaches, but can also start with imagination and how tech can improve life. Seeks to produce electronics that make user reflect on world. Meant to provoke - designs can reinforce or subvert cultural norms - critical theory offers little insight about how to make things – because it’s verbal - critical theory tends to be anti-method – different methods are irrelevant or suspicious - critical theory emphasizes the meanings and effects of cultural artifacts over their creation – work of the designer is done before critic gets started, says article. But I disagree – the designer is constantly thinking about the work they are making, criticizing and analyzing their own work, so the design work and the thinking around it are done simultaneously. - critical theory usually doesn’t focus on the author of a work as an individual creative agent – they don’t care about intent as much as the effect something has had - of course something can have a different affect than what its creator or designer intended, but that does not at all render the designer’s intent irrelevant. It just puts it in context. - significant screwdriver – a screwdriver that transgresses social norms of the male handyman by describing the work the user made with the screwdriver to loved ones etc. - note about this article: I found it extremely dense and challenging to read, particularly at the start (before the SS and WW examples). I am encountering many of these design terms for the first time, and found little in the article by way of definitions. This just made it more difficult to read, and I found it frustrating. Reading 2: Do Politics have Artefacts? By Bernward Joerges - context: an architect, Robert Moses, purposely built the bridges between New York City and the beaches of Long Island to be too low for public transportation to cross, therefore poorer and particularly non-white people would not be able to enjoy the beaches. - author says another author, Winner, says, of course artifacts have politics, and I agree. Why are we even debating this anymore? This to me seems such an obvious thing to point out, that someone may as well be pointing out that the sky is blue, or that the TTC sucks (both of which should be met with a resounding ‘duh’). - this author is extremely arrogant and constantly belittles those he mentions in the article. Example in the first part of the ‘Chinese Whispers’ section, which says that the number of times Winner’s article has been cited – 151 times – is meaningless. Another example of this is a quote further down “Much as Winner does, Latour takes things seriously’. Why is Joerges so grumpy? His attitude makes me think he was slighted by these people in the past and is trying to get some kind of nerd revenge in the form of an academic article. - Chinese Whispers – kind of like broken telephone? Is ‘chinese whispers’ kind of a racist term? - so – was Moses racist? Or was he merely trying to protect the beaches area (and other parks in New York) from commercialization and industrialization? - in my opinion, it doesn’t really matter all that much what Moses’ intention was with the bridges – the affect they have had is more important. His intention (if we can ever get the story straight) is important and adds context, but it is the reality of how the bridges work that matters. I.e. – do they actually keep poorer people form getting to the beaches? Joerges says no, because there are other routes they can take, and they like other beaches anyway (I find this particular argument to be an eyebrow-raiser, to say the least). - He also says buses etc were prohibited from parkways back then, and that Moses created the bridges for the advent of the car, of which the use and individual ownership exploded in the 30s - Greater than the mightiest idea is a story well told”, he says. I do actually agree with that – people don’t always care about the truth when a story version is more interesting. - best stories have metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, of which the bridge story has all 3. - in this vein, of course politics have artifacts if you examine the bridge story. Reading 3: Defining conditions for digital arts – social function, authorship and audience, by Margot Lovejoy - participation creates loss of authorship - “interactivity” loaded and overused so it is now basically meaningless - it’s a dialogue and collaborative rather than individual force - so the artist becomes a ‘framer’ – they set the context instead of setting all of the content - new media technologies challenge the way narrative forms of expression can be developed - some say agency is the main goal and meaning of interactive multimedia art - so content and its social context are intrinsically linked when art is participatory - many digital/new media artists see their art as a way to disseminate knowledge Reading 4: Title?, by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul and Victoria Vesna - content vs context, and the author/artist’s role in providing both, or one or the other - content provider – has become catch-all term, suggesting that cultural producers will fill technologies with stuff. Suggests return to pre-McLuhan idea that the ‘medium is the message’, and that form and function are interconnected. Was this change in thinking brought on by new techs themselves? - one of the first interactive art pieces was a performance between dancers on east and west coast of the US, enabled by satellite - context for artistic creation has changed. 90s were the digital revolution - order of elements online is no longer a reliable indicator of hierarchies, meaning that a web page can have embedded links, which if the user clicks on, the user is taken to another web page. In the real world, a ‘link’ would have to be something material like a book on another shelf. The online world makes information from around the world and from any source easily available - the internet = contextual network where a different context is always a click away - point and click interactivity is northing more than a sophisticated form of browsing. This may be new, but it does not fundamentally change our experience with a piece of art - more fundamental changes happen with virtual art objects that are open-ended ‘information narratives’ with fluctuating structure, logic, and control over content and context shifts to the recipient/user through the possibility of interaction Reading 5: Do artifacts have politics? By L. Winner - setting up the argument – do technical things have political qualities? - new inventions always come along and people claim it will be the salvation of a free society - technical systems are interwoven with the politics of the day - he says “we all know that people have politics; objects do not.” I disagree completely because people make objects, therefore any political agenda on behalf of the maker, whether intended or not, will make its way through to the object. - he further says that the technology itself doesn’t matter, only the social or economic system in which it is embedded does. Again – I disagree for the reasons mentioned above. - this author also takes a sneering tone when it comes to how social scientists view this argument - introduces the Moses bridge example - the specific arrangement of things can establish patterns of power and authority in a given setting. These techs are flexible. Also certain kinds of technology are linked to particular patterns of power or authority My overall take on all of these articles: I think the argument about whether artifacts have politics is dead. I think it’s almost impossible to separate the reasons and context behind which something was created from its actual purpose in reality. An artist or designer or creator of some kind can try to be as neutral as possible when creating something – they can try to keep their own personal biases and politics out – but this is literally impossible for humans. Whether we like it or not, our own biases, politics, backgrounds, etc. come into play with everything we do on a daily basis – and especially our creations. New media is changing the way we relate to the world – everything is available, all the time, and it’s just a click away. This creates challenges for anyone, but in particular if an artist wants to get their art seen, they must find new ways of engaging a fractured, somewhat impatient audience. Interactive art does pose challenges for the artist or designer – the more control they give to the audience or user, the less control they have over the final outcome. While some may see this as problematic, I see it as exciting and offers almost limitless possibilities to an artist’s creation. By incorporating other peoples’ actions into your work, you are harnessing their experiences, their politics, their biases and fusing it with your work, which makes it much more engaging and interesting as a result. It also runs the risk of turning into a jumbled-up mess, but the success of any given interactive project lies in its organization and the artist’s ability to set realistic, manageable parameters for the art to exist in (the context), without limiting the outcomes too much (the content).
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