Hi Ivan, Please forgive the speculativeness and abstruseness of my response to your question ... but it's the best I can do!
The question that's really being asked here is, 'What is the future of computing?' -- and I'm not sure it is possible to answer that question in the abstract, just in the same way it wasn't possible to answer the question 'What is the future of painting?' if it had been asked in the studio of Cimabue before Giotto turned up. Without actually answering the question, it's possible to speculate on the potential of the medium. To my mind, the first distinction to make is between the instrumental and the essential nature of the medium; by that I mean, between the purposes to which the medium can be put as a tool -- the computations that can be made with it, its mere utility -- and the possibilities of the medium as a medium for thinking and imagining in. So to continue the art example, the art of painting is itself the medium, and the introduction of, say, oil paints into Italy in the beginning of the 15th century, while it was a huge technical advance that allowed greater expressiveness, experimentation and delicacy -- and lead to some genres of painting that were not practical before with tempera -- it didn't represent the birth of a new field as such. The essential advance happened arguably centuries earlier in the art of Nicolo Pisano in sculpture and Giotto in painting in the awareness of the possibilities of space and form, and in the reabsorption of the Greek notions of studied rational observation of nature. Flatness in painting -- when it isn't an aesthetic choice but a miserable inability -- is also a kind of flatness, a weakness, a feebleness -- a sub-realism -- from a mental point of view. Giotto's paintings have many masterly qualities but perhaps the paradigmatic significance was his tremendous assertion of volume. Volume represented not just solidity, or merely an advance in making something look three-dimensional -- it literally advanced the art of painting by a power -- it showed that it was possible to think of forms in the round, to be aware of their sides, even of the backs of figures, while simultaneously depicting them from a single viewpoint. Giotto's achievement also demonstrates that this sense of volume -- while of course it exists in potential in everybody -- had to be first imagined by him and brought into existence by sheer force of will. To my mind it also suggests that things like the sense of volume can actually be regarded as 'senses' of a kind -- 'virtual senses', if you like, willed into existence by the mind -- and I think this is literally true if you think about a sense as not merely a sense organ but a cognitive process for which neuronal machinery exists in the brain, which we call cortexes. So what is the relevance of this to the future of computing? My point above is that although instrumental advances are powerful and important they are fundamentally incremental, and that paradigm shifts only occur when essential advances are made -- and essential advances are first intuited, imagined, and then willed into existence -- and function like 'virtual senses' in the sense that they both perceive sense data as well as actively organise data into new concepts. This brings us back to the question of computing as a medium in the instrumental and essential sense, and the general question of what effect do instruments and tools have on the ability to conceptualise. What medium does computing represent? Oil paints and brushes are the instruments of painting -- arguably a flat surface is the essential medium, as it is the essential difference between painting and sculpture. Computers can of course be used as tools to create in these media -- digital paint programs, 3D modelling software, etc., are instrumental equivalents -- but these are extensions of existing tools, and arguably less artistically efficient than traditional media (paints, violins, chisels, etc). Of course, computers can digitally manipulate images, sounds, words, etc., in ways that are cumbersome or practically impossible traditionally and you can argue that this certainly opens up new avenues of expression -- but not necessarily new realms of expression. I think Dr. Kay has pointed out that one thing that a computer can do uniquely that is more than an extension, refinement, or virtualisation of what traditional tools currently do is simulation -- the ability to project interactive information spaces, to run models through simulations, to carry out virtual experimentation. And it's arguable that the greatest enabler of experimentation in this space is not so much predefined software so much as computer languages, which provide an interactive syntax for thinking in that medium. Regards, Iian On 15 July 2012 05:36, Ivan Zhao <[email protected]> wrote: > 45 years after Engelbart's demo, we have a read-only web and Microsoft > Word 2011, a gulf between "users" and "programmers" that can't be wider, > and the scariest part is that most people have been indoctrinated long > enough to realize there could be alternatives. > > Naturally, this is just history repeating itself (a la pre-Gutenberg > scribes, Victorian plumbers). But my question is, what can we learn from > these historical precedences, in order to to consciously to design our > escape path. A revolution? An evolution? An education? > > Ivan > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
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