• Preliminary Class Business
• Encountering the Mechanism: Some Examples to Introduce the Issue
• Materialities of Communication
• Other Topics That May Come Up in Class
• References

Preliminary Class Business

• Web-authoring workshop, Thur. April 26th, 3:30-5
  Added: Alternate workshop, Fri. April 27th, noon-1:30
  
  
• Tech-support Drop-In Hours in South Hall 2509:
          Jennifer Jones: Tue., Thur., 9:30-11:30 am
          Eric Weitzel: W 9-11 am, F 1-3 pm
  
  
• Class next time: be prepared to give your views of works you liked and disliked

Encountering the Mechanism: Some Examples to Introduce the Issue

Materialities of Communication

Other Topics That May Come Up in Class

Perpective Painting Resources

• http://www.winslow.uk.com/criv.htm
• http://www.dia.org/collections/euroart/dutch/35.101.html
• http://www.mos.org/sln/Leonardo/ExploringLinearPerspective.html

"Remediation"

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)

The "Posthuman"

• N. Katherine Hayles, on her book How We Became Posthuman, 1999 (in an online interview):
  
  "For now, however, let me concentrate on the transformation from the human to the posthuman. Recent research programs in computer science, cognitive sciences, artificial life and artificial intelligence have argued for a view of the human so different from that which emerged from the Enlightenment that it can appropriately be called "posthuman." Whereas the human has traditionally been associated with consciousness, rationality, free will, autonomous agency, and the right of the subject to possess himself, the posthuman sees human behavior as the result of a number of autonomous agents running their programs more or less independently of one another. Complex behavior in this view is an emergent property that arises when these programs, each fairly simple in itself, begin reacting with one another. Consciousness, long regarded as the seat of identity, in this model is relegated to an "epiphenomenon." Agency still exists, but it is distributed and largely unconscious, or at least a-conscious.
  
  The effect of these changed views is to envision the human in terms that make it much more like an intelligent machine, which allows the human to be more easily spliced into distributed cognitive systems where part of the intelligence resides in the human, part in a variety of intelligent machines, and part in the interfaces through which they interact. At the same time, intelligent agent programs are being developed using "emotional computing" techniques that allow these artificial systems to respond to unexpected situations in ways that more closely resemble human responses."
  
  
• Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986)

  Marvin Minsky and Harry Harrison, The Turing Option (New York: Warner Books, 1992)

References

• Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)
  
  
• Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (July 1945) (Atlantic Monthly)
  
  
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, ed., Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994)
  
  
• Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's "Didascalion" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993)
  
  
• Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco/New York: HarperCollins, 1997)
  
  
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1999)
  
  
• Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990)
  
  
• Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986)

  Marvin Minsky and Harry Harrison, The Turing Option (New York: Warner Books, 1992)
  

• Peter Schwenger, "Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book," South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1994): 617-26

Supplementary links for this class on Study Materials page