Digital Technology and Culture

A blog for students and friends of Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture Program

Visual Computing

An interesting article from Breitbart.com
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080828220314.lq3gg11z&show_article=1

Lifelike graphics are breaking free of elite computer games and spreading throughout society in what industry insiders proclaim is the dawning of a "visual computing era."
Astronauts, film makers and celebrities joined software savants, engineers and gamers in the heart of Silicon Valley this week for a first-ever NVision conference devoted to computer imagery advances changing the way people and machines interact.

"Visual computing is transforming the videogame industry; transforming the film industry, and has all kinds of potential for how we view real-time television," NVIDIA co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang told those gathered at the event.

"We solve some of the most challenging problems for more and more companies around the world. Let the era of visual computing begin."

Gamers dueled for three days in a cavernous room in the San Jose Convention Center while entrepreneurs showed how graphics breakthroughs are shining in other fields.

Car makers are exploring letting potential buyers not only customize automobiles with graphics software but go on virtual test drives.

Graphics processing underpins financial modeling and weather forecasting.

Israel-based Optitex demonstrated software that replicates fabrics so realistically that clothing designers can see what fashions will look and act like on people before garments are made.

Optitex's animation software is being eyed by Hollywood film makers.

Dassault Systemes puts 3D computer-assisted design to work virtually constructing passenger jets, buildings and more.

"Three-D should be a new way for us to dream and design the future of our world," The French company's chief executive Bernard Charles said at NVision.

"It will impact everything we do: education, science, talking to each other ... of course games."

He predicts that lifelike graphics combined with feedback from online communities will let people influence how products are designed, sold and even how "green" they are.

Charles maintains computer simulations will be so realistic that virtual activities will mirror physical experiences.

Simulators already play an important part in training for space shuttle missions, according to former US astronaut Eileen Colleens, the first woman shuttle commander.

"When you fly the actual mission you feel like you are in a simulator," Collins said. "We really can't do our job without the good visual graphics that we get."

The world of visual computing is "inescapable," said Chris Malachowsky, a co-founder of NVIDIA, a California firm renowned for high-end graphics processing cards for computers.

"We are being presented with displays everywhere," Malachowsky told AFP. "It used to be about the computing part, but the emphasis is shifting. It is not so much about the computation but how it is presented and seen by people."

The rising tide of digital videos, photos, films and television shows on the Internet is lifting the status of graphics chips, cards, and software and strengthening a trend to "unflatten" displays with 3D imagery.

Malachowsky spoke of using visual computing power to develop new medicines or provide doctors with real-time 3D images of patients' organs.

"They will be able to recreate scan data so fast you could see your own heart beating," Malachowsky said.

"This is being subsidized by all these kids out there playing games."

Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han, referred to by some as "the father of touch screen" computing, maintains graphics opens up user interface control possibilities that could render a "mouse" obsolete.

Han demonstrated touch-screen technology that lets several people simultaneously manipulate applications and files on a single large monitor.

"It's not personal computing anymore," Han said. "It's visual computing."

Battlestar Galactica bombshell Tricia Helfer praised computer animation innovations that enable the science fiction television series to rivet viewers.

Helfer plays a part-machine, part-organic Cylon character called "Number Six" that has turned on its creators.

"It's a bit threatening," Helfer said of technology promising to one day make animated characters indistinguishable from real actors.

"But the advantages and uses of it are amazing, but it is something we are going to have to get used to."

posted by: grigar at 13:14 | link | comments |

Information on Digital Media Worth Repeating

With so many new students in the Digital Technology & Culture Program this fall (by my count––40) it is probably a good idea to repeat a couple pieces of information about digital media that may help to make sense of this relatively new field . . .

Genres of Digital Media

Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media talks about 10 different types or what I refer to as "genres" of digital media. Since the book was published in 2001 and because Manovich hails from the very visual field of film studies, we involved in digital media in 2008 with no such training can expand this number to 13. Here they are:

websites
computer animation
computer games
digital cinema
digital video
virtual worlds
virtual reality
multimedia
interactive installations
human-computer interface
digital music
internet radio
digital photography

The last three are the additions, btw. And there should and will be more as we continue to develop new technologies.

Philosophical Underpinnings

Looking through what the various creators and critics of digital media have said about the field, one can easily conclude that there are specific and fundamental principles that lie at the heart of digital media. These principles set the field of digital media apart from many other fields and help to give it its uniqueness. Here are a few I have pulled together through the years and the citations from which I have drawn the information:

1. A computer is not a tool or prosthesis that helps us to accomplish something; rather, it is the medium in which we work. (Oliver Grau, New Media Art History, 2007 )

2. The medium affects the message. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967)

3. Text is any form of information by which we communicate an idea, feeling, or concept. (Mats Dahlstrom, “When Is a Text Text?,” 2002 )

4. Digital media are material texts. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

5. Criticism of digital media should be specific to digital media and relies on the sensory modalities of the body for that critique rather than abstract ideas or theories. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

6. The artifact of new media is just as important as the process it took to produce it. (Jan Van Looy & Jan Baetens, Close Reading New Media, 2003)

7. New media involves an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary study of art, science, and technology (Edward Shanken, "Introduction",Telematic Embrace, 2003 )

#7 takes me to an issue that has been scratching my brain––that is, the idea that digital media functions at the intersection of art, technology, and science. Personally, every time I read this in a book (most recently yesterday in Richard Colson’s The Fundamentals of Digital Art, which is a very good book, btw), I am bothered by the fact that these folks all write cogently and communicate clearly about digital media, making allusions, drawing upon metaphors, or using narratives to illustrate salient points about works that use allusions, metaphors, and narrative structure––and yet these artists and scholars do not acknowledge the influence of the Humanities in their own work or the works that they write about. Personally, I think it is time for us to see digital media as the intersection of art, technology, science AND THE HUMANITIES. Try to talk about Mark Amerika's Grammatron without utilizing some aspect of the literary. I dare you:)


I hope this information helps some of you in understanding a little better what you will learn in the DTC Program and provide a conceptual framework for the books you are reading and assignments you are undertaking in your courses.

--Dene Grigar

posted by: grigar at 14:29 | link | comments |

Today is the Party

If you are a DTC student (defined as a major, minor, or a student taking classes in the DTC Program as an area of concentration) at WSUV and you are reading this blog *and* it is Tuesday, August 26 BEFORE 1:30 pm, then this is a reminder that the Welcome Back to Campus Bash is happening in VMMC 103 at 1:30. [If it is AFTER 1:30, then you may have missed the event--or should hustle down the hall really fast.]

This will be the third year in a row that John Barber and I have sponsored a back to school event. The first one took place right after he and I arrived to run the DTC Program in fall 2006. We called them Orientations for those first two years, but it seems to me that with the Program being as established as it is now that we have moved past the concept of introducing students to it. So, instead we are calling it a "Bash" because we see the gathering more as a celebration of the DTC Program.

Hence the pizza and the music––and no name tags.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 11:14 | link | comments |

Posting from Salon.com

Worth reading is this essay from Salon.com, entitled "12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs" by Dave Pollard

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/08/05.html#a2212


12 TOOLS THAT WILL SOON GO THE WAY OF FAX AND CDS
I'm preparing for a discussion forum on Friday in Quebec City, and one of the topics we'll be discussing is how the "information behaviours" of Generation Millennium differ from those of previous generations, and what that means for the tools they (and the rest of us -- they outnumber even the boomers) will and won't be using in the future.

Out of my research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which my generation thought were the last word in music storage, are disappearing even faster.

Here's the list:
1. Hard Drives: The price of bandwidth, and the price of storage space in cyberspace, have both dropped precipitously. Expect them to drop further. We may even get to the point where companies will pay us to host our content, even if it's confidential, just so that their clients can find out what we care about and can ask for a bit of our targeted attention. At the same time, Homeland Security is going to be scanning our laptops every time we cross borders, and delaying or charging us if they deem the content to be uh... unpatriotic. So why keep anything on a hard drive anymore? Let the storage and processing all be done in cyberplaces with lots of space and processing power and just stream the results to us, so our machines can be light, pocket-sized, always-connected, pure communication devices.

2. "Wall of Text" Reports & Documents: Generation Millennium is returning to an oral/visual real-time culture, where blocks of text are used only when visualizations don't convey what's happening better and more succinctly, and where written language is used only when spoken language is unavailable (and with communication becoming more and more instant and real-time, that's not often). This is not to dispute the elegance of well-crafted prose, stories and exposition, just to say it will be conveyed orally, not in written form. Iterative real-time conversation, visualizations, body language and voice inflection simply convey much more than the written word. Ultimately, good communication is more about context than content.

3. "Best Practices": It's natural that people want to hear what the leading companies and individuals in any area of business endeavour are doing, but the sad truth is that most "best practices" are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don't tell, and discuss, don't proclaim, are the information behaviours of the future. Less efficient, perhaps (stories take a while to tell, and voice is harder to browse through for fast learning), but much more effective.

4. Email and Groupware: I've written enough recently about the coming death of e-mail so suffice it to say it will be replaced by simple real-time face-to-face, voice-to-voice and IM technologies. Groupware has been dying for a decade: it's overengineered, asynchronous, complicated and unintuitive more-is-less technology, and will be replaced by its opposite.

5. Corporate Websites: I recently co-judged a competition of nominated best-of-class business websites, and I was aghast at how unnavigable and useless most of them were. My own research has indicated that most people who visit these sites are job-seekers, the media, and competitors. A combination of marketing/PR hype, just-in-case recycled internal junk, and self-congratulation, most corporate websites are devoid of useful content, and those that do have useful stuff have it buried where it can't be found. You just can't put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it. And your relationship isn't with Company X, it's with Individual Y at that company. Individual Y's blog, with lots of contact info, timely, casual-style articles and useful links, and instant connectivity options, is to the corporate website what your personal company rep is to walking into the company cold and asking for help. Next-gen blogs by individual employees -- personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer -- will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water.

6. Corporate Intranets: Same rationale as #5. The main way knowledge is, was, and always will be exchanged in organizations is person-to-person in real time. Rich context, iterative, personal, demonstrative, have-it-your-way information, conveyed through conversation. Accept no substitute.

7. Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don't know enough about their employer's business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they'll learn the employer's business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won't need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. "Information is always trying to be free", as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won't sell their research and analysis either: They'll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they'll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are.

8. Cell Phones: Now let me get this straight: On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you're going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I'm going to put up with this why?

9. Classrooms: There is really nothing that can be done in a classroom that can't be done using desktop videoconferencing with screensharing, for free. No travel costs/time/pollution. No bums on chairs. Unlimited multi-tasking without nasty looks from the instructor. And with YouTube, SlideShare/SlideCast and other tools, you have access to the best presenters in the world on virtually any subject imaginable.

10. Meetings: Same rationale as #9. With simple virtual presence tools you can actually exercise the Law of Two Feet without getting off your ass.

11. Job Titles: Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)

12. Offices: When I started working, executive offices had heavy dark wood paneling, fireplaces, and liquor cabinets. Now they're 10x10, utilitarian, sometimes shared, often empty, and sometimes without walls. Meanwhile the pay for executives has soared. People would rather have the money than the real estate, and as the cost of space, and travel to and from it, rises, the cost/benefit of offices worsens all the time. The next generation works anywhere, anytime, anyway -- home, car, coffee shop, and there is "virtually" no reason to go into an office to talk on the phone and work on the PC. As soon as simple virtual presence tools become second nature to the senior people in organizations (twenty years or so from now) the office will vanish.
I was tempted to add "keyboards" the this list but I'm not sure. Why is voice recognition and transcription improving so slowly? Even translation software is improving by leaps and bounds. I was also tempted to add "everything made by Microsoft" -- but that would be too obvious.

Anything I've missed?


---

I found the essay a bit ironic in that he claims that the "wall of text" will disappear in a wall of text that Salon.com published. But then many of you know that Plato whined about writing in his writings.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on Pollard's prognostications.

--Dene

posted by: grigar at 14:13 | link | comments |

Animations to Check out

Here are some Stories for the Web published by webyarns.com/. Check it out. Mallisa, you will love the comic book look.

http://www.deepphilosophicalquestions.com/

posted by: grigar at 18:34 | link | comments |

DTC Fall Welcome-Back-to-Campus Bash

All students pursuing the DTC degree as a major, minor, and area of concentration are invited to the DTC Fall Welcome Back to Campus Bash!

Tuesday, August 26
1:30-2:45
Fine Arts Studio, VMMC 107

You will meet Artists in Residents Steve Gibson and Justin Love and our Fulbright Scholar with us from the Ukraine for the year: Nataliya Shpylova––as well as learn about all the changes and innovations going on at the DTC Program.

Refreshments will be served!

posted by: grigar at 21:45 | link | comments |

The 2008 DTC Artists in Residency Program

Below is the flyer about the 2008 Digital Technology and Culture Artists in Residency Program. I have put a link to a pdf that you can download since the print is so small on this jpg.

posted by: grigar at 17:32 | link | comments |