Resource for Brenda

Brenda, I have two books for you to look at that I think will really be useful to you.

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life.

I can give them to you whenever, they are my personal copies.

Resource for Leo

there's a chapter at the end of Mourning and Modernity that falls into your topic perfectly. I have the book from penrose right now, but should be done with it very soon if you want it when i am finished.

Readings for Davids Presentation

So listed below are a sampling of materials that I hope will shed a little light on what it is I think I am doing.
I am trying to draw together formal approaches to embodied human computer interaction, using what Bourriaud seems to be calling a tactic of "post-production" that remixes the traditional form of Still Life, with the newly emerging form of live audio visual performance called "Live Cinema". I hope to be able to "couple" the objects of the Still Life, and their cultural meanings (both contemporary and art historical) to create an open-ended chain of semiotically charged moments. Further, in "performing" these interactions, I hope to set up discernible feedback mechanisms which might be interpreted as analogous to the notion of "enacted perception".

Nicolas Bourriaud- Postproduction
Bourriaud makes an argument for the DJ and the Programmer as the relevant forms of artistic practice. Look at the Intro, and pages 19-22 of the pdf file, (not according to the page numbers on the pages)

Live Cinema- Context and "Liveness"
A paper on the history and practice of live cinema focusing on context and "liveness".

Hal Foster on Fetish in Dutch Still Life (in Louise Kaplan's Cultures of Fetishism.)

Peter Greenaway Filming the Dutch Still Life
This article examines the symbolic and visual function of objects in four of Peter Greenaway’s films made in the 1980s, a period when the filmmaker was exploring the relation between cinema and painting.

Embodiment and Human Computer Interaction
(go to section 3.3.4)
An interesting take on ontology, inter-subjectivity, and intentionality, as it pertains to embodied interaction between humans and computers. It's short.

Still Life in Real Time- Video Sketch
A rough sketch video of one of the Still Life concepts.

Readings/Video for Stacey's Presentation

Alright. I still feel like I am all over the place with my research so Monday should really help me out with feedback from all of you. Help me focus a little bit. I've also been reading bits and pieces of books so it has been difficult to find whole articles or chapters for you all to read.

It might help for me to explain again what it is exactly that I'm trying to study. I am interested in looking at how we perform our identities online by looking at Freud and Lacan's ideas on psychoanalysis (the self and the other), a bit of communication theory, and perspectivism. I need to draw on how our lives have changed with new media technologies so I'm looking at McLuhan for that, as well as a few other scholars, but you get the idea with McLuhan. With performing our identities online, iterations of ourselves are created. Past selves, which would normally be collected in a tangible photo album or handwritten journal, are now a lot of times online in the form of a social networking site such as facebook and blogs. Jacques Derrida has the idea that these iterations are ghosts. I want to go further and look at how online profiles of the deceased become real ghosts and often "living" memorials/archives. Freud, Derrida, and Lacan touch on the idea of archiving, I see facebook and the internet in general as a huge archive, facebook being more like the old shoe box under your bed with photos, letters, etc. Louise Kaplan touches on the fetishism of archiving.

So basically, I want to look at identity online, the ghosts and the fetishism of those online identities using Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Nietzsche.

Here's a video of Derrida talking about the science of ghosts. It's old school and a bit odd being that it was also a film of him playing himself without a script.


The Science of Ghosts

Check out this NY Times article about how lives are being changed through living online. You might need to have a user name and profile, but it's free. Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches


Cultures of Fetishism - Kaplan
Read chapter one, Fetishism and the Fetishism Strategy, then pages 93 to top of 95, p 107, the last paragraph of 170 to 173. You can find this online through Penrose. You need to sign in with your DU info.

dooce community

i thought this might be helpful to aaliyah--the popular blogger, heather armstrong (dooce.com) just started this new community for her website readers. it's powered by drupal and is an interesting example of an online community in its infancy.

you can read more about how it was put together here.

Health Check ABC's

I have been looking into online physical, mental, and behavioral health tests. Here are a few that I thought were useful. They range from calculators and questionnaires to virtual doctors. Check to see how healthy you are in these different areas:

Alcohol Use Test
Alcohol Calorie Calculator
Anxiety Screening
Body Mass Index (sorry, Josh)
Breast Cancer Risk Questionnaire
Cancer Risk Questionnaire
Depression Screening
Exercise: How Fit Are You?
Flu Checkup
Heart Disease Risk
Phobia Self Test
Sleepiness Scale
Sun Safety IQ

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

This is an interesting article, Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages, published February 3, 2009 in the New York Times about a project funded by Google and installed by engineers from the University of Michigan that has made the Internet accessible in Entasopia, Kenya. It addresses some of the benefits (such as raising consciousness about local issues online) and challenges (such as computer illiteracy and illiteracy, in general) of making high-technology available in such a rural setting. I think it shares some interesting threads with our projects, such as sustainability, race/ethnicity, class, access, etc.

Online Journalism Scholarly Articles

In case anyone need some online journalism or multimedia journalism articles to help with your projects, I found this list of them by University of Florida professor Mindy McAdams via her Twitter feed.

http://www.macloo.com/journalism/refs_online_journalism.htm

There's lots of options on there.

Next Nature

This video made me think about Leo's work; I didn't get to watch it all, but looks like it might be relevant...

share economy

Stumbled across a really cool online magazine about the share economy. Not really sure if it would play into any of your research, but it's still a very cool thing to check out.


http://shareable.net/

Materials for Claire's Class

Everyone should've received an email on Saturday morning with a link to the Donna J. Haraway readings from her book When Species Meet, but in case anyone missed it the link to download the pdfs is here. I've been reading like mad in search of sources that will resonate on the technology side of things, specifically regarding the nature of the human relationship with technology. I had hoped to find something that would pertain enough to include another entire reading, but instead what I've found to be useful has been too fractal; usable bits and pieces of all kinds of different things. So here are some of the main points from various things I've read that might help you get an idea of where I'm heading with all of this (especially after having read Haraway).

- McLuhan's assertion in The Medium is the Message that the very essence of technology is fragmenting.

- McLuhan's concerns presented in The Gadget Lover that media and technology are destroying (or at least debilitating) our imaginiative capabilities.

- Heidegger (in Critique of Technology) maintains that we are "unfree and chained to technology."

- Both anecdotal evidence and a wide range of articles out there (such as this one) illustrate the ever increasing prevalence of digital technologies in Americans' every day lives.

Other things to think about:

- Dogs as technology (ie breed manipulation, cloning, etc)

- Dogs differentiating themselves from other technologies because not only do we spend our money on them, but they themselves are pseudo consumers in the market

- Understanding the ramifications of and vast contexts to our modern digital media technologies and the roles they play in our everyday lives

- Understanding the totally separate skill set necessary for communing with this "other" (canine), as opposed to the skill set necessary to navigate technologies

- Questions of design; canine design (including the human element) + the design of technologies

Looking forward to class tomorrow!

Does Technology Reduce Social Isolation?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/does-technology-reduce-social-isolation/

By Stefanie Olsen
Americans are more isolated than ever, but don't blame the technology, says a new Pew study. It suggests that the Internet and cellphones actually expand our social networks

Cool study by the Pew Research Center on our social networks, physical and digital.

a little humor

If you want to check out the source, it's good for a few laughs. PhD Comics