Myron W. Krueger was working in new media and attempting to pursue artistic as well as scientific goals. Sometimes referred to as “the father of virtual reality,” his focuses lie in responsive environments, artificial reality, and real time interaction between men and machines. His work was greatly ignored in the visual arts and in computer science his artistic concerns haven’t always been acknowledged. His major assertion is that “the response is the medium” and he claimed, “Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system.” With similar views to Ted Nelson, Krueger calls for lay understanding of technology. Krueger’s work also reminds me of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” because of his belief that the “response is the medium.”
26. Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg
This essay, in many ways, foretold what notebook computing has become today. Through his work directing the Xerox PARC group, Kay developed new ideas of notebook computing, and even the notebook computer itself, even though it would not be embraced for many years. Kay saw a problem in that most people saw computers as tools for engineers and businessmen, and he claimed that computers should be able to be used by children and for creative purposes. Kay’s work was similar to Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machine claim that “EVERYBODY SHOULD UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS.” The Star computer that Kay worked on used a graphical interface that became a part of personal computing in Apple’s Macintosh. I really appreciate what these early thinkers did by encouraging the use of computers to be easy. As I sit at my laptop and Photoshop images for a class, I realize that I would be nowhere without their developments.
27. From A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari’s literary machine is very different from those of Calvino and Nelson. They also challenge the reader to consider dualisms and claim that “In truth, it is not enough to say, ‘Long live the multiple,’ difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made…” Their A Thousand Plateaus has been considered similar to Eihei Dogen’s 10,000 dharmas. These two thinkers were also actively engaged in political action. A Thousand Plateaus includes many terms that they define in a book they wrote previously, entitled Anti-Oedipus. Their work is often understood to be written from the perspective of “if I were using these terms, this is what I would mean.”
28. From Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert
The 1980s is sometimes called the home computer era, in part because children embraced video game consoles. Papert, in this same time, worked to provide “environments in which children could learn through the process of programming.” His philosophy of education was called “constructionism,” and it examined closely the idea of mental construction. Constructionism has influenced new media in many ways, including the MaMaMedia website and the Lego Mindstorms robot kits, named after the book this essay was taken form. Papert predicted that children’s toys would have as much computer power as the super computers, which has proved correct in modern times. To reveal his approach to constructionism, Papert created this hypothetical conversation between two children using a computer and creating drawings. I think it is so interesting that Papert encouraged the use of computers by children, similar to the way that Alan Kay did.
29. “Put-That-There”: Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface by Richard A. Bolt
Bolt encouraged combining speech and gesture input to create a computer interface more like a spoken conversation. Computers, in most cases, provide a 2D view into a 3D space. MIT’s Architecture Machine Group tried to find a way to allow the user to experience these as one. A multimodal interface with communication with a computer via several channels, they believed, would make computer use easier. The “Put-That-There” program prefers speech over typing, which is an idea that has yet to stick today. In the “Media Room,” also developed by the AMG, the “computer terminal” is a room which uses a special data management system to use pointing and speech to control the computer.
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