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The Computer Is Not a Tool to Help Us Do Whatever We Do, It Is What We Do, It Is the Medium on Which We Work1

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The Computer Is Not a Tool to Help Us Do Whatever We Do, It Is What We Do, It Is the Medium on Which We Work1 PRZEGLĄD KULTUROZNAWCZY NR 2 (40) 2019, s. 229–243 doi: 10.4467/20843860PK.19.013.10908 www.ejournals.eu/Przeglad-Kulturoznawczy/ PEJZA Dene Grigar in conversation with Piotr Marecki Ż E KULTURY THE COMPUTER IS NOT A TOOL TO HELP US DO WHATEVER WE DO, IT IS WHAT WE DO, IT IS THE MEDIUM ON WHICH WE WORK1 Piotr Marecki: Let’s start with very basic approach to the word “lab”. A few days ago, we had a conversation about diff erences between digital humani- ties and digital media fi eld. You said something like this, that in digital human- ities fi eld lab is considered like a tool for some projects, while for example in creative digital media lab is considered almost like the destination, like the main part of the project. What do you mean and how do you understand this? Dene Grigar: When I developed this program––the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program––I had to think of how to bring multiple kinds of people together because one of our faculty is an animator, another is a video producer, another is a coder, another is a library science person. How do you bring people like that into one place where we have a common goal and common belief system, so that we’re not arguing over what we should do? And so, I developed at that time what I call the Guiding Principles, and the fi rst guiding principle of the ten or eleven we have now is, “The computer is not a tool to help us do whatever we do, it is what we do, it is the medium on which we work”. My faculty is not focused on taking pictures with the camera, running them through Photoshop, and then printing them and for the wall. For us, everything we do is encased in the digital world; everything is part of that world. And so, the computer becomes then the medium on which we work. That’s a very diff erent view than “The tool helps us create something”. In the most recent defi nition of Digital Humanities I saw yesterday on Twitter (I forgot who posted it), there was an explanation, a very short, 140-character de- scription of what DH means. Essentially the idea was that DH answers the same question as humanities, but uses computation as the method for doing it. I would off er that’s what we’re interested in here, because DH is part of what we do, right? For this lab though it’s looking at how computers, the computer medium, can help works created in the computer medium, live on. In a sense, we’re answering some new 1 Publication fi nanced by the program of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” for the years 2016–19 ( 0020/NPRH4/H2b/83/2016). THE COMPUTER IS NOT A TOOL TO HELP US DO WHATEVER WE DO... 229 PK_2_lamanie 2_2019.indd 229 21.11.2019 11:34:40 Dene Grigar in conversation with Piotr Marecki questions with computation that don’t exist in the print world. These are new prob- lems to solve with the very medium that these problems arise in. Does it make sense? Next question, about the diff erences and the comparisons. We are in the elec- E KULTURY tronic literature lab, and you gather a lot of old devices, a lot of materials, a lot Ż of hardware and software. Why is this institution diff erent, and why do you call this lab, and not for example museum. What is the diff erence? PEJZA This is a working lab. So, this is a working museum, I guess you can say. The computers have a purpose here beyond just “for exhibition”. But people do walk in this room, see all these old Macintoshes, and get excited because they think it’s a mu- seum. But when they realize that these computers are here so that we can see the art that was produced for them… Maybe it’s a working library. Actually, in museum we can also see some work, the hardware, for example, to work. The MoMA Library is a good example, where you can see Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger. You could indeed go to see that work on an emulation in another part of MoMA. If you go to the Rubenstein [Rare Book & Manuscript] Library, and you want to see Judy Malloy’s work, there’s 27 boxes of her materials collected. But you can’t use the fl oppy disks to read Uncle Roger because they are considered too fragile to be handled. There are two cases in which you could actually see the work and when you can’t. Here [in ELL] the idea is that anybody can walk in, go to the library, pull out the piece, and read anything they want, on that very machine it was intended for. You are not seeing an emulation of the work but the work in its original format. When you see Judy Malloy’s work on the Apple IIe––which is a great example–– then you’re looking at the computer’s green screen, and that’s the very green screen that the character Jenny sees when she’s looking at her computer in “Terminals”, the third part of the trilogy. So, when Jenny is talking about the green screen, you’re looking at the work on the green screen. And you get what she is referring to. [Uncle Roger] is emulated––it’s version 6.0. You can download from the website, but you are looking at a black background with white letters. And certainly students who look at that version don’t understand what the green screen is until they see the work on the Apple IIe. The cultural context is missing for them. I think the cultural context is really important because in ELL we aren’t just interested in preserving the work, we’re interested in preserving the experience that humans have with a work. This ties into another concept important to my program: “People come fi rst”. People take precedence over processes, protocols, policies––all of those are secondary and only serve the interest of humans. What’s primary for me as a Humanist are people; for me a human being’s experience with the work of art is important. This lab tries to recreate the experience that humans had with a work back when it was fi rst released and experienced. You know, yesterday we were fooling around with the [Macintosh] 230 THE COMPUTER IS NOT A TOOL TO HELP US DO WHATEVER WE DO... PK_2_lamanie 2_2019.indd 230 21.11.2019 11:34:40 Dene Grigar in conversation with Piotr Marecki Classic and waiting for it boot up––and it was the very hassle we had years ago with PEJZA computers––you know, waiting for things to load. It is part of the experience of the work; it’s something my students don’t have to contend with but need to understand Ż so that they realize how media, computers, artistic decisions, etc. have evolved over E KULTURY time. You mentioned interfaces, but during my stay here I also realized the noises, the sounds of the computer are also very important. You also mentioned in your book, “Traversals”, for example in the chapter about Judy Malloy, that the sound when you start, for example Apple II, is extremely important. But I would argue that this is similar to the classical media archeology approach. So, is there something more, or do you consider your lab one of the media archeological labs? I do, think so, but I think everyone of us has a diff erent focus. In some cases people focus on hardware, and that’s valuable. In some cases they’re interested in game consoles, and that’s valuable. Everything we’re doing, I think, any attempt to preserve that experience, no matter what approach, is important. We are part of media archeology, but our focus is on art and the experience that humans had/have with art, which is part also of the computer itself––you can’t separate it. We need the compu- ters to go with the art, but having this experience with this work and discovering it, exploring it, and fi nding delight, you know, in that experience. It goes beyond just the straight academic focus, and it goes into the level of what I consider to be the basic human foundation of this joy and delight and sublimity. We as humans fi nd the way to transcend our human experience, fi nding something beyond ourselves. I think that’s the reason I’m so attracted to the electronic literature over any other type of literature, besides maybe ancient Greek, which I still adore. I love the ability for art to surprise us, to excite us. I look at the most recent work I’ve just been crazy about, Alan Bigelow’s “How to Rob a Bank”. It’s so freaking amazing what he did, the playfulness of the social me- dia, without using any words outside this media event. And then there’s “All the Deli- cate Duplicates” by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell. That work is visually stunning. You know, you explore, cave-like, through this experience, this kind of intellectual environment. It’s extremely visual and oral. And they’re both diff erent experiences, those two works. One is really funny and dark, and the other is dark and very deep and, you know, heavy.
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