UC Irvine Embodiment and Performativity Title The Mother of All Demos Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91v563kh Author Salamanca, Claudia Publication Date 2009-12-12 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Mother of All Demos Claudia Salamanca PhD Student, Rhetoric Department University of California Berkeley 1929 Fairview St. Apt B. Berkeley, CA, 94703 1 510 735 1061
[email protected] ABSTRACT guide situated at the mission control and from there he takes us This paper analyses the documentation of the special session into another location: a location that Levy calls the final frontier. delivered by Douglas Engelbart and William English on This description offered by Levy as well as the performance in December 9, 1968 at the Fall Computer Joint Conference in San itself, shows a movement in time and space. The name, “The Francisco. Mother of All Demos,” refers to a temporality under which all previous demos are subcategories of this performance. Furthermore, the name also points to a futurality that is constantly Categories and Subject Descriptors in production: all future demos are also included. What was A.0 [Conference Proceedings] delivered on December 9, 1968 captured the past but also our future. In order to explain this extended temporality, Engelbart’s General Terms demo needs to be addressed not only from the perspective of the Documentation, Performance, Theory. technological breakthroughs but also the modes in which they were delivered. This mode of futurality goes beyond the future simple tense continuously invoked by rhetorics of progress and Keywords technology. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate “The Demo, medium performance, fragmentation, technology, Mother of All Demos” as a performance, inquiring into what this augmentation system, condensation, space, body, mirror, session made and is still making possible.