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Everything Is Intertwingled :: New Perspectives on Computer History and a Community of Users

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Everything Is Intertwingled :: New Perspectives on Computer History and a Community of Users Everything is Intertwingled :: New Perspectives on Computer History and a Community of Users Accepted for publication for the Interarts Journal, Edited by Ela Kagel and Jocelyn Robert by Lisa Moren, August 2011 Like a warbling fly through virtual reality, the nausea is in my head. The angular caps of the good dark, cool-colored water were now a soft, warm ripple that looked like something between the plasticity of a Pixar animation and the solarizing effects of an early 1960s Nam June Paik video, when digital effects were brand new and unnatural color contrasts were big. If you bent down to eye level with the water, the contrast allowed you to see the hollow oval shapes of the shimmering oil sheen. I was a cynical artist surrounded by sci-fi enthusiasts, and like them, empowered by the accessibility of such high-end technology even I was if unsure of what it all meant. In 1991 at the Banff Centre for Art, I saw artists, humanist, feminists, people of diverse ethnicity and sexual orientations, as well as art engineers, who emerged from a 1980s art movement fraught with theories and politics, congregating at the residencies in Canada. They worked in a variety of materials and questioned the rationale of material vs. its simulation, interface and code, and had lofty goals of reversing the once believed inevitable one-point perspective destiny of technology into a pluralist, post-modern direction. The engineering oriented artists at the Banff residency brought a wealth of information that could tell us where our cursors came from and about maps of the future, but more significantly they could tell us why. They knew about emerging forms of writing that branch out upon request through a new kind of literature called hypertext. They could trace it’s lineage to 1963, when Ted Nelson primarily argued that the experience of retrieving data from computer systems should be developed not only with the user in mind, but in collaboration with the user, or better, a community of users. This was radical in the early 1960s when several corporations, including IBM, were in a battle over whether to manufacture office equipment and big linear, sequential computers, or, figure out the bugs in the less dependable and more risky, smaller, non-linear, modular systems communication-based. IBMs President, Thomas Watson Jr., began a research program in 1963 gambling that the company’s main commodity was centered on the movement of information, not making big office machines. Days after the announcement of their new product, the System/360, IBMs stock nearly doubled to what it had been 18 months prior1 and they set the industry on a risky path of networked communication that depended on input from their community of users.2 The young Ted Nelson watched this path. Motivated by the inadequacies of his education, and its inability to meet his own learning style, Nelson was first inspired by the Memex. The memex was first described in “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, in 1945 (see fig 1). As the former Director of the research team for the Manhattan Project during WWII, Bush sought to transfer his atomic research away from the one-point perspective goal of destruction, into a collective memory system that could better explore loftier goals of scientific truth: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems... The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against (one) another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.3 — Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, 1945 Bush imagined a great record of knowledge holding all of human memory in order for society to become wise, or at least more broadly spend their time engaging in the sublime rather than the atom bomb. As a scientist, Bush understood that researchers worked best by finding patterns in seemingly disparate contexts. With his hypothetical Memex machine, he sought to create a data archive and retrieval interface that more directly compared associative and visual patterns, that mimicked how scientific brains naturally process information. Bush knew that computers of the time used a linear, sequential logic that had been imposed since the Renaissance and was no longer relevant. In fact, the random access of data, non-sequential processing and parallel performance of equations were at the core of computer processing. His Memex proposed to be a more flexible interface based directly on comparing visual information, rather than tediously 1 http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=IBM&a=09&b=1&c=1963&d=04&e=1&f=1964&g =d 2 http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1960.html 3 http://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/vbush8.shtml sorting through intermediums such as library card catalogs. In 1945, “As We May Think” argues that the interface of the Memex can bring us closer to the way we think, and therefore it’s a path to wisdom over destruction. Ted Nelson also looked at his 1960s contemporaries, sociologist and engineer Douglas Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland. Both researchers were also deeply influenced by Vannevar Bush’s philosophical text and were just as eager to engineer aspects of the Memex. Ivan Sutherland’s 1962 MIT Phd thesis project was the flexible interface Sketchpad that allowed a user to draw on a screen. Based on an x,y axis, a pen allowed the user to draw lines on a computer monitor between 2 points and interactively modify that line. By 1964, Sutherland briefly became Director of the US Military project ARPA4 and an inspiration to Doug Engelbart. In 1962 Engelbart published Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework where he builds on the foundation laid by Vannevar Bush. Engelbart saw the current state of technological advancement limited by an impossible Catch-22 loop. He believed that the limitations in our technologies control the knowledge that we are able to learn from them, and in turn, the knowledge-output from computers restricts our ability to process further knowledge or advance the medium. Similar to playing poker or the stock market solely on mathematics, Vannevar Bush expressed the unnecessary limitations of computers when he said “If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world.”5 He sought to break the cycle at Stanford Research Lab (SRI), and with ARPA support he led the Augmentation Research Center where in 1968 he presented his famous public demonstration (dubbed mother of all demo’s) of this concept by tying a brick to a pencil and writing with it. He said that in order to loose the brick we needed to make computer information more transparent, he believed interfaces needed to be a more direct augmentation to the way we think. Engelbart modernized the work laid out by Bush and saw a future where people drive computers as intuitively as they navigate cars, with unmediated eye-body coordination using foot pedals, stick shifts and steering wheels. His SRI research exploited natural body 4 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the US Military precursor to ARPANET, Milnet and the Internet. 5 Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, London, 2001. Essay: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” pp 145. movements through a knee interface or a head-mounted device that was attached to the chin or nose. He also mined and applied lost inventions, such as the teleautograph, a pre-cursor to the fax machine that could transmit image data via telephone wire in 1888. With the desire to make the connection between human gesture and thought as direct as possible, Engelbart and his team designed objects that pioneered the field of human-computer interface. After explaining what he meant by augmenting human intellect, he put down the brick and demonstrated his own patented computer mouse.6 (see fig 2) Because Englebart’s mouse was inspired by Sutherlands use of the x, y axis in Sketchpad, the interactive mouse and screen were all compatible. From these experiences, Nelson laid out a breadth of interface designs that turned known hierarchical learning structures into a format that was closer to the way the way that Ted Nelson’s brain thought. For example, Nelson’s Thinkertoys is a concept that exemplifies that “the written word is nothing less than tracks left by the mind”7 and therefore fragmentary by nature. He sought simplistic, flexible interfaces that were transparent enough for the user to focus on ideas. This goes well with his stimulating interactive learning devices, such as a joystick, that are again, closer to the way that Nelson and many others think (see fig 4). The word toy is both a pun and a direct observation of how our child-like minds are enthusiastic about developing new information that favors hands-on experiences over books and lectures. Nelson wasn’t against reading, he was looking for a new delivery system of literature, science, history, art, and saw the Gutenberg book format as a highly malleable and temporary format. Like Bush’s archive of scientific memory, Nelson imagined a Babel-like archive containing all knowledge linked in a complex and interwoven labyrinth. He believed that knowledge was already “intertwingled” and that the labyrinth-like system capable of connecting such knowledge 6 Many computer industry people such as IBM executives witnessed this demonstration in which the mouse design was based in part on the teleautograph.
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