hhalpin's blog

I have to admit that when I first came to Duke I was a bit overwhelmed with the concept of "interface." It is very difficult to say precisely what "interface" is. Interface is always the Janus-faced border, yet at the same time enunciating the very division of the border, for at the interface that which was previously disparate mixes, combines, becomes one. How does one understand, much less visualize, such metaphysics? With video interviews with digital pioneers and 3-d patent visualizations, of course!

The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."

Ben Crawford's exploring the edge of music and computers, and his background readings gave us a preliminary exploration of this emerging field. Perhaps the importance of music is best understood in relation to Andy Clark's the extended mind thesis. Normally, one can quite easily think of extending one's intellectual abilities out into the world, such as how everything from pencils and books to computer workstations extend our memory. Art, and in particular, music seems to allow us to extend our emotions into the world around us, allowing us to experience collective emotions?

Bill Seaman is the head of Digital Media at RISD, and luckily he's coming over at the invitation of Kristine Stiles to speak to the Interface Seminar. Seaman's main interests lie along the intersection of digital media, electrochemical computing, and artificial intelligence: an eclectic and productive combination.

If one were to jumble all the disciplines of a modern University up in some giant hat, and just choose two out at random, one fairly seemingly random duo would be Art and Neuroscience. Yet, there are surprisingly strong connections, as the collection "The Artful Minds" - connections that may very well lead us to the heart of symbolic thought itself.

Henry Jenkins, the renown cultural theorist from MIT, is visiting Duke for a few days currently and we are inviting him to our Interface Seminar. However, there are some caveats. First, the main thrust of this work seems to be to, from various new and old media sources, to provide a series of extended examples for Pierre Levy’s book “Collective Intelligence” and show the emergence of a new "transmedia" from old and new media forms...

Andrew Janiak led an engaging discussion on one of my favorite theorists, Elizabeth Grosz, although I'm going to find it hard to justice to her in these brief notes, and I admit to knowing nothing of architecture whatsoever, perhaps ranking me as more of an outsider than Elizabeth Grosz. She's definitely doing interdisciplinary research at its best, drawing conclusions that have broad relevance not just to architecture but to all the humanities and cognitive sciences. Rachael Brady got us to get our hands on some fun haptic and VR devices at UNC as well, but that definitely can't be described well in words.

Orit Halpern is the postdoctoral fellow for the Interface seminar, and is definitely an up and coming theorist actively involved in synthesizing digital theory from a well-grounded historical perspective. Her overall project is nothing less than a historical reconstruction of the preconditions of our digital age, and showing how they appear not first in cyberneticists like the famous Norbert Wiener per se, but also in thinkers like Freud and Bergson.

We were lucky enough for this seminar to have a visit by Ian Bogost, author of "Unit Operations". It's hard for me to describe the subversive work Ian has been doing lately with the Serious Games initiative, such as the wonderfully funny video game about Kinkos employees slacking off on their jobs. Ian Bogost is mainly interested in trying to use the idea of unit operations - i.e. a discrete, finite number of operations in a world of "objects" as a counterbalance to the sort of fuzzy thinking going on in some versions of postmodernism. In particular, in "Unit Operations" he is challenging the ideas of "rhizomes" and "somooth open-ended" spaces of the two French theorists, Deleuze and Guattari.