4. What shifts when writing
isn’t human-readable?
Friday, April 15, 2011
5. “Code is the only language that is
executable, meaning that it is the first
discourse that is materially affective.”
- Alexander Galloway, Protocol
Friday, April 15, 2011
6. How do we split agency
between humans and
machines?
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7. Who is doing what to
whom? For whom?
How does technology
reinforce or facilitate that?
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8. Does the context of
war continue to
influence these
technologies?
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29. who did the daily work
of the Holocaust.
Friday, April 15, 2011
30. LaToya:
we can see nothing happens in vacuum. There is no direct link
between new technologies and their consequences whether they
are good, bad, or somewhere in the middle; there is always a
middle man, woman, group, or human force whose will and/ or
intention is the determining factor. I maintain that there is no
neutral technology where there is human influence.
...
With this in mind, how can we re-member and learn from the
ways that technology has been used in the past to oppress, or
create conditions that oppress others? How might this process of
re-membering inform and bring about more ethical practices in the
future?
Friday, April 15, 2011
32. “A computer was a human being until
approximately 1945. After that date, the term
referred to a machine and the former human
computers became “operators.”
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39. “The ENIAC was then told to solve a difficult
problem that would have required several weeks’
work by a trained man. The ENIAC did it in
exactly 15 seconds.” The “15 seconds” claim
ignores the time women spent setting up each
problem on the machine. (474)
Friday, April 15, 2011
40. Tim:
But this story is bigger than a story of inclusion. These stories are
stories of war machines. Of “megamachines,” to quote Lewis
Mumford via Cynthia Haynes. And this story is about the colonial
price of inclusion in the halls of power–at any position. Because no
matter how utopian Vannevar Bush made the memex sound, the
ENIAC girls were partaking in–helping to perfect–machines of
ultimate control. Death machines. The megamachine. What price,
inclusion? What price, a more technical education and job? What
price, to develop technologies that stop the Nazi’s (insert any
other colonial monster here) and to enable them at the same time
(remembering here the Onondaga land I’m actually on as I type
this)? What price, to seek to include more and more in a system
that cries out for radical transformation?
Friday, April 15, 2011
42. Tim:
all these inscription technologies, from clay tokens right up to
punch cards and the ENIAC computer, have all been technologies
originally developed as systems for those in power to control
those without it. Whether it’s death (Hole 8), or taxes (clay
tokens), technologies of inscription so often begin as systems of
more efficient control.
Friday, April 15, 2011
46. Tim:
How might we, as teachers of art and writing inscription,
continually politicize these technologies for ourselves and
students?
How might we inoculate ourselves against the silencing, the
forgetting, the “oh gee, isn’t that cool?” that so often accompanies
our professionalization, our technology use, our everyday
practices, that we might work to be more like Minnie Bruce and
excavate real use-able histories that might point us to better
methods of imagination for transformation?
Friday, April 15, 2011
