PowerPoint Presentation Lecture

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computers as theater fdm 20c introduction to
digital media lecture 20.05.2004
warren sack / film digital media department /
university of california, santa cruz
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last time

• what is a cyborg?
• a comparison of
• democractic, liberal politics
• identity politics
• biopolitics and,
• cyborg politics
• who is donna haraway?
• videos haraway on paper tiger television (1987)
  and haraways faculty research lecture (1996)
• a reading of the cyborg manifesto

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reading the cyborg manifesto

• what is a manifesto?
• compare to the manifestos of art and politics
  (e.g., surrealism and marxism)

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why was it written?

• DH In 1982, the editors of the Socialist Review
  gave me an assignment Write five pages on what
  socialist-feminist priorities are in the Reagan
  years. So I started writing and what came out
  was A Cyborg Manifesto.
• TNG So your cyborgs origins are in this modest
  proposal?
• DH Yes. I think the moral of the story is,
  dont give me an assignment!
• p. 39, How Like a Leaf

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the breakdown of three dichotomies

• human/animal
• machine/organism
• physical/non-physical
• connection with todays topic while haraway
  talks about how these distinctions are breaking
  down, laurel proposes a means for designing
  connections between them (or, at least, between
  the latter two)

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the cyborg as organizing myth

• There is nothing about being female that
  naturally binds women.
• No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in
  themselves any component can be interfaced with
  any other if the proper standard, the proper
  code, can be constructed for processing signals
  in a common language.
• The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
  reassembled, post-modern collective and personal
  self. This is the self feminists must code.
• Haraway, p. 519

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working as a humanities scholar

• what does it mean to work as a humanities scholar
  in the area of digital media?
• haraways offers one set of suggestions (in her
  faculty research lecture of 1996)

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haraways six ways of working

• pay attention to humor and how it is projected
  onto the womans body (remember the first
  trudeau/doonsbury comic she showed)
• standpoint theory start your analysis from the
  point of view of someone who is underrepresented
  or poorly represented
• understand science and technology as both a
  practice and a culture
• materialized figuration metaphors are research
  projects

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haraways six ways of working (continued)

• 5. watch for odd interactions between the
  supposedly local and global, the particular
  and the universal (haraways example of this
  was the image of the global native woman used
  in science and advertising)
• 6. pay attention to the portrayal of genius in
  science, technology and art and, pay attention
  to the differences between originals and
  copies.

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working as a humanities scholar

• haraway provides us with one model
• laurel and nakamura provide us with two other
  models of how one can work as a humanities
  scholar in the field of digital media

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key points for today

• character and identity are performed through
  words and actions
• this has implications for designing and analyzing
  digital media because...
• designing digital technologies is like writing,
  casting and directing a play and,
• interacting with digital technologies is like
  playing a role or character

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contemporary design methodologies based on these
insights

• personae design of cooper interactive (see
  http//www.cooper.com/)
• the use of stories and scenarios in design and
  design prototyping

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specific examples of laurels work

• early work at atari on computer games in alan
  kays group
• virtual reality environments with scott fischer
  (now at usc)
• computer games by purple moon
• influence on various research projects e.g., joe
  bates group at cmu, the oz project that original
  tried to implement a variety of ideas from
  computers as theater

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recall from last week two kinds of work...

• computer games how do they work?
• how do they work behind the screen? i.e., how
  do they work from the perspective of an engineer?
• a simple example of pong in flash
• how do they work in front of the screen? i.e.,
  how do they work for the audience or participant?
• sherry turkle on computer games and processes of
  identification
• henry jenkins on computer games, gender and space
• laurel proposes we use an aristotlean framework
  to coordinate -- to direct -- the coupling of
  these two kinds of work

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Laurels exegesis of Aristotle

• action
• character
• thought
• language
• melody
• spectacle Aristotle described the fundamental
  material element of drama as spectacle -- all
  that is seen.

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laurel on connections between

• thought and language and,
• character and action

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between thought and language

• The thought of a play can appropriately only
  deal with what is already manifest at the levels
  of enactment, pattern and language. (p. 568)
• in other words, language influences thought
  because it is not good drama for a character in a
  play to suddenly think about something outside
  of the story world of the play.
• but, thought also influences language it is the
  formal cause of language (p. 568)

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Laurel on action and agents

• In a purely Aristotelian sense, an agent is one
  who takes action. Interestingly, Aristotle
  admits of the possibility of a play without
  characters, but a play without action cannot
  exist. This suggests that agency as part of
  representation need not be strictly embodied in
  characters as we normally think of them -- that
  is, as representations of humans. Using the
  broadest definition, computer programs that
  perform actions that are perceived by people can
  be said to exhibit agency in some form. (p.
  568-569)
• compare this to Latours actants

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between characters and actions

• In drama, character may be defined as bundles of
  traits, predispositions, and choices that, when
  taken together, form coherent entities. (p. 568)

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characters as bundles

• who gets to choice which associations are linked
  with whom or what?
• whats the difference between
• building a reputation and,
• gaining a reputation?
• recalling my exchange with jill walker about
  online caroline

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characters, reputations, identities

• what are these bundles of traits,
  predispositions, and choices that, when taken
  together, form coherent entities?
• what is a coherent entity?
• race?
• class?
• gender?
• sexuality?

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what is the overall goal of a good design?

• spectacle?
• entertainment?
• education?
• insight?
• defamiliarization?

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Laurel on Aristotle

• One of Aristotles fundamental ideas about drama
  (as well as other forms of literature) is that a
  finished play is an organic whole. He used the
  term organic to evoke an analogy with living
  things. Insofar as a whole organism is more than
  the sum of its parts, all of the parts are
  necessary for life, and the parts have certain
  necessary relationships to one another. He
  identified six qualitative elements of drama and
  suggested the relationships among them in terms
  of formal and material cause. (p. 564)

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Laurel on plays and CHI

• Plays, like human-computer activities, are closed
  universes in the sense that they delimit the set
  of potential actions. ...it is key to the
  success of a dramatic representation that all of
  the materials that are formulated into action are
  drawn from the circumscribed potential of the
  particular dramatic world. Whenever this
  principle is violated, the organic unity of the
  work is diminished... (p. 568)

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Contrast with other forms of theater e.g., Boal
on Aristotle, oppression and the oppressed

• ...the poetics of Aristotle is the poetics of
  oppression the world is known, perfect, or about
  to be perfected, and all of its values are
  imposed on the spectators who passively delegate
  power to the characters to act and think in their
  place.
• The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the
  poetics of liberation the spectator no longer
  delegates power to the characters either to think
  or to act in his place. The spectator frees
  himself he thinks and acts for himself!
• Theater is action! (p. 352)

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computers as theater

• is this method, to analyze and design digital
  media as theater, applicable to things other than
  jusy computer games?
• e.g., does it work with online chat environments
  or MUDs and MOOs?

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whats a MUD

• MUD stands for multi-user domain
• MOO stands for MUD, object-oriented (referring to
  a particular way in which the MUD is programmed
  using an object-oriented language).

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what is LambdaMOO?

• from the introduction LambdaMOO is sort of like
  a chat room. It's a text-only based virtual
  community of thousands of people from all over
  the world. It's comprised of literally thousands
  of "rooms" that have been created by the users of
  LambdaMOO, and you endlessly navigate (walk
  around) north, south, etc. from room to room,
  investigating, and meeting people that you can
  interact with to your hearts content. You get
  there not thru an HTML browser like Netscape or
  IE but through another program called TELNET.
  http//www.lambdamoo.info/

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Plaintext Players

• and example of theater using MUDs
  http//yin.arts.uci.edu/players/
• Who are the Plaintext Players? We're an online
  performance group forging a unique hybrid of
  theater, fiction, poetry, and vaudeville using
  network technology. We work on the Internet in
  the virtual role-playing worlds known as MOOs.

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so, whats the difference between...

• being a Plaintext player,
• playing a character on LambdaMOO, and
• performing ones identity or character IRL (in
  real life)? i.e., being ones self?

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nakamura identity tourism passing

• nakamura provides us with two very specific ways
  of investigating the differences between these
  kinds of performance. i.e., she offers us a
  way to be more specific than shakespeares
  aphorism might otherwise lead us to be all the
  worlds a stage...
• identity tourism
• passing

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nakamura on identity tourism

• Tourism is a particularly apt metaphor to
  describe the activity of racial identity
  appropriation, or "passing" in cyberspace. The
  activity of "surfing," (an activity already
  associated with tourism in the mind of most
  Americans) the Internet not only reinforces the
  idea that cyberspace is not only a place where
  travel and mobility are featured attractions, but
  also figures it as a form of travel which is
  inherently recreational, exotic, and exciting,
  like surfing. The choice to enact oneself as a
  samurai warrior in LambdaMOO constitutes a form
  of identity tourism which allows a player to
  appropriate an Asian racial identity without any
  of the risks associated with being a racial
  minority in real life.

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the risks of performance

• in short, being an identity tourist is quite
  different from performing ones own identity
  because the risks are quite different the
  tourist has fewer risks.
• but, of course, this a graded distinction. we
  might ask just how serious is the tourism? or,
  put in alan turings language, how serious is the
  imitation game which is being played? it might
  constitute a crucial difference (e.g., it might
  determine whether or not the player is considered
  to be intelligent).
• see also, judith butler, gender troubles and,
  bodies that matter

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what are the risks of online role playing?

• can racial and sexual crimes take place online?
• what is the violence of a comment like nakamura
  quotes Seems to me, if you include your race in
  your description, you are making yourself the
  sacrificial lamb. I don't include 'caucasian' in
  my description. (lambdaMOO player)
• a story from julian dibbell, rape in cyberspace
  (http//www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html)

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nakamura project statement

• My study, which I would characterize as
  ethnographic, with certain important
  reservations, focuses on the ways in which race
  is "written" In the cyberspace locus called
  LambdaMOO, as well as the ways it is read by
  other players, the conditions under which it is
  enunciated, contested, and ultimately erased and
  suppressed, and the ideological implications of
  these performative acts of writing and reading
  otherness. What does the way race is written in
  Lambda MOO reveal about the enunciation of
  difference in new electronic media? Have the
  rules of the game changed, and if so, how?

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nakamura design and performance

• Player scripts which eschew repressive versions
  of the Oriental in favor of critical
  rearticulations and recombinations of race,
  gender, and class, and which also call the
  fixedness of these categories into question have
  the power to turn the theatricality
  characteristic of MOOspace into a truly
  innovative form of play, rather than a tired
  reiteration and reinstatement of old hierarchies.
  Role playing is a feature of the MOO, not a bug,
  and it would be absurd to ask that everyone who
  plays within it hew literally to the "rl" gender,
  race, or condition of life. A diversification of
  the roles which get played, which are permitted
  to be played, can enable a thought provoking
  detachment of race from the body, and an
  accompanying questioning of the essentialness of
  race as a category. Performing alternative
  versions of self and race jams the
  ideology-machine, and facilitates a desirable
  opening up of what Judith Butler calls "the
  difficult future terrain of community" (242) in
  cyberspace.

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next time

• media ownership