Week #2 Questions and Answers

After watching tonight's DVD lectures parts one and two please answer the following questions. Post the questions and answers on your individual class blogs and upload a text file of the questions and answers to the week 2 iLearn area for DAI227

Due 2/10/2011



Questions for week 2


Based on the lecture from week



Part one)


1) Why was the period at the turn of the 20th century so important?

The importance of this period was defined by technological advancement that was so rapid that it created a “Shock of the New”. Life for all people in the industrialized world had been suddenly changed several times over, and was never the same afterward. The current relevance of this period is that technological advancements in computing and digital media are being innovated at a torrid pace that is arguably comparable to the turn of the 20th century. (Shock of the Now?)

2) What aspects of the Dada art movement are important from the point of view of the rise of the computers and digital visual media? (for example Marcel Duchamp's "readymades"?)

The Dada movement was unabashedly anti-war. The Dada movement was also responsible for many creations of the absurd. The mass accessibility of the Internet provides ample space for anti-war anti-establishment ideology to flourish. The Internet has many “readymades” within it. One need only go to You Tube to see examples of the ordinary (often extremely and painfully ordinary) elevated to art by the choice of the artist. The Dadaists used art of the absurd to reject not only the blotting out of life on a large scale, but also the ideologies that were the driving force behind World War I. You could make an argument that some of the content on the Internet is a reflexive response to worldwide indifference to death and suffering, and the anticipation of the ultimate loss of privacy to the Cloud. The desire of governments to control the untamed, wild construct that is the Internet is perhaps inspiring a kind of Neo-Dadaism.


3) Name one aspect that links "The Man with a Movie Camera" with digital media according to Lev Manovich (ReadingsB)

Manovich states that “Editing, or montage, is the key twentieth technology for creating fake realities. Theoreticians of cinema have distinguished between many kinds of montage but, for the purposes of sketching the archeology of the technologies of simulation leading to digital compositing, I will distinguish between two basic techniques. The first technique is temporal montage: separate realities form consecutive moments in time. The second technique is montage within a shot. It is the opposite of the first: separate realities form contingent parts of a single image… examples [of montage within a shot] include the
superimposition of a few images and multiple screens used by the avant-garde filmmakers in the 1920’s (for instance, superimposed images in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and a three-part screen in Gance Abel’s 1927 Napoléon).”

[I think Manovich would appreciate that I used cut & paste to answer this question. Please allow me to add my own comparison. My comparison of Vertov’s film and digital media might not have the polish of post-doctoral academia, but I would like to essay a try.]

In my opinion, the great connection between Man With a Movie Camera and digital media is the use and editing/re-ordering of databases. Vertov filmed all the subjects he wanted to and stored the film clips in a database that was later re-arranged/edited by his partner Svilova. This is essentially the concept that is at the fundament of digital media. Data of any sort from a common database can be re-ordered and/or re-arranged to suit the user.

4) What was 'constructivism'?

Constructivism is defined by the World English Dictionary as “a movement in abstract art evolved in Russia after World War I, primarily by Naum Gabo, which explored the use of movement and machine-age materials in sculpture and had considerable influence on modern art and architecture”


5) Read pages VI (6) to XXII (22) of "The Language of New Media" in ReadingsB:


What does Lev Manovich suggest are the 'three levels' of "The Man with a Movie Camera"?

Manovich suggests that “Just as new media objects contain a hierarchy of levels (interface — content; operating system — application; Web page — HTML code; high-level programming language — assembly language — machine language), Vertov's film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a progression of one day: waking up — work — leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of as its meta-texts.”


6) Who first developed the idea of "Cybernetics"?

American mathematician Norbert Wiener developed the idea of Cybernetics.


7) In "Computer Lib" Ted Nelson describes Hypertext as "Non ___________" writing (fill in the blank)

Nelson described Hypertext as non-sequential writing.

8) (Lecture) why were transistors, even though 100 times smaller than vacuum tubes considered impractical for building computers in the 1960s?

The existing hardware simply wasn’t built to utilize transistors. In order to use transistors, hardware manufacturers would have had to “re-invent the wheel”.

9) What was the name of the first commercially available computer (kit)?

The Altair 8800 was the first commercially available computer.


10) Write a paragraph: In your own words: What are things going to look like in 20 years from now in the average living room in terms of digital visual media? What types of digital media will your kids be using around 2030?

My first thought is that I would hesitate to predict how much will change in our consumption of digital media 20 years hence. In 1993, twenty years ago: Apple Computer had just stopped selling the Apple IIe (CPU: Motorola 6502@1.023 MHz, RAM: 64 KB expandable to 1 MB.) and had moved on to the Macintosh LC (CPU: varying versions of the Motorola 68020, 68030, and 68040 chip, @ clock speeds varying from 16-33 MHz, and RAM: 2-68 MB). In 1993 Motorola and IBM created the Power PC 601 CPU (@50-80 MHz). Computers running Windows in 1993 were doing so on boards powered by the Intel Pentium CPU (60-66 MHz), or by the IBM POWER2 (@55-71.5 MHz). In stark relief: The fastest single-CPU Apple that is commercially available is the Mac Pro Server running on an Intel Xeon “Nehalem” quad-core @2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM. Windows machines in 2011 have a variant of the Intel Core i7 CPU at the heart of the motherboard ( Such as the “Sandy Bridge” model running @1.6-3.4 GHz). The safe prediction for computing in 2031 is that computers will be that much again faster as our current models are to the ones in 1993. Perhaps the 2031 computers will open up a greater speed gap than the one between current models and computers from 1993. Who can safely say? In terms of consumer electronics, I predict that the home theater will still be the center of living room entertainment, save one thing - I believe that computers will replace the television. TV circa 2031 may be computers with (likely giant-sized, like the wall screens in Fahrenheit 451) HD or 3DHD monitors. This will be accompanied by innovations in sound. Perhaps technology will evolve to the point where we can watch a film and set one volume expecting to be able to clearly hear dialogue at one volume without then being deafened by the special effects and soundtrack. One day we may develop the technology to have advertisements that aren’t twenty times louder than the regular programming. Video gaming will probably (and sadly) succeed in its goal to blur the line between game and reality. This will likely introduce a new array of social problems, and mental health issues. This will be accomplished by streamlining the immersive virtual reality experience, perhaps aided by advanced holographic displays using three dimensions. Portable gaming devices will become more powerful and less expensive. The trend in miniaturization in consumer electronics will presumably continue and produce a new and hyper-advanced array of portable wireless devices. There may be options for wetware augmentation in 2031, but I don’t know that I’d care to live in such a world. Ultimately the quality and type of digital media devices available to consumers in 2031 will be dictated by the perception of how much money there is to be made in making said devices available. Technology is quickly made obsolete changing from year to year in its fast fashion. Greed is forever.

email me with the answer to question 10 - dcoxdai227@gmail.com