R3C3

"I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:20:17 -0400

“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

- Roger Ebert - I do not fear death

"It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from...."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:45:06 -0400

“It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from. We need to question the obvious, to reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs. That is design thinking.”

- Don Norman - Rethinking Design Thinking

"[In] a game where a number of individuals are involved, then the [player] taking one role must be..."

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:57:27 -0500

“[In] a game where a number of individuals are involved, then the [player] taking one role must be ready to take the role of everyone else… . He must know what everyone else is going to do in order to carry out his own play. He has to take all of these roles. They do not all have to be present in consciousness at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it, and so on. These responses must be, in some degree, present in his own make-up. In the game, then, there is a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of one calls out the appropriate attitudes of the other.”

- G.H. Mead - Mind Self and Society, Section 19

"In Dionysus in 69 the modes of interaction reflected the idealism of a company concerned with..."

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:51:46 -0500

“In Dionysus in 69 the modes of interaction reflected the idealism of a company concerned with breaking the hierarchy between audience and performer, and at their core suggested a trust of the audience. Sleep No More is predicated upon a basic suspicion of the audience. The way the piece is designed limits my desire to act or intervene–and if I don’t respond to suggestion, it will remove me from the show. It’s safe and smooth, but hypocritical. There is the illusion of choice and agency, but the offer is rigidly circumscribed, and the only real role allowed to me is that of passive voyeur, consuming the actions, images and sounds of the piece. I can open this drawer or that drawer, follow this actor or another. I have a choice, but it changes nothing. I’m a passive ghost moving through this illusion. And the only agency granted to me is the capacity to consume.”

- Agnès Silvestre - Punchdrunk and the Politics of Spectatorship

"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen."

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 13:50:46 -0400

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

- Robert Bresson, Notes on the cinematographer

"Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value..."

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 13:18:00 -0400

“Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.”

- Tristan Tzara. “Lecture on Dada” (1922)

"The video game remains an icon of its age, an emblem for the interpellation of ideological..."

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:53:19 -0400

“The video game remains an icon of its age, an emblem for the interpellation of ideological subjectivity, and a tool which continues (through its counter-claims of interactivity) ably to fulfil that function on behalf of capital, military and state. The commercial video games industry has put an extraordinary emphasis upon the significance of interactivity in its field of production; but while the digital game may be neither more nor less interactive than any other text, this emphasis itself seems not only to mislead its consumers but also to disempower them. When, then, Jane McGonigals’s dreams of a world of World of Warcraft are eventually realized, this new reality may not represent the democratic cybertopia of which some have dreamt. W.H. Auden … suggested that “each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom” - yet when each individual is not almost but absolutely convinced by that illusion of self-determination, those who are interpellated by the dictatorship of the algorithm will not even dream of autonomy and liberation, because (like all those sustained by the faux-scriptible, like the victims of The Matrix itself) they will mistakenly believe that they are already the authors of their own destinies.”

- Alec Charles - Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games

"We might therefore add a third category to Roland Barthes’s classification of scriptible and..."

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:23:03 -0400

“We might therefore add a third category to Roland Barthes’s classification of scriptible and lisible texts: the faux-scriptible text which proclaims its openness to interactivity, which gives its user the illusion of meaning, power and active participation, and which, in appearing to satisfy its audience’s desire for agency, in fact sublimates and dilutes that desire. This process resembles a kind of textual karaoke: its audiences believe that their participation represents a form of activity, a mode of agency, but they are, in effect (and in consequence), mere puppets of the text. This faux-scriptible text is thus significantly more reactionary and compelling than the lisible.”

- Alec Charles - Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games

"What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a..."

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:24:37 -0400

“What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives—its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace autonomy and its job security—in return for acquiescing to the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise.”

- William Deresiewicz - Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

"Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture..."

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:08:49 -0400

“Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts … unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistencies of his tastes, values, memories, brings into a crisis his relation with language.”

- Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14.

"[Capital] puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to stop it..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:21:45 -0400

“[Capital] puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to stop it infecting other human activities. Art is this privileged and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay that way until economic imperialism refits it in its turn as a spiritual supermarket. Then, hunted down everywhere, play will burst out everywhere.”

- Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life

"What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or..."

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:11:10 -0400

“What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. This pull is especially strong in those commercial platforms that celebrate their own difference from the so-called passive media of previous decades, and in the process monetize their users’ participation either directly or indirectly.”

- Jonathan Sterne - What if Interactivity is the New Passivity?

"In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being..."

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:54:54 -0400

“In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)”

- Charles Stross - Not an April Fool

"Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:11:40 -0400

“Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”

- Paul Graham - How to Do What You Love

"Most good games are against the law."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:22:01 -0500

“Most good games are against the law.”

- Theodore Roosevelt. Presidential Addresses and State Papers VI, 1163

"studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a..."

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 23:26:07 -0500

“studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with ‘stuff’ that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.”

- Laughlin, Robert B. (2005). A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. NY, NY: Basic Books. pp. 120–121. ISBN 978-0465038282.

"The ubiquity of phone booths is interesting because they are completely obsolete, unevenly..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:23:46 -0500

“The ubiquity of phone booths is interesting because they are completely obsolete, unevenly distributed in outlying neighborhoods and they carry a strong sense of nostalgia with me. They’ve already evolved from their original function as person-to-person communication technology into their second iteration as pedestrian-scaled billboards. I wanted to see if there is a third option in that, yes, they get our eyes for advertising dollars, but they can also give value back to a neighborhood. I was most interested in turning what is perceived as an urban liability into an opportunity.”

- The Atlantic Cities - How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries

"In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:39:12 -0500

“In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only one value: safety. Safety trumps innovation. The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, because failure is inherently unsafe. An innovative medical procedure will not be as safe as the proven standard. Innovation is not prudent. Yet because precaution privileges only safety, it not only diminishes other values but also actually reduces safety.”

- Kevin Kelly - What Technology Wants

"Ubiquitous systems lend themselves easily to—indeed, redefine—surveillance. However discrete they..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:13:23 -0500

“Ubiquitous systems lend themselves easily to—indeed, redefine—surveillance. However discrete they may be at their design and inception, their interface with each other implies a domain of action that extends from the very contours of the human body outward to whatever arbitrarily large civic space can be equipped with the necessary sensors and effectors. In short, there is no current technology with greater potential to support authoritarian and totalitarian social engineering, and the limitation otherwise of choice.”

- Adam Greenfield - All watched over by machines of loving grace

"Thomas Maldonado … saw the design process as a system embodying both scientific-based and..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:47:36 -0500

“Thomas Maldonado … saw the design process as a system embodying both scientific-based and intuitive-based thinking. He considered that while design is indeed an art, the designer is not solely an artist. Aesthetic considerations were no longer the primary conceptual basis of design. The professional designer would be an “integrator” with responsibility for integrating a large number of specialties in addition to aesthetics, mostly the diverse requirements of materials, manufacturing and context of product use, as well as considerations of usability, identity and marketing.”

- Wikipedia: Ulm School of Design