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transduction

This tag is associated with 3 posts

FCJ-128 A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web

By ⋅ October 9, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Fenwick McKelvey. York / Ryerson Universities, Toronto I found Drupal in the summer heat of the riverside town of Rosario, Argentina during an internship with a women’s rights organisation in the city. The Canadian government funded me to help the organisation with their information technology, part of a program to promote Canada’s reputation as a leader in technology sector. Cynical of my government’s motives, but committed to the politics of free or open source software (FOSS), I helped the administrator migrate from proprietary software to free software alternatives. Their website relied on an aging copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, a foreign application for most of the staff. I wanted in Rosario to create the ideal website for the NGO, but I did not have the ability to program such customised software. After some extensive searching, I happened upon the Drupal content management system (CMS) as a replacement. Drupal describes itself as […]

FCJ-125 From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’

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Troy Rhoades. Concordia University, Montreal. Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 197)   Science and Art When encountering John F. Simon Jr.’s software artwork Every Icon (1997) on his website, it can be difficult for viewers to know whether they are seeing the visual execution of a mathematical theorem or experiencing a work of artistic expression. [1] This is because they are presented with a stark white and black thirty-two by thirty-two square grid on the right side of the website and three statements that read like a mathematical theorem on the left side. They state: Given: An icon described by a 32 X 32 grid. Allowed: Any element of the grid to be coloured black or white. Shown: Every icon (Simon, 1997b). [2] But before […]

FCJ-124 Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction

By ⋅ October 9, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Christoph Brunner. Zurich University of the Arts & Concordia University, Montreal. Jonas Fritsch. Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus Universitet. Introduction Digital and interactive technologies have evolved dramatically as the traditional desktop computer has given way to ubiquitous computation. Computation is now an integrated part of many people’s everyday lives, a question of experience more than simple use, as John McCarthy and Peter Wright have argued in their seminal book on the subject Technology as Experience. Yet while all this might be a simple given, accounting for and working with the reality of newer interactive technologies is less straightforward. Ubiquitous computation provides a digital layer that can be added to almost anything, offering radically new contexts of use and technological possibilities (McCullough, 2004). This changes the way one can—and must—imagine the design of digital and interactive technologies. Design is often now for what Terry Winograd has termed ‘interspaces’, in […]

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