Note: following the exhibitionThinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 until last April at MOMA, images of the show appeared on the museum's website, with many references to projects. After Archeology of the Digital at CCA in Montreal between 2013-17, this is another good contribution to the history of the field and to the intricate relations between art, design, architecture and computing.
How cultural fields contributed to the shaping of this "mass stacked media" that is now built upon the combinations of computing machines, networks, interfaces, services, data, data centers, people, crowds, etc. is certainly largely underestimated.
Literature start to emerge, but it will take time to uncover what remained "out of the radars" for a very long period. They acted in fact as some sort of "avant-garde", not well estimated or identified enough, even by specialized institutions and at a time when the name "avant-garde" almost became a "s-word"... or was considered "dead".
Unfortunately, no publication seems to have been published in relation to the exhibition, on the contrary to the one at CCA, which is accompanied by two well documented books.
Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989
November 13, 2017–April 8, 2018 | The Museum of Modern Art
Drawn primarily from MoMA's collection, Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 brings artworks produced using computers and computational thinking together with notable examples of computer and component design. The exhibition reveals how artists, architects, and designers operating at the vanguard of art and technology deployed computing as a means to reconsider artistic production. The artists featured in Thinking Machines exploited the potential of emerging technologies by inventing systems wholesale or by partnering with institutions and corporations that provided access to cutting-edge machines. They channeled the promise of computing into kinetic sculpture, plotter drawing, computer animation, and video installation. Photographers and architects likewise recognized these technologies' capacity to reconfigure human communities and the built environment.
Thinking Machines includes works by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, Waldemar Cordeiro, Charles Csuri, Richard Hamilton, Alison Knowles, Beryl Korot, Vera Molnár, Cedric Price, and Stan VanDerBeek, alongside computers designed by Tamiko Thiel and others at Thinking Machines Corporation, IBM, Olivetti, and Apple Computer. The exhibition combines artworks, design objects, and architectural proposals to trace how computers transformed aesthetics and hierarchies, revealing how these thinking machines reshaped art making, working life, and social connections.
Organized by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Giampaolo Bianconi, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.
It took Richard Ridel six months of tinkering in his workshop to create this contraption--a mechanical Turing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you're left hanging, wanting to know more, I'd recommend reading Ridel's fifteen page paper where he carefully documents why he built the wooden Turing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the construction.
If this video prompts you to ask, what exactly is a Turing Machine?, also consider adding this short primer by philosopher Mark Jago to your media diet.
Note: a proto-smart-architecture project by Cedric Price dating back from the 70ies, which sounds much more intersting than almost all contemporary smart architecture/cities proposals.
These lattest being in most cases glued into highly functional approaches driven by the "paths of less resistance-frictions", supported if not financed by data-hungry corporations. That's not a desirable future to my point of view.
"(...). If not changed, the building would have become “bored” and proposed alternative arrangements for evaluation (...)"
Cedric Price’s proposal for the Gilman Corporation was a series of relocatable structures on a permanent grid of foundation pads on a site in Florida.
Cedric Price asked John and Julia Frazer to work as computer consultants for this project. They produced a computer program to organize the layout of the site in response to changing requirements, and in addition suggested that a single-chip microprocessor should be embedded in every component of the building, to make it the controlling processor.
This would result in an “intelligent” building which controlled its own organisation in response to use. If not changed, the building would have become “bored” and proposed alternative arrangements for evaluation, learning how to improve its own evaluation, learning how to improve its own organisation on the basis of this experience.
The Brief
Generator (1976-79) sought to create conditions for shifting, changing personal interactions in a reconfigurable and responsive architectural project.
It followed this open-ended brief:
"A building which will not contradict, but enhance, the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere; has to be accessible to the public as well as to private guests; has to create a feeling of seclusion conducive to creative impulses, yet…accommodate audiences; has to respect the wildness of the environment while accommodating a grand piano; has to respect the continuity of the history of the place while being innovative."
The proposal consisted of an orthogonal grid of foundation bases, tracks and linear drains, in which a mobile crane could place a kit of parts comprised of cubical module enclosures and infill components (i.e. timber frames to be filled with modular components raging from movable cladding wall panels to furniture, services and fittings), screening posts, decks and circulation components (i.e. walkways on the ground level and suspended at roof level) in multiple arrangements.
When Cedric Price approached John and Julia Frazer he wrote:
"The whole intention of the project is to create an architecture sufficiently responsive to the making of a change of mind constructively pleasurable."
Generator Project
They proposed four programs that would use input from sensors attached to Generator’s components: the first three provided a “perpetual architect” drawing program that held the data and rules for Generator’s design; an inventory program that offered feedback on utilisation; an interface for “interactive interrogation” that let users model and prototype Generator’s layout before committing the design.
The powerful and curious boredom program served to provoke Generator’s users. “In the event of the site not being re-organized or changed for some time the computer starts generating unsolicited plans and improvements,” the Frazers wrote. These plans would then be handed off to Factor, the mobile crane operator, who would move the cubes and other elements of Generator. “In a sense the building can be described as being literally ‘intelligent’,” wrote John Frazer—Generator “should have a mind of its own.” It would not only challenge its users, facilitators, architect and programmer—it would challenge itself.
The Frazers’ research and techniques
The first proposal, associated with a level of ‘interactive’ relationship between ‘architect/machine’, would assist in drawing and with the production of additional information, somewhat implicit in the other parallel developments/ proposals.
The second proposal, related to the level of ‘interactive/semiautomatic’ relationship of ‘client–user/machine’, was ‘a perpetual architect for carrying out instructions from the Polorizer’ and for providing, for instance, operative drawings to the crane operator/driver; and the third proposal consisted of a ‘[. . .] scheduling and inventory package for the Factor [. . .] it could act as a perpetual functional critic or commentator.’
The fourth proposal, relating to the third level of relationship, enabled the permanent actions of the users, while the fifth proposal consisted of a ‘morphogenetic program which takes suggested activities and arranges the elements on the site to meet the requirements in accordance with a set of rules.’
Finally, the last proposal was [. . .] an extension [. . .] to generate unsolicited plans, improvements and modifications in response to users’ comments, records of activities, or even by building in a boredom concept so that the site starts to make proposals about rearrangements of itself if no changes are made. The program could be heuristic and improve its own strategies for site organisation on the basis of experience and feedback of user response.
Self Builder Kit and the Cal Build Kit, Working Models
In a certain way, the idea of a computational aid in the Generator project also acknowledged and intended to promote some degree of unpredictability. Generator, even if unbuilt, had acquired a notable position as the first intelligent building project. Cedric Price and the Frazers´ collaboration constituted an outstanding exchange between architecture and computational systems. The Generator experience explored the impact of the new techno-cultural order of the Information Society in terms of participatory design and responsive building. At an early date, it took responsiveness further; and postulates like those behind the Generator, where the influence of new computational technologies reaches the level of experience and an aesthetics of interactivity, seems interesting and productive.
Resources
John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture, Architectural Association Publications, London 1995. http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/exhibition.html
Frazer to C. Price, (Letter mentioning ‘Second thoughts but using the same classification system as before’), 11 January 1979. Generator document folio DR1995:0280:65 5/5, Cedric Price Archives (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture).
New MoMA show plots the impact of computers on architecture and design. Pictured here: “Menu 23" layout of Cedric Price's Generator Project. (Courtesy California College of the Arts archive)
The beginnings of digital drafting and computational design will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) starting November 13th, as the museum presents Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989. Spanning 30 years of works by artists, photographers, and architects, Thinking Machines captures the postwar period of reconciliation between traditional techniques and the advent of the computer age.
Organized by Sean Anderson, associate curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, and Giampaolo Bianconi, a curatorial assistant in the Department of Media and Performance Art, the exhibition examines how computer-aided design became permanently entangled with art, industrial design, and space planning.
Drawings, sketches, and models from Cedric Price’s 1978-80 Generator Project, the never-built “first intelligent building project” will also be shown. The response to a prompt put out by the Gilman Paper Corporation for its White Oak, Florida, site to house theater and dance performances alongside travelling artists, Price’s Generator proposal sought to stimulate innovation by constantly shifting arrangements.
Ceding control of the floor plan to a master computer program and crane system, a series of 13-by-13-foot rooms would have been continuously rearranged according to the users’ needs. Only constrained by a general set of Price’s design guidelines, Generator’s program would even have been capable of rearranging rooms on its own if it felt the layout hadn’t been changed frequently enough. Raising important questions about the interaction between a space and its occupants, Generator House laid the groundwork for computational architecture and smart building systems.
R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1970 work for Radical Hardware magazine will also appear. (Courtesy PBS)
Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 will be running from November 13th to April 8th, 2018. MoMA members can preview the show from November 10th through the 12th.
The visual optics plates were realized by scientist Thomas Young at that time, when he was studying light (wave theory of light). It took another 100 (and fifty) years to truly access the art world...
My question would be: what kind of "plates" are getting drawn today? (and this drives us to Leonardo, to art-sciences programs of different sorts, etc.)
"(...). Nevertheless, in the early-19th century Young put forth a number of theoretical reasons supporting the wave theory of light, and he developed two enduring demonstrations to support this viewpoint.
Note: I recently found out about this curious rosettacode.org projects that presents brief solutions of the same task in "as many languages as possible" (rem.: programming languages in this case). Therefore this name, Rosetta Code. Pointing of course to the Rosetta stone that was key to understand hieroglyphs.
The project presents itself as a "programming chrestomathy" site and counts 648 programing languages so far! (839 tasks done... and counting). Babelian (programming) task ... that could possibly help restore old coded pieces.
Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The idea is to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible, to demonstrate how languages are similar and different, and to aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another. Rosetta Code currently has 839 tasks, 202 draft tasks, and is aware of 648 languages, though we do not (and cannot) have solutions to every task in every language.
“My feeling is that the Bauhaus being conveniently located before the Second World War makes it safely historical,” says Dr. Peter Kapos. “Its objects have an antique character that is about as threatening as Arts and Crafts, whereas the problem with the Ulm School is that it’s too relevant. The questions raised about industrial design [still apply], and its project failed – its social project being particularly disappointing – which leaves awkward questions about where we are in the present.”
Kapos discovered the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, or Ulm School, through his research into the German manufacturing company Braun, the representation of which is a specialism of his archive, das programm. The industrial design school had developed out of a community college founded by educationalist Inge Scholl and graphic designer Otl Aicher in 1946. It was established, as Kapos writes in the book accompanying the Raven Row exhibition, The Ulm Model, “with the express purpose of curbing what nationalistic and militaristic tendencies still remained [in post-war Germany], and making a progressive contribution to the reconstruction of German social life.”
The Ulm School closed in 1968, having undergone various forms of pedagogy and leadership, crises in structure and personality. Nor the faculty or student-body found resolution to the problems inherent to industrial design’s claim to social legitimacy – “how the designer could be thoroughly integrated within the production process at an operational level and at the same time adopt a critically reflective position on the social process of production.” But while the Ulm School and the Ulm Model collapsed, it remains an important resource, “it’s useful, even if the project can’t be restarted, because it was never going to succeed, the attempt is something worth recovering. Particularly today, under very difficult conditions.”
Foundation Course exercise
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Helene Nonné-Schmidt 1955
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise
Student: Bertus Mulder
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise
Student: M. Buch
Instructor: Tomás Maldonado
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Max Bill, a graduate of the Bauhaus and then president of the Swiss Werkbund, arrived at Ulm in 1950, having been recruited partly in the hope that his international profile would attract badly needed funding. He tightened the previously broad curriculum, established by Marxist writer Hans Werner Richter, around design, mirroring the practices of his alma mater.
Bill’s rectorship ran from 1955-58, during which “there was no tension between the way he designed and the requirements of the market”. The principle of the designer as artist, a popular notion of the Bauhaus, curbed the “alienating nature of industrial production”. Due perhaps in part to the trauma of WW2, people hadn’t been ready to allow technology into the home that declared itself as technology.
“The result of that was record players and radios smuggled into the home, hidden in what looked like other pieces of furniture, with walnut veneers and golden tassels.” Bill’s way of thinking didn’t necessarily reflect the aesthetic, but it wasn’t at all challenging politically. “So in some ways that’s really straight-forward and unproblematic – and he’s a fantastic designer, an extraordinary architect, an amazing graphic designer, and a great artist – but he wasn’t radical enough. What he was trying to do with industrial design wasn’t taking up the challenge.”
Foundation Course exercise
Student: John Lottes
Instructor: Anthony Frøshaug
1958-59
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
In 1958 Bill stepped down having failed to “grasp the reality of industrial production simply at a technical and operational level… [or] recognise its emancipatory potential.” The industrial process had grown in complexity, and the prospect of rebuilding socially was too vast for single individuals to manage. It was no longer possible for the artist-designer to sit outside of the production process, because the new requirements were so complex. “You had to be absolutely within the process, and there had to be a team of disciplinary specialists — not only of material, but circulation and consumption, which was also partly sociological. It was a different way of thinking about form and its relation to product.”
After Bill’s departure, Tomás Maldonado, an instructor at the school, “set out the implications for a design education adequate to the realities of professional practice.” Changes were made to the curriculum that reflected a critically reflective design practice, which he referred to as ‘scientific operationalism’ and subjects such as ‘the instruction of colour’, were dropped. Between 1960-62, the Ulm Model was introduced: “a novel form of design pedagogy that combined formal, theoretical and practical instruction with work in so-called ‘Development Groups’ for industrial clients under the direction of lecturers.” And it was during this period that the issue of industrial design’s problematic relationship to industry came to a head.
“You had to be absolutely within the process, and there had to be a team of disciplinary specialists – not only of material, but circulation and consumption, which was also partly sociological. It was a different way of thinking about form and its relation to product.”
– Peter Kapos
In 1959, a year prior to the Ulm Model’s formal introduction, Herbert Lindinger, a student from a Development Group working with Braun, designed an audio system. A set of transistor equipment, it made no apologies for its technology, and looked like a piece of engineering. His audio system became the model for Braun’s 1960s audio programme, “but Lindinger didn’t receive any credit for it, and Braun’s most successful designs from the period derived from an implementation of his project. It’s sad for him but it’s also sad for Ulm design because this had been a collective project.”
The history of the Braun audio programme was written as being defined by Dieter Rams, “a single individual — he’s an important designer, and a very good manager of people, he kept the language consistent — but Braun design of the 60s is not a manifestation of his genius, or his vision.” And the project became an indication of why the Ulm project would ultimately fail, “when recalling it, you end up with a singular genius expressing the marvel of their mind, rather than something that was actually a collective project to achieve something social.”
An advantage of Bill’s teaching model had been the space outside of the industrial process, “which is the space that offers the possibility of criticality. Not that he exercised it. But by relinquishing that space, [the Ulm School] ended up so integrated in the process that they couldn’t criticise it.” They realised the contradiction between Ulm design and consumer capitalism, which had been developing along the same timeline. “Those at the school became dissatisfied with the idea of design furnishing market positions, constantly producing cycles of consumptive acts, and they struggled to resolve it.”
The school’s project had been to make the world rational and complete, industrially-based and free. “Instead they were producing something prison-like, individuals were becoming increasingly separate from each other and unable to see over their horizon.” In the Ulm Journal, the school’s sporadic, tactically published magazine that covered happenings at, and the evolving thinking and pedagogical approach of Ulm, Marxist thinking had become an increasingly important reference. “It was key to their understanding the context they were acting in, and if that thinking had been developed it would have led to an interesting and different kind of design, which they never got round to filling in. But they created a space for it.”
Foundation Course exercise
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Tomás Maldonado
1956
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise (detail)
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Tomás Maldonado
1956
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
“[A Marxian approach] would inevitably lead you out of design in some way. And the Ulm Model, the title of the Raven Row exhibition, is slightly ironic because it isn’t really a model for anything, and I think they understood that towards the end. They started to consider critical design as something that had to not resemble design in its recognised form. It would be nominally designed, the categories by which it was generally intelligible would need to be dismantled.”
The school’s funding was equally problematic, while their independence from the state facilitated their ability to validate their social purpose, the private foundation that provided their income was funded by industry commissions and indirect government funding from the regional legislator. “Although they were only partially dependent on government money, they accrued so much debt that in the end they were entirely dependent on it. The school was becoming increasingly radical politically, and the more radical it became, the more its own relation to capitalism became problematic. Their industry commissions tied them to the market, the Ulm Model didn’t work out, and their numbers didn’t add up.”
The Ulm School closed in 1968, when state funding was entirely withdrawn, and its functionalist ideals were in crisis. Abraham Moles, an instructor at the school, had previously asserted the inconsistency arising from the practice of functionalism under the conditions of ‘the affluent society’, “which for the sake of ever expanding production requires that needs remain unsatisfied.” And although he had encouraged the school to anticipate and respond to the problem, so as to be the “subject instead of the object of a crisis”; he hadn’t offered concrete ideas on how that might be achieved.
But correcting the course of capitalist infrastructure isn’t something the Ulm School could have been expected to achieve, “and although the project was ill-construed, it is productive as a resource for thinking about what a critical design practice could be in relation to capitalism.” What’s interesting about the Ulm Model today is their consideration of the purpose of education, and their questioning of whether it should merely reflect the current state of things – “preparing a workforce for essentially increasing the GDP; and establishing the efficiency of contributing sectors in a kind of diabolical utilitarianism.”
Ulm Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung
Foundation Course exercise (detail)
Student: Bertus Mulder
1956-57
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Tomás Maldonado
1956
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise (detail)
Student: Bertus Mulder
Date unknown
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Tomás Maldonado
1956
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Foundation Course exercise (detail)
Student: Hans von Klier
Instructor: Helene Nonné-Schmidt
Date unknown
Courtesy HfG-Archiv/Ulmer Museum
Note: interesting exhibition and economic setup (by Fala Atelier) for an exhibition about the metabolists in Lisbon --Nagakin Capsule Tower specifically--, in one of the many marvelous yet rotten "palaces" of the City!
Finding a place to live in Tokyo isn't easy. Most of the available options are expensive and usually located far from the center. Typologically, the Nakagin Capsule Tower continues to prove that it makes sense. Designed by Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, it represented a new typology and a different approach to the idea of urban renewal.
Nevertheless, forty years later, it is clear that something went wrong along the way. The building is getting emptier and several of the capsules are abandoned, rotten, leaking. Some of the owners want to demolish it; a few offer resistance. Each capsule was supposed to last 20 years but twice the time has passed.
Metabolism’s biggest icon is sick and stands today only as a remembrance of a future that never happened.
Anticlimax was an exhibition about the contemporary routine of a fallen hero. While presenting its current condition, the exhibition intended to illustrate the contemporary daily life of one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th Century.
Exhibiting the former metabolist superstar in Portugal was also a provocation and the layout for the exhibition was a necessary curatorial dead-end: presenting the Nakagin in a traditional way would be conceptually wrong. The exhibition happens in an almost negligent way, reflecting the condition of the building, bringing its sense of scale and repetition to the Sinel de Cordes Palace.
Note: following the previous post that mentioned the idea of spiritism in relation to personal data, or forgotten personal data, but also in relation to "beliefs" linked to contemporary technologies, here comes an interesting symposium (Machines, magie, médias) and post on France Culture. The following post and linked talk from researcher Mireille Berton (nearby University of Lausanne, Dpt of Film History and Aesthetics) are in French.
Cerisy : Machines, magie, médias (du 20 au 28 août 2016)
Les magiciens — de Robert-Houdin et Georges Méliès à Harry Houdini et Howard Thurston suivis par Abdul Alafrez, David Copperfield, Jim Steinmeyer, Marco Tempest et bien d’autres — ont questionné les processus de production de l’illusion au rythme des innovations en matière d’optique, d’acoustique, d’électricité et plus récemment d’informatique et de numérique.
Or, toute technologie qui se joue de nos sens, tant qu’elle ne dévoile pas tous ses secrets, tant que les techniques qu'elle recèle ne sont pas maîtrisées, tant qu’elle n’est pas récupérée et formalisée par un média, reste à un stade que l’on peut définir comme un moment magique. Machines et Magie partagent, en effet, le secret, la métamorphose, le double, la participation, la médiation. Ce parti pris se fonde sur l’hypothèse avancée par Arthur C. Clarke : "Toute technologie suffisamment avancée est indiscernable de la magie" (1984, p. 36).
L’émergence même des médias peut être analysée en termes d’incarnation de la pensée magique, "patron-modèle" (Edgar Morin, 1956) de la forme première de l’entendement individuel (Marcel Mauss, 1950). De facto, depuis les fantasmagories du XVIIIe siècle jusqu’aux arts numériques les plus actuels, en passant par le théâtre, la lanterne magique, la photographie, le Théâtrophone, le phonographe, la radio, la télévision et le cinéma, l’histoire des machineries spectaculaires croise celle de la magie et les expérimentations de ses praticiens, à l’affût de toute nouveauté permettant de réactualiser les effets magiques par la mécanisation des performances. C’est par l’étude des techniques d’illusion propres à chaque média, dont les principes récurrents ont été mis au jour par les études intermédiales et l’archéologie des médias, que la rencontre avec l’art magique s’est imposée.
Ce colloque propose d’en analyser leur cycle technologique : le moment magique (croyance et émerveillement), le mode magique (rhétorique), la sécularisation (banalisation de la dimension magique). Ce cycle est analysé dans sa transversalité afin d’en souligner les dimensions intermédiales. Les communications sont ainsi regroupées en sept sections : L’art magique ; Magie et esthétiques de l’étonnement ; Magie, télévision et vidéo ; Les merveilles de la science ; Magie de l’image, l’image et la magie ; Magie du son, son et magie ; Du tableau vivant au mimétisme numérique. La première met en dialogue historiens et praticiens de la magie et présente un état des archives sur le sujet. Les six sections suivantes font état des corrélations: magie/médias et médias/magie.
Docteure ès Lettres, Mireille Berton est maître d’enseignement et de recherche à la Section d’Histoire et esthétique du cinéma de l'Université de Lausanne (UNIL).
Ses travaux portent principalement sur les rapports entre cinéma et sciences du psychisme (psychologie, psychanalyse, psychiatrie, parapsychologie), avec un intérêt particulier pour une approche croisant histoire culturelle, épistémologie des médias et Gender Studies.
Outre de nombreuses études, elle a publié un livre tiré de sa thèse de doctorat intitulé Le Corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme autour de 1900 (L’Âge d’Homme, 2015), et elle a co-dirigé avec Anne-Katrin Weber un ouvrage collectif consacré à l’histoire des dispositifs télévisuels saisie au travers de discours, pratiques, objets et représentations (La Télévision du Téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie de l'audiovision, Antipodes, 2009). Elle travaille actuellement sur un manuscrit consacré aux représentations du médium spirite dans les films et séries télévisées contemporains (à paraître chez Georg en 2017).
L'intervention propose de revenir sur une question souvent traitée dans l’histoire des sciences et de l’occultisme, à savoir le rôle joué par les instruments de mesure et de capture dans l’appréhension des faits paranormaux. Une analyse de sources spirites parues durant les premières décennies du XXe siècle permet de mettre au jour les tensions provoquées par les dispositifs optiques et électriques qui viennent défier le corps tout-puissant du médium spirite sur son propre territoire. La rencontre entre occultisme et modernité donne alors naissance à la figure (discursive et fantasmatique) du médium "hypermédiatique", celui-ci surpassant toutes les possibilités offertes par les découvertes scientifiques.
Note: can a computer "fake" a human? (hmmm, sounds a bit like Mr. Turing test isn't it?) Or at least be credible enough --because it sounds pretty clear in this video, at that time, that it cannot fake a human and that it is m ore about voice than "intelligence"-- so that the person on the other side of the phone doesn't hang up? This is a funny/uncanny experiment involving D. Sherman at Michigan State University, dating back 1974 and certainly one of the first public trial (or rather social experiment) of a text to speech/voice synthesizer.
Beyond the technical performance, it is the social experiment that is probably even more interesting. It's intertwined and odd nature. You can feel in the voice of the person on the other side of the phone (at the pizza factory --Domino's pizza--) that he really doesn't know how to take it and that the voice sounds like something not heard before. A few trials were necessary before somebody took it "seriously".
Every year, the researchers, students, and technology users who make up the community of the Michigan State University Artificial Language Laboratory celebrate the anniversary of the first use of a speech prosthesis in history: the use by a man with a communication disorder to order a pizza over the telephone using a voice synthesizer. This high-tech sociolinguistic experiment was conducted at the Lab on the evening of December 4, 1974. Donald Sherman, who has Moebius Syndrome and had never ordered a pizza over the phone before, used a system designed by John Eulenberg and J. J. Jackson incorporating a Votrax voice synthesizer, a product of the Federal Screw Works Co. of Troy, Michigan. The inventor of the Votrax voice synthesizer was Richard Gagnon from Birmingham, MI.
The event was covered at the time by the local East Lansing cable news reporter and by a reporter from the State News. About seven years later, in 1981, a BBC production team produced a documentary about the work of the Artificial Language Laboratory and included a scene of a man with cerebral palsy, Michael Williams, ordering a pizza with a newer version of the Lab's speech system. This second pizza order became a part of the documentary, which was broadcast throughout the U.S. as part of the "Nova" science series and internationally as part of the BBC's "Horizon" series.
In January, 1982, the Nova show on the Artificial Language Lab was shown for the first time. The Artificial Language Lab held a premiere party in the Communication Arts and Sciences Building for all the persons who appeared in the program plus all faculty members of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences and their families. The Domino's company generously provided free pizzas for all the guests.
The following December, Domino's again provided pizzas for a party, again held at the Communication Arts building, to commemorate the first ordering of a pizza eight years earlier. The Convocation was held thereafter every year through 1988, each year receiving pizzas through the generous gift of Domino's.
A Communication Enhancement Convocation was held in 1999, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first pizza order.In addition to Dominos's contribution of pizzas, the Canada Dry Bottling Co. of Lansing provided drinks.The Convocations resumed in 2010 through 2012, when Dr. John Eulenberg advanced to Professor Emeritus status.
At each event, in addition to faculty and students, the convocation guests included local dignitaries from the MSU board of trustees and from the Michigan state legislature. Stevie Wonder, whose first talking computer and first singing computer were designed at the Artificial Language Lab, made telephone appearances and spoke with the youngsters using Artificial Language Lab technology through their
school district special education programs. MSU icons such as the football team, Sparty, and cheer leaders made appearances as well.
Now, through YouTube, we can relive this historical moment and take a thoughtful look back at 40 years of progress in the delivery of augmentative communication technology to persons with disabilities.
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