What became known as a mouse was demonstrated in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The idea occurred to Engelbart in 1964, when he attended a computer graphics conference and wanted to have a way to move the cursor on the screen. He then worked with engineers and drafters at Stanford to […]
Newark, New Jersey, on Lunaape Land
I am in the New York City area this week to celebrate the centennial of the Woolworth Building, a skyscraper designed by the architect Cass. Gilbert. A group of folks, including especially Helen Post Curry and Chuck Post, along with Barbara Christen, have been key organizers of this ambitious week of activities. On April 24, […]
Bondville Stop of the “Inter-Urban” Project
What do a panel truck, a jib crane and the remains of a wooden grain elevator have in common? All are being repurposed by an energetic, volunteer team of sculptors and designers for Urbana Land Arts Inter-Urban project. When it is all finished (soon–in August 2012!), it will be a mobile exhibition space, with the […]
The Performance of Information Flows
Information & Culture: A Journal of History has accepted my article on Stephen Willats for a forthcoming issue 47:4(November/December 2012), to be exact. It’s one of the reasons why my blogging has been so sporadic. Here’s a wordle of the article.
The Resilience of Meaning
Stephen Willats is interested in both information networks and networks of meaning, each connected to real people in real locations. In Willats’ art, these networks intersect and overlap in complex ways; words, pauses, gestures, posture, and spaces between, all contribute both information and meaning to exchanges that are captured as “Data Stream: A Portrait of […]
In Need of Some Sociological Imagination
I spent much of my week distracted and distraught by the demonstrations and confrontations in London, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, to name some of the locations of unrest this August. Perhaps I was particularly tuned in to that part of the world because in June I was working in London and Bristol, and in […]
Regional Relationships
The collaborative artist team, Regional Relationships (RR), has just launched its first edition! Matthew Friday, the first artist commissioned by RR, has been working in southern Ohio with flooded mines. He writes of “interlocking networks of abandoned mines” that number about 12,000. A bacteria has colonized the flooded underground areas and, as part of their […]
Notes on “Archiving Memory in the Age of Digital Technologies”
I am still playing conference catch-up. Between September 23 and October 3, 2010, I went to two conferences, the Imagining America conference in Seattle, and the Society for the History of Technology conference in Tacoma. For now, I just want to share my notes on the keynote talk on September 24, 2010 by Diana Taylor […]
“Meating” in WordPress
I know a lot of people who blog. Lately, I have been blogging on other websites, which I think is a delightful way of connecting. Kasalina Nabakooza is a photographer and a recent graduate in Comparative Literature from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn and began an exchange with me via email. Her website […]
Dawoud Bey at CAA
After a really crazy spring semester, I am finally cleaning my home office, finding tidbits here and there that I intended to blog about, but never did. Dawoud Bey was the keynote speaker at this year’s College Art Association conference. He teaches photography at Columbia College in Chicago, and runs a speaker series there. Bey […]
