Description
How do human beings and human bodies participate in expressive communication technology, digital or otherwise? To consider this question, we will look at examples of technological mediation in history, literature, art, science, and pseudo-science. Topics will include Séances, Oracles, Operators, Automated & Automatic Writing Machines, Medical Imaging, and Computational Inscription. Readings will include works by Pynchon, Plato, Poe, Butler, Borges, Tiptree, Bioy-Casares, Kafka, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, among others.

1) 10-15 minutes.

Spend some time browsing through the following expressions of domestic spaces. Once you’ve looked through them all, pick one or two that you’d like to focus on.

2) 10-15 minutes. Answer the most relevant of the following questions by citing examples from the work you’ve chosen:

How do the concepts of “self” and “house” relate to each other in the space you’ve chosen? What kind of self is suggested by the contents of the space? What kind exterior/interior do you imagine would complement the space depicted? Is there a clear self that the space depicts, or is the place empty? Are you allowed to “enter in” or are you kept at bay? How? How mobile are you? How mobile is the house? Whose perspective do you follow—a character’s, the house’s, your own? How do words/text/image/sound participate in the construction of the self-house? How does it “feel” to “read” such spaces? What do they suggest to you? Finally, if a house can be read as a symbol for the self, how does the ability to enter into and explore domestic spaces online effect the reading of this symbol?

3) 10-15 minutes

Post your comments to the forum / report back.

Domestic Spaces

[the house]: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/flanagan__thehouse.html
“pieces of herself” http://www.julietdavis.com/studio/piecesofherself/
domestic : http://www.maryflanagan.com/domestic/

Home Page:
fall of the site of marsha:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/wittig__the_fall_of_the_site_of_marsha/index.html
Jeanie Finley, home maker: http://www.jeaniefinlay.com/homemaker/view/view.html
“mighty mighty” http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/meyer/mighty.html

Larger Spaces
The Flatness:
http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/theflatness/
mall as a machine for living: http://www.wdog.com/blackburn/Architect/
Homeland: hypermedia berlin: http://www.berlin.ucla.edu/

On Houses

“The home is a symbol, so that even though we recognize it and “know it,” it will always defy a rational deconstruction and complete explication of its meaning content” (David Benjamin, 3).

“A home is a “symbol of how people see themselves and how they want to be seen by others” (Carole Després, 98).

“The house is frequently presented as a symbol of the self—a representation much influenced by C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud.”

“I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories.  It was “my house.”  I found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old paintings…Descending the stairs I reached the ground floor.  There everything was much older…Everywhere it was rather dark.  I came upon a heavy door, and opened it…I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar.  Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room…[June descends another stairway of narrow stone steps into a cave where he discovers to human skulls].”(Jung 158-159).

While Freud obsessed about the significance of the skulls Jung had discovered in the cellar of his dream house, insisting that they represented Jung’s death wishes concerning his wife and mother-in-law, an increasingly irritated Jung decides instead that the house represents the psyche, his psyche.  For example, the salon symbolizes consciousness, while the lower floors—and cellar—depict levels and layers of unconsciousness.

Freud…describes a “suite of rooms to explain the structure of the unconscious:  Let us compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals.”  He explains that consciousness resides in the drawing room; a watchman who stands on the threshold between the two rooms examines the mental impulses and refuses to admit them to the drawing room if they displease him.  It has subsequently become commonplace to interpret houses…as settings for an emerging interior life (Rybczynski 36).

GIBSON ON TECHNOLOGY
“Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn’t been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn’t have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn’t a decision.” (http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp)

GIBSON ON CELEBRITY
“I’ve met, in the course of my career, some big rock celebrities. I met Bowie, and Jagger, and I’m kind of on speaking terms with U2 now. I was always very intrigued by what that’s like, that whole bizarre business of the enormous mechanism that surrounds an artist like that. You go through this maze of smaller and smaller circles. And when you get to the center, there’s just a guy. But it’s a guy who’s kind of charged with the energy of this system — and he isn’t just a guy anymore, there’s something else going on there.

The suggestion is there that what really facilitates the marriage between Rez and the Idoru is not so much the nanotech Maguffin everyone’s been chasing through the novel, but the fact that in some ways, Rez is already more like the Idoru than anyone knows. There’s already an aspect of Rez that is exactly what she is. The guy wandering around in the unconstructed black Japanese suit is almost a vestigial organ of the real Rez.” (http://www.salon.com/weekly/gibson3961014.html)

ROLAND BARTHES ON GARBO
“Viewed as a transition the face of Garbo reconciles two iconographic ages, it assures the passage from awe to charm. As is well known, we are today at the other pole of this evolution: the face of Audrey Hepburn, for instance is individualized, not only because of its peculiar thematics (woman as child, woman as kitten) but also because of her person, of an almost unique specification of the face, which has nothing of the essence left in it, but is constiuted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions. As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.”

CICERO / PERSONA
Quid potest esse iam fictum quam versus, quam scaena, quam fabulae? Tamen in hoc genere saepe ispse vidi, ut ex persona mihi ardere oculi hominis histrionis viderentur spondalia illa dicentis…

What could be so artificial as poetry, as the stage, as drama? Nevertheless, in that medium I have myself often seen how the eyes of the man acting seemed to me to blaze through the mask, when he intoned these lines… (Cicero, de Oratore 2.46.193; qtd./translated in C. W. Marshall’s Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy 128)

BRUCE STERLING on SCI-FI
“I resent it when my ideas, which I have gone to some pains to develop and explore, are dismissed as unconscious yearnings or a fun-house reflection of the contemporary milieu. My writings about the future are not ‘about the future’ in a strict sense, but they are about my ideas of the future. They are not allegories” (Science Fiction in the 20th Century 97).

SPACES OF PLACES AND FLOWS
“Our societies are constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interactions, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of social organization: they are the expression of the processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life. … Thus, I propose the idea that there is a new spatial form characteristic of social practices that dominate and shape the network society: the space of flows. The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows. By flows I understand purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors.” (Manuel Castells, Rise of the Network Society (1996), 412)