Had to laugh at this article
[From Multimedia -- who cares? - Australian Macworld]
But serioulsy, what of the early experiences of computer generated art, sound, video, photography animations and so on. Well there is this book which has a special place on my bookshelf,
"The New Media Reader" (The MIT Press)
Even so something I've noticed in my cyber travels, particularly on flickr over the last 4 years or so is that notions of memory and identity don't seem to rank very high on most folks radar. As an artist it's often all I care about; in a creative sense anyway.
well, let's take the christmas (or chinese new year, thanksgiving, eid, diwali or whatever) slideshow as an example.
for 99.9% of folks it's "just" a record of an historical event, one to be looked back upon in future times when the grandkids are grown up and reminiscing with us grandfolks about good times past.
i reckon it's simply a continuation of the "oral history" and "rock art" tradition of indigenous people 60-40,000 years ago, which really were them just recording significant (and mundane - last night's dinner and the killing thereof?) events that happened in their lives. then we started making photographs and sticking them in albums. then we started making home movies on super8. then we started making digital videos, adding a cheery xmas mp3 soundtrack and emailing/uploading/mms'ing it around the world for others to "share" (or have it inflicted upon them, possibly).
the technoology has changed, but our brains - our eyes and ears, optic and auditory nerves, our hippocampi, frontal lobes and amygdalas - haven't changed in 100,000 years.
similarly, i'm not sure these new technologies will "impact on our memories of who we are" any more or less than drawing on a rockface did for early homo sapiens sapiens.
now, once we start routinely implanting chips in people's brains to help them hear / see / move / sense / remember the world around them much more clearly, or just start making transgenic humans to do the same, i think we'll have moved on to a point where we can say we'll experience ourselves, and the world, a lot differently than we currently do.
yeah but I still wonder how this technology impacts on us and our memories of who we are, after all aren't these defining factors that make us humans?
i like this quote - "Of course they can e-mail a slideshow of Christmas pix with sound and music over to England. Straight after it happens. On a phone. It's just stuff -- get over it, Dad."
my old man called me on skype the other day, but i happened to be out on my bike, so he called my mobile using skype credit. he couldn't get over the fact that i was in the back streets of singapore and he was in his loungeroom and we were talking over the interwebs. craaaazy shit, man.
and btw, he liked the peter russel clark video i sent him via youtube.