cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (04/29/91)
>From The WELL, with permission of Kenny Meyer
(kennym@well.sf.ca.us):
Topic 1: VR CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS AND ADMINISTRIVIA
# 83: Kenny Meyer (kennym) Sun, Apr 28, '91 (00:01) 67 lines
I attended the Cyberspace II conference. Two 14 hour days of
extremely fast talk. I never met a salesman who could hold a
candle to those deconstructionist historians and social
theorists. I was encouraged to over-hear a couple people say, "I
almost understood parts of what they said." That's the best
claim I could make.
There was a good balance of presenters: liberal arts scholars,
engineers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs. I understand
that many made encore appearances from last year. It would be
tough to select any particular presentation as a highlight. There
wasn't a dog in the lot. Here's the presentations that stick in my
mind:
* Ann Lasko-Harvill: Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality.
* Stuart Moulthrop: Paradise for Paranoids: Critical
Hermeneutics of Cyberspace.
* Brenda Laurel/Scott Fisher: Art and Artistry in
Telepresence.
* Kathleen Biddick: Uncolonizing History in Cyberspace.
* Chip Morningstar/Randy Farmer: Cyberspace colonies
* Don Byrd: Cyberspace and Procioceptive Coherence: A
Proposal.
I apologize for only dropping the titles. The thought of
summarizing all the talks is a little daunting. Rather than the
specifics, let me offer few general observations which might
characterize the event.
* The conference was run with a light touch. The atmosphere
was open and conducive to all kinds of discussion.
Sometimes it felt like no one was in control. This was
especially true during the Friday night panel-discussion
which became almost anarchistic when audience members
began shouting demands of the panelists. However, the
fact that the talks and meals ran more or less according
to schedule belied this feeling. The chair, Sandy Stone,
deserves a lot of credit for knowing when to show
restraint.
* The scholars tended to be pessimistic and the engineers
optimistic. The scholars made repeated warnings to the
engineers and entrepreneurs that the development of VR
technology was about to create a litany of social ills.
As the conference wore on and the number of scholarly
admonitions increased, the latter group seemed to grow
more restive and defensive.
* There was a great deal of discussion about VR/Cyberspace
being the domain of the white middle class male; a
predicament which was certain to lead to dire
consequences. Considering the "maturity" of the industry,
I believe these concerns were grossly overstated and
regretted the absence of an informed, articulate while
middle class male apologist. I was not alone; in
discussion at the closing dinner, I heard a speaker who
had warned us against white middle class male hegemony
say the that problem, while real, had been overstated.
I find this especially interesting in light of the related
comments in April's ESQUIRE. It might be a trend.
In retrospect, I think the conference generated a lot of energy.
Not the kind that makes people go out and build things; rather, the
pent-up kind that makes them want to talk the kind of talk that
doesn't stop until it has exhausted the possibilities -- talk as a
way of catharsis. It seems like there was a tremendous
commotion, with little visible effect. It was a different kind of
conference for me, but maybe that's just because I have not
attended an "academic" conference before.
-- jet@karazm.math.uh.edu ("J. Eric Townsend") (04/29/91)
In article <1991Apr28.231146.19029@milton.u.washington.edu> cyberoid@milton.u.wa shington.edu (Robert Jacobson) writes: >I attended the Cyberspace II conference. Two 14 hour days of For those of us that couldn't make it, is there anyway to get a copy of the proceedings? -- J. Eric Townsend - jet@uh.edu - bitnet: jet@UHOU - vox: (713) 749-2120 Skate UNIX or bleed, boyo... (UNIX is a trademark of Unix Systems Laboratories). [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Allucquere "Sandy" Stone, the CC2 organizer, can be reached at virtual@ucscc.ucsc.edu . I suggest your contact her regarding proceedings...unless someone knows better. -- Bob Jacobson]
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) (05/02/91)
Reposted from The WELL (415-332-6106), by permission of Don Byrd:
Topic 14: Origins/Usage of Virtual, Cyber, and Hyper
#226: Don Byrd (bird) Wed, May 1, '91 (08:07) 81 lines
SOME THOUGHTS ON CYBERCON 2
SANTA CRUZ, APRIL 19-20, 1991
I should say that I was a speaker at Cybercon 2, so I will note
only that I was astoundingly perceptive and leave myself out of it.
It was an important gathering not for anything in particular
which was said, but for the recognition that, increasingly, the
technology is right up against the hardest philosophic questions.
It is, in a sense, technology's loss of innocence, and it is a little
sad. There is something charming, if the story is true, that the data
glove was developed because a couple of teen-agers wanted a better air
guitar. But I just finished reading P.R. Masani's *Norbert Wiener,
1894-1964* (Birkhauser Verlag, 1990), which is excellent in a dry,
straight-ahead way, and, as it makes clear, the philosophical snake
has been in the technological garden all along.
However, I think its effects on the cultural-theoretical side
(where I come from) is going to be good. It has been possible to jaw
and jaw, endlessly; implementation has never been an issue.
I found the conversations between talks perhaps the best
thing, and I wish there had been more time for that. The whole
organization of not just information (which is a problem in itself) but
KNOWLEDGE as such is going to have to get redone, and the fact that
literary critics were talking to engineers is the first sign that it might
actually be possible. In *Cybernetics*, Wiener says that "the whole
mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly
posed questions." But the NEW questions have still not been
adequately stated. The engineers still tend to mechanists and the
cultural-studies people still tend to be vitalists. It seems to be that
some head way on this problem was made in Santa Cruz.
The difference between mechanism and vitalism, to sum up in
a few words a controversy which has been going on since the 17th
Century is this: mechanists assume that all of the virtualities are
implicit in the variables of a function; vitalists assume that for living
things (and for things which living things construct by way of
observation) the functions themselves change. The arguments,
therefore, center around the question of time's reversibility (a movie
running backwards of a mechanism will still exhibit quantities
computable by the same functions) and questions of purpose and
teleology. A mechanism's purpose is inherent in its design, a living
thing or organism revises itself in relation to its ever changing and
non-reversible purposes.
The reason western thinking has been relentlessly dualistic is
that these are both important aspects of our experience, and it is not
possible to give a coherent account of both from either point of view.
The conclusion that I draw, after little more than a week to
digest the intensities of Cybercon 2, is that machines and life are now
so intertwined that we cannot go on with the pretense that they belong
to separate realms.
Neither mechanism nor vitalism "win." The entire problem is
pushed up to a higher level of abstraction. Working in this new space
is not going to be easy, because both mechanism and vitalism have
both functioned as religions, that is, beliefs which give finals
answers. Those from the mechanistic tradition, which want to make
things work now, will be impatient; the people from the vitalistic
tradition will have to put their thoughts into forms which can be
implemented. Everyone is likely to be grumpy about the situation.
A good start on the philosophic problems was made at the
Macy Conferences, organized by Warren McCulloch and Wiener, in
the 1940's, but it did not go far enough, and frankly I think its way
was blocked because it tended to draw more heavily on the
mechanistic than the vitalistic tradition. Gregory Bateson and
Margaret Mead presented the culturalists point of view, but there
were other people around, such as the poet Charles Olson (with whom
Wiener was acquainted, though I do not know how well) who could
have held their own in that heady atmosphere.
At any rate, everyone circled their intellectual wagons during
the Eisenhower era. Cybernetics and information theory provided
fashionable vocabularies for various disciplines (they were like the
Deconstructionism of that time), but the old disciplinary structures
did not break-down, and so the kind of metasystemic study which was
required did not emerge.
Instead we got a new, jivey computerized version of Cartesian
mechanism in Cognitive Science, and a new, nervous version of
romantic vitalism in cultural studies, both essentially nostalgias.
The important thing about Cybercon 2, it seems to me, is that it
was drawing back to the place where we lost in the late 1940's. I
would like to see the discussion move further in that direction at
Cybercon 3 in Montreal.