Wow, long timelines

Sometimes I am amazed at how long journals still take to get articles and reviews into print. Given how quickly things get posted online, I would have thought they would all be changing their practices in order to not get left behind entirely. I mention this by way of introducing the following review. i wrote it for the European Journal of cultural studies and have just learned they expect to publish it in 2010. It's a book review, not a 20 page article requiring peers to read it. But anyway, I don't care that much, except I think the book really deserved more attention sooner, so I'm re-posting the link to my review (which I blogged a couple of months ago) here.

I also just learned that a chapter I proposed on the FB stuff has been accepted for publication in the Handbook of Digital Research (at least the proposal has been accepted meaning, I can send a full chapter, which I think will be also be reviewed), so that's cool.

On the downside, My NEH grant proposal has been rejected. I asked for the feedback, but haven't yet received it. I was approved for an internal grant of a few thousand dollars, but our school is so broke at the moment, there is no money to actually fund that grant program. Unless they find money somewhere in the next 2 weeks, it seems I will not be able to make the trip I had planned to the Netherlands in late January. I'm pretty discouraged about that because it will delay my work on my book projects by at least 6 months and they have already been held back by the fact that I can only visit each time for 1-3 weeks, have only been able to afford 3 visits in the last 2 years, and have such a heavy workload the rest of the time that (like almost all of my colleagues) I have almost no time for research anyway.

Lack of funding and too much work would be problems for any academic, but when you actually love your research like I do (as opposed to just doing it because your school requires some amount, and I personally know several people who take that approach) this is especially awful. If all I cared about was meeting a requirement, I could argue that the requirement was unreasonable under these conditions and have a powerful case, but I love the research. So much so that I've been doing it on my own time and out of my own pocket. --My school doesn't have a really good internal grant program to support junior faculty, nor are any time or money allotted to everyone just to support research.

So it boils down to my work being accepted by my peers for publications and presentations, but if I want to do the work and travel to present it, I have to pay for it myself because academic research is not sufficiently valued by the public to support it (not just mine, but most scholars') generally. Maybe I need to just leave the country. :P

Florian's moment of revelation

Florian at Ars Electronica 2007.

Note, visit Ars Electronica 2007 for more info. about Florian winning the Prix Ars prize for theory.


I was still a student in 1995, in Comparative Literature, and there was a conference in Berlin. It wasn't really a conference so much as a public culture event, and it was called Soft-Moderna --soft modernism and basically it was organized by people from the American Studies program from the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, and it imported the whole Brown University Hyperfiction discourse. So it was about literature and the internet and computing, but heavily based in the whole hypertext-hyperfiction paradigm. And bringing together Robert Coover for example and some German people who were doing early experiments in that field. And you could see the whole helplessness of people there, and they also operated in the new media paradigm so they asked a couple of media journalists and media studies people to be on this panel and discuss this whole thing. And you could see this complete helplessness. And I was just this young student and I just stood up and asked critical questions. I didn't talk so long, maybe two minutes or so, but I was really critical of what they had said. And then basically the organizer of the conference said well, you seem to know more about that stuff than the people we had on the panel, so do you want to be in the next conference? So that was actually my first public lecture and I was on a panel with Friedrich Kittler (!) and Andy Müller-Maguhn the spokesperson from the chaos computer club. And from there I got writing commissions and I gut sucked into this whole field.

This is a short one, but next time I'll be covering what Florian likes about the field, his concerns about the art being produced, and his own role.

I'm interested though to learn how closely connected new media and hyperfiction were early on and how hyperfiction/text was really one of the basic paradigms because today in the US, hyperfiction seems like a narrow genre that a few people are really getting into, like Nick Montfort, but at least on the conference circuit it seems to have lost it's place as being so basic, being something everyone knew about and discussed.

Florian Cramer on the problem of new media paradigms

Florian at Worm in Rotterdam, Summer 2007
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

We moved on to discuss "new media" as a discipline and I mentioned how both Sher Doruff and Renee Turner had said one thing that attracted them (among other characteristics) was the lack of constraints on the field, because no body knew what was possible or not, and no one expected or required that any particular methodology be used. I'm afraid I also indulged in a mini-rant about how often I've seen presentations that were basically just descriptions of the speakers encounter with some situation involving new media, and just stopped at that--no analysis, no theory, no further data... Ahem. Anyway, Florian (as usual) had a far more thoughtful take on this issue.

I go even deeper than that and say that there is a lot in the so-called new media field, especially in the more alternative, or activist, or off-mainstream field, a kind of naive continuity of cybernetics. What do I mean by that? Well cybernetics in the 1950s and the 1960s was basically the idea that we operate with a notion of system-feedback-control and that these are descriptors that we could commonly apply to both artificial and natural systems. So that means we can analyze a society in terms of feedback, control or whatever. We can describe human organisms, we can describe politics, but we can also describe a machine.

And here I noted we had arrived right at Katherine Hayles! Florian agreed and continued.

Then what I see in the so-called new media field is that it was from the same paradigm except that it doesn't work with this classical behaviorist model which is really about almost totalitarian control fantasies, but their model is something like the rhizome. But the rhizome is just another cybernetic model and it is based on the same idea of using that structure in order to compare the internet to human society, etc etc etc. And that is something I find very questionable and I also want to do more critical writing on. And I think there is little reflection and little awareness of the continuity of these cybernetic paradigms. And nobody questions for example the notion of "system." System is a highly speculative construct. I mean you say we are systems, society is a system, the human body is a system, and a computer is a system. But I think this kind of rhetoric obscures and clouds more than it actually helps to analyze things and I think we have to go beyond that. For me, really critical media studies would be to question both notions.

But I see when I say this that I'm really making myself enemies. And even with people with whom I wouldn't have thought it. Well I thought they also come from a really critical camp. But it's really astonishing to see how deeply these paradigms are really embedded into the whole field.

So now, after these two entries, we are about 17 minutes into the interview, and I already feel like I've swallowed a rich media text! In the next entry we finally get to the actually reasons Florian got into this work.

The secret origins of Florian Cramer

Florian during his interview
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Ok, there aren't really any secrets but I haven't seen any really biographical interviews with Florian anywhere else, so maybe it will be some kind of revelation. :-) I've known Florian for a long time now, about 15 years, but when working on my projects in the Netherlands, I realized we had never talked very explicitly about his own history with technology, art, culture, etc. --For reasons that will become clear, I am not using the term New Media.

In fact my first question was how Florian got involved with new media to begin with, and this led immediately to a a lengthy and detailed explanation of the problems with the term from a historical perspective. I will try to encapsulate it:

• First, new media means something totally different in the US than in Europe. Here it means digital or computer media, ala Lev Manovich, but in Europe TV and radio are often included in that, in fact, from a historical perspective, all media is new at some point.
• Second, the terms medium and media are being used incorrectly throughout the field. For example, if we speak of radio, one of the earliest technologies to be discussed as a medium, then technically the medium, the carrier of radio waves, is air. This was then extended metonymically to include the waves themselves, then further expanded to include the devices themselves, the senders, and even the receivers (that is the people sending and receiving). So that the term now encompasses so much, it's not even very useful.

I explained that while I agreed with this critique, I've been using the term as the most broadly understood as covering the territory I mean to explore, but I am coming to believe that it's really time to dispense with it altogether. At any rate, I reiterated my question, how did he get started?

According to Florian he started by programing his own computers when he was 13, and in fact might be considered to have been doing the same stuff for 25 years: he used computers to generate random poetry which he published in his own punk fanzine. :-) The most fascinating thing for him then was the random generator, though of course now that he's "older and wiser" he knows that the randomness of a computer is not true randomness; it's "pre-determined chance." This shaped his interest; the kind of meta reality, textuality, emergence of code, and also the connection to society and all the arts.

But back to the timeline; I asked how at this starting point at 13, in 1982 how he even had a computer. Through friends he started using them, especially an older friend who used computers to trigger the light show for his music--all of this was programmed in Basic.

But his interest in computers went up and down; in the very early 90s he was on the internet but found it really boring; it was all controlled by system administrators and not much was going on. Now he reads papers by his students that glorify the old days, he says "oh but you couldn't do much then; you couldn't use your own server or install your own software; you could only dial up the university mainframe."

I contrasted this to Sher Doruff's experience that people felt even a sense of wonder at being able to connect at all. But of course she is older than Florian or I and so had a different set of expectations about what might be possible. Further, and I think this is a crucial factor affecting people's attitudes toward computers and "new media," Florian has always been quite skeptical about the technology itself and the promise it might hold. (A skepticism I share.) As he puts it:

They're not the perfect machines and they're not the dream machines, and this is what also cripples the whole new media field. Basically there have been all these kinds of utopian expectations. The first machine I had was incredibly primitive; it had 1 kb of memory. But today's machines cannot really do more. And the structure of programming is not at all different, it's just more comfortable. The machines have become faster but they haven't become smarter. And what also surpised me, when I came to the Netherlands, is that even more than in other parts of the world, is the expectation that somehow computers will become smarter or less deterministic. And you can name those expectations with certain names such as artificial intelligence --where computers are not just stupid sytactic machines, but become semantic machines that have a true understanding. Or artificial life; that you have something like emergence , or whatever, out of computers. And the third one I think is new media. The whole idea, especially in the 1990s with the whole virtual reality nonsense, is that somehow through multi-media interfaces, the machine wouldn't be this whole command-line deterministic thing, but would become more intuitive, less deterministic.... but if you're a smart computer user you know that a mouse click is the same as typing a command. The logic remains the same.

So that is Florian's take on new media as such, and a tiny bit about how he himself got involved. But in the next part we talked much more about the actual conditions of the field (however one names it) and about his own history, from being a graduate student in comparative literature to his current role as Director of the Media Design MA course at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Brenno de Winter

B. de Winter
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

I should also note that Brenno is starting to establish quite a journalistic reputation when it comes to reporting on IT and issues of privacy, freedom on information, and related matters. For example, he has relentlessly pursued the privacy problems with the OV Chipkaart. You can see the most recent article at WebWereld--all in Dutch though.

An interesting thing about Brenno's work is how he manages the rhetorical frame around these issues in order to be more persuasive. Rather than using the usual hacker image and discourse which is scary and paranoid, all about protecting individual's privacy, instead he talks about protecting data in more business-like terms which are far more appealing to government and business types, but in the end lead to the same desired results. An interesting example of someone co-opting corporate language and discourse in the inverse of the way corporations often try to co-opt user discourse.

Finally, Brenno de Winter

Having got through everything I want to say for now about IR9, I hope to finish with my summer interviews--it's not too long now until I go back to NL for more interviews, so I have to get these done!

So actually one of the earliest interviews I did in the summer was with Brenno de Winter, who I actually first learned of through his podcasts and and website, Laura Speaks Dutch. --That's a great resource for learning Dutch, by the way. Strangely, he turned out to be the one who had translated the instructions for how to use GPG with Mac mail and when I realized he had done these two totally different but helpful things, emailed to thank him. Once I learned more about his work in IT security and as an IT journalist, I decided to interview him. Also, we've gotten to be friends, so it was nice to meet in person finally anyway.

Brenno has a fairly classic history with technology, from the gender standpoint. Like many male geeks, he started very young and was coding before age 10. But beyond that, I'd have to say he violates most other stereotypes about male geeks or hackers. He tends to wear preppy clothes, is quite sociable, has a very positive attitude toward people at all skill levels when it comes to technology, as long as they are trying to educate themselves, and he shows no hostility at all toward girl geeks. In fact he's very supportive.

Our conversation was not so focused because his work is really outside the new media stuff I usually look at, but we did have a very interesting discussion of what the atmosphere was like in the open source and hacker communities and how it might have changed over time. He felt that when he first got involved, it was very community-spirited, and even described himself as feeling tearful at some evnts, because he was so moved by how everyone cooperated and how warmly people behaved toward each other. Over time though he feels this has diminished and gave the example of his own efforts to found a house in Amsterdam where hackers could live for free. He met with a group of them and offered to help them find funding, which he thought might be fairly easy. But because the group could not reach any agreement at all about how the whole thing might work, it just collapsed and went nowhere.

This really seemed to echo some of how William Uricchio has described his own frustrations in trying to organize new media scholars in the Netherlands for everyones mutual benefit. I wonder if no longer being such small and beleaguered has actually made it harder for people in these groups to unite. This is a fairly common problem when a group that has been outcast starts to gain social currency; since they no longer have to spend all their enrgy and resources to survive, room opens to argue about how to spend the "excess." Or everyone gains a little power and security, and suddenly they have something to lose, and so they become territorial.

I guess no matter how technology changes, in some ways, people never do.

Anyway, nowadays Brenno is working on a project called Small Sister that aims to educate people about privacy issues and provide tools with which they can guard their privacy in these frightening days of increasing data-retention. It's already a cool project just in the way it collects together so much useful info about protecting your privacy, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they cook up themselves. He'll be speaking at 253C in December, so if you are around Berlin, go see him.

Nancy Mauro-Flude Youthful Veteran of Dutch New Media

Nancy Mauro-Flude
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

As mentioned earlier, I spoke with Nancy and Audrey together and this is Nancy's half of that conversation, plus info from a few, brief, subsequent chats.

I had been thinking of Nancy as part of the new generation in the Dutch new media art scene, but in fact she's been involved for 15 years though she only finished her MA at Piet Zwart in Spring 2007. Now on the one hand, maybe I am just ignorant, but also wonder why have I not heard of her before? I'm tempted to think this supports my contention that's women's participation is just not being documented. But in fact the scene is not very well documented overall. I will need to look at many examples before I can say for sure that one group of participants has been differently reported than another.

Anyway, Nancy has been on the scene for quite some time but in this conversation we mostly talked about the Genderchangers and differences between that environment and her experiences learning about tech in other venues. Nancy didn't seem to feel she had encountered as much impatience over her lack of tech experience in academic programs, but she took it for granted that she'd had to prove herself to "the boys" in other tech groups, or just generally techie guys.

I find very surprising how little attention she seems to have garnered, because she has been doing interesting, technically ambitious work for quite some time, yet doesn't seem to get what I would consider the attention she deserves. Particularly interesting to me are the projects that combine a performance, which is ephemeral, with creation of an artistic tool which may have many future uses. For example, one of her most recent projects is Bag Lady. Follow this link to a description/review by Mirko Schaefer.

I need to talk more with Nancy, and get the story of those 15 years.

A younger generation of women using tech-- the Gender Changers

Audrey Samson
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

OK, finally I'm on the last women I spoke with on this last trip, Audrey Samson and Nancy Mauro-Flude. This joint interview was less formal and in depth because we had trouble finding times when they could meet and eventually met altogether for just about and hour. They'll be among the first with whom I follow up. I originally met Nancy and Audrey last summer when they were graduating from the Piet Zwart Media Design MA program. I had been impressed by both of their projects and was interested over the subsequent year to see that they were both involved with the Genderchangers as well as continuing with their own work.

Audrey grew up in Canada and got her pilot's license before going to school for a BA in Art and Design. She didn't do too much with computers at first, apart from learning skills that might make her more employable. One of her ongoing concerns is how people communicate and she's interested now in how different technologies can shape and facilitate that. When I asked about what she had observed or experience around gender, she felt there were definite stereotypes. She felt she had to prove her tech savvy to men sometimes--for someone who can fly a plane, this seems especially tiresome. More than that, when she was learning to code, she felt that the men around her got impatient if she "slowed them down" by needing more or different explanation.

Now she is working with the Genderchangers and she has felt that Genderchangers is more comfortable as a place to learn than what she has experienced before. Though Audrey has had less experience and less time to reflect, I was interested to see that again time seems important, or in this case, speed. I'll be speaking further with Audrey to see how things look to her as she continues teaching. ok, next time I'll continue with Nancy.

Finishing up with Marianne

So I will get back to this at last and wrap things up from this interview a little more quickly so I can get to the next ones of the women, plus I still have Brenno and Florian to add, and I then have to actually do the interviews with Jaromil, Mirko, and maybe some others, not to mention follow ups with Hajo and Alex. Yeesh.

So, toward the end of the email part of the interview, I asked what Marianne thought about the the people involved with new media, whether it was or is a community.

No I don't think in terms of community, more in terms of a scene, which I consider less coherent than a community. Very different people, hackers, journalists, organizers, artists, idiots, designers, querulants, activists, often fighting each other (as at the aftermath of the Digital City).

And the same question again--did she still find this range of people getting involved?

Actually I am not sure. It may be that I just don't attend as much of the meetings and events as I did before, but I would say today there are less journalists involved and more students. And mor artists/dsigners - but that may be my perspective, since I have spent the last weeks with all these plans of e-culture institutions. What is clear anyway is that what was once a scene is now a social-cultural sector, the e-culture sector.

I think this has been a gradual change, but the changes in the Dutch funding structure seem as though they could potentially lead to a petrification of the e-culture sector because there will be so many more bureaucratic hurdles to get through in application for support that only very established professional groups will be able to manage it.

Finally I asked her what had led her back into academia to get her PhD.

That must have been somewhere in 2000, when I was finishing my book Leven op het Net - De sociale betekenis van virtuele gemeenschappen (in Dutch, title can be translated in: Life on the Net - The social meaning of virtual communities; though here the nice ambiguity of the Dutch word 'leven' which means both 'life' and 'cosy noise' is lost.)

Every time I was really inspired in writing and was starting to have real fun (when writing about the meaning of media, of space and spatial metaphors), the publisher said: No, that's too complex for the intended audience for this book, don't do that in this book, write a PhD if you want that kind of stuff... And so I finally did. First as a nomadic savage, without an appointment, later at Utrecht University, which also had connections to my supervisor in Rotterdam, the Dutch 'cyberspace philosopher' Jos de Mul.

When we met in person I followed up on the e-culture aspect, but unfortunately the whole discussion has to remain confidential. I need to speak with someone in charge if the sector who would have the authority to say I can reprint or repeat her replies without her getting into some kind of trouble!

But we did talk about other things, one being what the dept. looks like from her perspective which was interesting in the way it is similar or different from what I've heard from Erna, William, Mirko, and Nanna. Overall they all have good things to say, but for example, the extent to which they find it very collegial or just somewhat, leading the way, or keeping up--all these things depend on the other communities and academic groups they compare UU with, and on their own personal preferences. So someone who really pushes to publish and go to conferences and is always in the middle of the global academic debate on new media may feel the dept is ok, but just keeping up, or maybe out in front, but shouldn't relax. While someone who is not so interested in that may feel it's a bit of a pressure cooker already. Very subjective.

I'll be following up with Marianne later, as with everyone, but that's it for now. Time to get to my next victim, I mean interviewee... ;-)

Marianne van den Boomen part 2

So, more from Marianne... First her account of how she encountered the internet:

The Internet came into view in 1993, when I attended the famous Hacking at the End of the Universe camp (the HEU, as it is called) in a Dutch nowhere land polder, organized by the hacker-techno-anarchists of Hacktic (later called Xs4all, still my Internet provider, and I am proud that my e-mail adresses at Hacktic and xs4all are still working. I was there with my tent and laptop to write an article for De Groene about the hacker movement. Man, what fun did I have there! Hundreds of tents on a site, lectures, workshops and demonstrations in bigger tents, 300 public computers connected to the Internet, 1000 boys and 10 women/girls camping, talking, internetting, listening, laughing.

I notice that even then, there were far fewer women, but interestingly, Marianne felt the following way:

The amazing thing was that the atmosphere was really like what I knew of women's festivals - I came right out of the women's movement, and here there were boys and men all over the place, sharing their stuff and experiences, discussing how to get human right violations reports out of Gaza over weak telephone lines, how to get rid of the fascists on their bulletin board systems without betraying their principle of freedom of speech, talking about Gopher (the text menu based navigating system, no web yet) and newsgroups and mailinglists and FTP.

From here we talked further about gender stuff and Marianne had some interesting observations. I'm not sure a man who did not know how computers worked (who was not a nerd) would have felt any different than what Marianne describes below.

Mm, my prior experiences with computers did not really impress me. At school 'computers' were something unseen, a hobby of a few boys with the wrong clothes, who went studying math and physics. Classical nerds, and at that time 'nerd' was not associated with anything sexy or fun at all. When I studied psychology I had my first hands on experience with computers: mainframes behind glass...(the typewriters connected to the computer did not even have screens). I did not have a clue what I was doing and it did not interest me at all. ... no, not my cup of tea. For that matter, just a classic women stance towards computers.

The first time I had an idea about computers was again at the research institute were I worked, actually before they bought the word processors. In the hall there was a piece of furniture I did not understand. It was a huge table, in which a kind of typewriter was built in. No one used it, it was just standing there. I asked other people what it was, no one knew, but one day the publisher visited the insititute, he saw the thing and he told me that it was a word processor, on which you could save and edit text. And that is was a shame that the institute did not know how to handle it. At that moment I got a glimpse, I had a idea what could be done with such a device, I have been involved in several feminist magazines as a volunteer, and some of these we had to typeset ourselves at the printing house. ... Though there were ways to correct a letter or a word, you usually ruined the rhythm of the words and the sentence cause the font types were proportional, there was not enough space or too much space after deleting and then inserting a new letter. I realized that this problem would be solved with a word processor.

So in that sense my computing education is 'classical feminine': I did not see anything in computers as long as it was about calculation, but when it turned out to be about writing, language and typesetting I got it. Of course, this is a tricky stereoptype male=calculation, language=female, but it worked for me. I have to admit that I used this stereotypical argument in my book 'Internet ABC voor vrouwen' (Internet ABC for women, 1995) to convince women they had to get their hands on this stuff, because otherwise the Internet would remain a toy for boys. My message was basically: don't be afraid, the Internet it is more about language and communication than it is about computing and technology. I am still a bit ashamed for that argument... But it worked.

I really question the way we use this stereotype of pragmatism versus play. Marianne and others have said they cared about tech once they saw it could help them do something they wanted to do, and they seem to think this is more how women think, while men use tech more often for playful reasons. But This distinction rests on what we define at "just for fun" or "for a serious purpose" and no one seems to question those categories.

Oh, I suddenly remember another 'computing' experience which was perhaps also crucial. Actually, I would not call it computing, but it definitely had to do with micro-electronics and chips. I was playing in a punk band, and in Amsterdam Michel Waisvisz from STEIM (institute for experimental electronic music) had designed a so called crackle box, a very primitive synthesizer which did not have a keyboard as interface, but turning keys and a metal plate on which you laid your fingers. The resistance (temperature, moist. movement) of your fingers was then translated by VOC's (I don't remember what it meant, voltage operating circuits or centers, I think - anyway, they were computer chips) into eh... sound, noise, great noise! But you never knew before what noise :-)

To me, this sounds like just the kind of playful appreciation usually attributed to men.

I wanted to play a crackle box too! ... I went to STEIM and they gave me the drawings, the schemes, and a list of stuff needed: transistors, VOC's, and all kinds of other tiny little things you had to buy in a radio hobby shop. I had a friend who was deeply into electronics and soldering, and he taught me how to do this. I have ruined so many chips and two print plates by my unexperienced soldering! Eventually we never did a gig with the crackle box, it blew itself up all the time, and that was completely my fault since I changed the original design: I did not want to work with batteries but with a transformator and ordinary net current... Which was pretty stupid, since the thing worked by direct touch contact. I have had my portion of electroshocks...

I think for me the point was, both with the word processor and the crackle box: if I have an idea of what I want to accomplish, and if I have the idea that this can be done with a technology on which I can lay my hands on, which I can appropriate, adjust, tweak, then I am into technology. I am not a hacker, of course, but I always liked the old hacker's slogan: hands-on! Because it is both literal and figural a matter of hands-on, both with the crackle box and the computer (which' most important interface is the keyboard, and not the screen.) Strange enough such a basically pragmatic drive is not usual in women. I at least had no women friends who have the same fun in appropriating technology.

So Marianne seems to have really gotten into a kind of hardware hacking, or even circuit bending, which again is usually assumed to only be interesting to men. And she even describes this as atypical among women. I talked to her further via email about this, so I'll get into that in the next post, as well as finally getting to the in-person interview! --and if you think this has been long (even though I edited out a lot) just wait a few entries until I get to my interview with Florian Cramer, which I managed to actually record. Or rather he did. ;-)

Interview with Marianne van den Boomen

On the same day I interviewed Erna I went also to speak with Marianne van den Boomen, who is also working on a PhD at Utrecht University, in new media. Marianne has already been writing about technology for some time, so she has a very well-informed perspective. Before meeting in person we exchanged a series of emails, so I will start with some excerpts from that exchange.

I guess I have to make a distinction between new media and Internet, because I encountered these separately.

My first involvement with new media was in 1984. I was working as an editor of a magazine called Marge, a monthly magazine about social work, community work and social movements (feminist, gay, squatting etc). That year the research institute where we had our office had bought a word processing system (not even MS DOS, it was a dedicated Dutch word processing system, with huge 8 inch floppies, on which you could store I think 30 pages). The system was meant for just the secretaries, to type reports, but we, the three magazine editors, went with the secretaries on a course to learn it. We had the idea that with this we could publish the magazine without the expensive, bureaucratic and tiresome steps in between the editing and final printing (manual copy editing on typescripts, sending it by snail mail to the typesetter, getting strips back by snail mail, proofreading, sending it back again, doing the layout with the returned corrected strips, sending it back again, and then final proofreading - and always fights with the publisher about delivering to much typesetting work). So we started to do the typesetting by ourselves in-house - that indeed did save us money we had to pay to the publisher, and it was big fun, but of course it increased tremendously our working hours... First mistake :-)

Nevertheless, I was completely in love with those word processing machines - magical typewriters, which enabled bypassing intermediary institutions by doing-it-yourself, hands-on (I still consider PCs that way). The same year I organized a conference and a special issue of the magazine about 'The electronic social worker - Information technology and welfare'. The issue was about what would happen when computers would enter the field of social and community work. The issue and the conference addressed computer democracy, community building, client-registration systems, privacy issues, Orwell's 1984, new labour relations, changes in quality of labour, social and cultural impact etc.

To write the general overview article I visited several clubs and institutions, among these an open day of the Utrecht School of Arts, which showed the latest stuff in the field of computer aided design and games. It was impressive, color screens, moving images (I had never seen that before), proud technophilic teachers giving demonstrations. But the most impressive moment was when three boys sneaked in (I guess 14-year old, clearly not the intended student target group, they had the wrong age, the wrong coats and the wrong Utrecht accent). They asked if they could show their stuff, because they had 'some problems with sequencing' they could not figure out. The teachers allowed them to put their cassettes in a computer, and at once all the other CAD-stuff in the room looked bleak and dull: this was the real stuff, very professional funny animations and games, including music. Homebrew! The embarrassed teachers immediately pulled the plug. The boys left, and I now regret forever that I did not talk to them. But that was the moment I realized: there must be a whole subculture out there, doing things with computers which will amaze the world...

Later at my work MS-DOS computers with WordPerfect and 5 1/4 inch floppies replaced the Océ proprietary system, and we started to use telephone modems to send the magazine completely laid out to the publisher. I started working as a copy editor at a weekly magazine, the Groene Amsterdammer, and because I had a little bit more knowledge about computer systems I also became the system manager (teaching the editorial team Windows and e-mail!), and now and then I wrote articles about computer culture, and later about the Internet.

Marianne really took time to reflect on what she thought when she first encountered computers, and I note that for her as well there is an idea that they can confer some kind of freedom; freedom from layers of control, freedom from the constraints of some other medium. Also, like Sher and Erna, Marianne had the experience of being the most knowledgeable in a community or workplace, and so sort of fell into the role of tech expert, and in her case actually gaining a title of system manager. I have a tone of material for this interview, so tomorrow I'll post another entry but try to make it a little more of a digest.

Erna Kotkamp part 2

So I talked to Erna quite a bit about gender stuff, since she actually has worked in that area for some time and she has reflected pretty thoroughly on her own experiences and observations. For one thing, she finds that she does have to prove her technological expertise more often than male teachers, and when she observes the teachers she trains she sees the same thing. In a class on computer use, women teachers are still more likely to be asked "test" questions than men, which suggests that though men and women may use computers for daily tasks in the same ways, and may be aware that they use them in the same ways, when people talk or think about being "experienced with computers," they tend to use a narrow definition that depends on actual programming or other creation, rather than just use, and that men are still perceived as being more competent.

Also, Erna made a really good point in saying that she defined her own level of experience differently in different settings. Among her colleagues in Gender Studies, who are not so focused on tech, Erna describes herself as very experienced, but among people who program a lot, she describes herself as less so. So I think we need to look more closely at what standard people are using when asked to either describe their own practice or to evaluate others.

She also made an interesting comment about relationships and careers; as I said in part 1 of the interview, she mentioned herself still feeling like she had to have serious reasons to use tech, not just enjoying the playful aspect and that this was part of an old, embedded gender stereotype. She also later said that it was easier for lesbians to escape that dynamic because between two women (and I assume his would hold for gay men) choosing to work or not did not instantly force you into some stance in relation to traditional roles. Oddly, in a completely different context, a gay friend of mine here in the US recently said the same. So that may be a real issue, but hard to get at since if self-reporting about tech use is unreliable, I would guess that self-reporting about partner's attitudes or relationship issues connected to work with tech might be even less so! And I'd really prefer to avoid using tiny spy-cams.

Erna in particular found that ICTs were important to her because she doesn't like F2F communication so much. She claimed that she simply would not talk to people or stay as connected to them without email, chat applications, and Skype. This went really counter to the assumption most people seemed to make that connecting, speaking, or performing live was always better.

Finally, continuing the theme of socializing, she felt that while New Media as a field was more cooperative than some, it was not very cohesive, compared to E-Learning, for example. What I start to notice is that the artists I speak with find it quite cooperative while the academics do not, which suggests again another case where people are using different baseline criteria. Really a great interview in the way it helps me to start seeing larger patterns and figuring out which questions I need to ask next.

Interview with Erna Kotkamp

Erna Kotkamp 2008
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

My next interview was with Erna Kotkamp, who is at U. Utrecht where she has been doing work on gender studies, and more lately on technology. Erna described her use of technology in a way that, so far, more closely resembles the "classic geek mode" than any of the other people with whom I spoke. She said she was most comfortable with a screw-driver in hand, tinkering with a computer's guts. At the same time, even she was not completely comfortable saying she just found it fun, admitting any frivolous reasons for her use of tech. And she noted herself that it was interesting to find such an old gender old still affecting her so much.

Though Erna is not focusing explicitly on gender in her current research, which is on open-source software and e-learning, it was more explicitly part of this interview than in many, maybe because she notices that aspect in her work as a matter of course. She mentioned that 10 years ago, it was still common for people in humanities disciplines to feel comfortable ignoring tech or even announcing their ignorance of computers. At that time she was the "tech-y one" in Women's Studies at U. Utrecht and was often called on to help others do things with computers, even to make PowerPoint slides. Now people are not so comfortable admitting techno-illiteracy, but Erna still feels some she knows need to be more savvy, and more importantly to recognize that knowing how to use tech and how to think critically about it are both essential basic skills now.

This conversation seemed to be be much more organic (that is to say non-linear and recursive) so this write-up will also be that way and also since I thought I was recording it and the device turned out to not work, I will probably have to come back and edit details later. :P

Though Erna is the most inclined toward hardware hacking and of the women I've spoken with so far, one of the most proficient at coding, she seemed to get started sort of incidentally. Her family always was much more focused on arts and humanities kind of stuff, so neither she nor her brother were encouraged to do much with math, science, or tech. So though Erna feels her strengths lie in these later areas, she never really had much chance to develop them (or maybe even recognize them?) until by chance she took computer classes during her BA studies.

Anyway, Erna had quite a few insights into her own use of technology, the open-source scene, and the impact of gender...but that will be in the next post because in fact i have to go do family stuff myself right now!

Renee Turner part 2

Ok, slowly trying to catch up on these interviews... So, Renee is now working on an MA in fiction, and interestingly, she seems to share some of the same interests as Sher in thinking about writing or text as part of artistic practice. Right now she's finishing her MA project which involves both fiction and non-fiction intertwined and she's thinking about going on to a PhD in which she can explore narratives in electronic literary forms. Work she's already done in De Geuzen reflect some of these interests, like the virtual seance with Guy Debord or some aspects of the Female Icons series.

Along with discussing these aesthetic and theoretical aspects, we talked a lot about how she used technology and what really affects women's use. A couple of really interesting things emerged from this part of the interview. Because Renee has been a tutor at Piet Zwart this year, we were talking about that experience, in particular about women learning to program. Anyone who knows Florian Cramer (the director of the Media design MA program at Piet Zwart) knows of his preference for the command-line and has probably heard his reasoning on why graphical user interfaces are limiting to users. Since I know Renee is not a really avid coder, I asked her what her view on this was and how the students reacted.

(Since coding is almost always part of gender stereotypes around tech, this is a useful way to create an opportunity for gender to arise in the discussion without forcing it into the story artificially.)

Anyway, a couple of things came up. First, all of the students seemed to manage the coding without too much trouble (and the class is about 50/50 women and men). Second, at the same time, the students most likely to get into "tech as toy" thinking were men, but in such a small group, that doesn't really show anything. Third, and most interesting, she thought the real reason women appeared to have a harder time learning to write code or use the command line has to do with the way their time is structured, especially if they are taking care of kids or other family.

Renee felt, and I can certainly confirm this from my own experience, that learning a programming language or to use the command line takes a kind of sustained attention over time that often women don't have if they have families. She realized this after reading Martha Rosler's work on how women read magazines (among other topics). Apparently women read magazines like Vogue because they can put them down and pick them up easily, and being interrupted is not too much of a problem. So her idea is that graphical user interfaces enable a similar ability to put down and pick up computer work. Her own experience has been that if she is trying to (or succeeds at) learning how to code something or do something via the command line, if she then has an interruption of several days (or of course longer) she loses her place and has to start over figuring out how she did it. I have found this as well, and when I later spoke with Erna Kotkamp and Audrey Sampson, they each independently mentioned similar experiences

I don't think this indicates a difference between how men and women think, rather, anyone would probably have trouble if they were frequently interrupted and I think women are more prone to being interrupted or perhaps allowing themselves to be. Certainly anyone with children experiences this problem, and women are still more likely to be primary caregivers, especially when kids are very young (a time when one is lucky if one can squeeze out an hour of uninterrupted time from caretaking). But further, I suspect that women are less likely to insist on uninterrupted time because it may seem self-centered. --The persistence of this particular aspect of gendered socialization is still surprisingly strong and it showed up in most women's reluctance to feel using tech for fun was even relevant to our discussion.

So when I ask how or why they use tech, most women only talk about reasons they feel are serious, worthwhile, important, etc. Though some may actually play with it in the same way men do, or use tech in the same way for the same reasons, they seem to perceive or at least describe their use very differently. This raises interesting challenges in how to best interpret my interviews if I want to make any general comment about women and tech/new media in the Netherlands.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some other important ideas--but maybe the ones that stick are most important. Yeah, that's it... ;-) Well, I'll check with Renee, but that's it for now.

Renee Turner 2008

Renee Turner 2008
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

My next interview was with Renee Turner, a member of De Geuzen, for whom I gave a talk last January. De Geuzen is a group of 3 women conducting what they term "multi-visual" research, and most of it involves computers and digital media in some way.

Renee describes herself as a perpetual student and this is pretty clear looking at her educational history: BA University of Dallas, [1984-1989]; MFA University of Arizona, [1990-1992] and MAs from Rijksakademie, Department of Photographic Media, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [1993-1994], and the Jan van Eyck , Laureate: Theory, [1995-1996]. Now she's finishing an MFA in writing from a UK school and is considering going on for PhD in New Media or something like that. But this seems in a certain way another point in common among the people I've interviewed, especially the women--they are always pushing into new areas, learning new things. That's not to say this is reserved for women, or new media scholars/artists, but more people have explicitly mentioned that as a motive. I suppose maybe it's no surprise that people studying new media (and as a foreshadowing, I have trouble even writing that phrase now that I've officially interviewed Florian) are more interested in continually having to learn something new.

Anyway, Renee started really with photography, but soon got in to digital images. She said that for her, new media seemed to allow more freedom from disciplinary constraints, but also that it allows her to much more easily combine and remix media (the advantage of digitality, of course).

She summed up her overall view as this: "I want to be rigorous, but I'm not into being disciplined at all."

more on Renee's work soon...

Interview with Sher Doruff -- a different view of new media fragmentation

Or discontinuities, or whatever term captures the idea that a field that previously seemed really fluid and border-less no longer is so. Coalescence? Coagulation? Choosing the right metaphor seems much more important these days.

I spoke to Sher Doruff a few days ago and really wish I'd by then acquired a recorder--still working on that in fact--because it was a brilliant interview. She has been working on new media for a long time, much longer than most of the others with whom I am speaking. In fact since the mid 70s, before any one was even talking about new media the way we do now, Sher was working with electronic music. She was part of a band in this genre before moving more into computer work and even more experimental audio stuff --we didn't go too far into this part of her story though. I really started with the points at which she moved into new media, and at which she came to the Netherlands. It seems she feels she started with new media pretty early, as I said, and mainly because of the freedom she believed it would offer both because the technologies were so new, no one had any pre-conceived idea of technical limitations, they just tried anything and everything. Further, in those early days, there were no stereotypes about computers being only for men, or that men were more inclined or more skilled at them--no one really felt very skilled.

This was sort of a revelation to me because the other women I've spoken with are younger--between 25-45--so they entered the larger story much later. Most of the other women mention the lack of perceived limits when it comes to what the tech can do, or at least the feeling that it offered more freedom to them in some way, but most of them did not have such an experience of thinking they would be able to completely shed gender stereotypes related to careers or activities. --I can see this will be a point I need to look at in all the ineterviews since so many people have mentioned it.

Anyway, Sher had a pretty good career developing in New York but then her apartment burnt down and she decided to go to France, ended up doing a residency there, and they went up to Amsterdam where she started doing some stuff for Steim, and just stayed there for awhile. Most recently she was at De Waag, where I spoke to her last year, but now she is teaching at the Theater School (part of the Hogeschool in Amsterdam). She has had other more immediate reasons for leaving one path for another whenever she made a change, but she also seems to reach a point in any medium where she feels she has figured out what she wanted to know and then turns to something else. Sometimes she later goes back, and of course, she doesn't abandon any of them really, but rather shifts the focus of her inquiry (from what I can tell).

Sher had a mixed view of the New Media scene in general. On the one hand, she feels that new media artists, especially people working online, are paralyzed precisely because the tools are now so easy to use. I know what she means; it's similar to what happens with course management systems at the university. Those CMSs make it pretty easy to put stuff online for a class, but maybe not in exactly in the way you want to try. But it's so much easier than doing it all from scratch, and seeing how it works in the CMS can make thinking of alternatives even harder.

But my own experience has been that while the majority of people don't go beyond the limits built into most plug 'n play type software, usually there are some number who hit the limits, get frustrated, and switch to learning how to really do it themselves. Maybe artists who can do that ought to rethink their whole practice (or even career choice) anyway. So that's one of the more negative things she said. But she thinks there will eventually be a crisis, and then a renewal, or a new approach.

On the other hand, she was not so worried about the coagulation of the new media field. She feels that the separation into different subfields will create difference, which she generally regards as a good thing, and that these different groups will come up with different ideas, questions, and answers, and different ways of thinking about the shared ideas, questions, and answers. --And so these groups when they do interact, would have much more fruitful exchanges. I asked Sher if she thought the groups actually would interact and share, because so far I find that they don't seem to communicate so much lately, and William felt this as well. But Sher thinks that they still cooperate far more than most other disciplines. I wonder though if it's really that the new media organizations Sher works with are cooperative, but that other types, like universities, are not so much. I mean, maybe it's over-generalized. Another point to compare across interviews.

We also talked about the creative industries, some of the specific Dutch institutions, and her current work with Brian Massumi, but I'll put that in the next post.

William Uricchio part 2

So one of the biggest issues in many of my interviews has been funding and William talked about this as well. Right now there is a lot of money available for digitizing historical archives and so every school is looking through their library to see what might be worth proposing as a project. The money comes from both education and art funding, so this also represents quite a shift in emphasis from supporting art creation to supporting art history. Not to say that all the money is shifting, but a million or two million euros is still quite a big chunk, and some of the smaller organizations don't get much money, or have much of a budget at all, so even small cuts are big problems for them.

Also, there is a change to the funding system underway because of a decision to use a "creative industries" model. Since the 1980s arts funding has worked as follows: "a long-term grant is awarded with the proviso that once every four years all the institutions receiving these subsidies (more than 800 of them) will be inspected – all at the same time (Smithuijsen 2005)."

I know this system is still in place now because all the organizations I've been in touch with in the last year just recently got recommendations about whether or not their funding should continue and on the same levels. It turns out that many lost funding, in part because of the above archiving project, but also because a shift toward a "creative industries" model is underway. This refers both to Richard Florida's book about the Creative Class and also to a model of cultural policy developed in the UK over the last 10 years.

I encounter very mixed responses to this change; most of the artists and new media institutions seem unhappy and William also was intensely skeptical that this would be a positive change. I still haven't heard a systematic critique, but two problems seems to be the expected increase in bureaucracy and loss of control over arts/cultural policy. Clearly though I need to get more detail on what the new system will be and why people don't like it.

William and I also talked quite a bit about how new media is developing and I was flattered that he wanted to know who I thought were important voices and which I thought were important centers, both institutional and national. I mentioned Worm and Piet Zwart MDMA because I think they continue to do really innovative things, and I think Vienna is or will be important. In the US I find it much harder to estimate this because everything is so spread out and incoherent. I don't know of any cities with really strong new media scenes. Boston has some, NYC has some, San Francisco, maybe Austin. But none of these is organized the way they are in Europe because there is just so much less public funding for any art.

Finally we talked about whether or not the new media scene had any cultural specificity, and whether fan culture, to which we were drawing some parallels, has any. While he could see the point I was making about how national context my change how people can participate in new media, William feels (in spite of the fragmentation) that it is a global discourse. I think this is true to a degree, but that it can't be assumed. If one is studying the field, one has to check the extent to which discourse is local, national or global. For example, I can say that William certainly participates in a global discourse, because he travels constantly, publishes internationally, and works with other scholars who do the same. But this is hardly true of everyone I've interviewed. Most of them cannot travel so much, they may read international journals, but maybe don't publish on that level so much, and most of their work may take place at one school or in one city. Just being on the nettime mailing list or even a bunch of people connecting on Facebook doesn't make it a global field, at least not so far. I think that in fact the way scholars and artists participate in the new media field is quite variable--maybe I have to steal Mirko's concept of heterogenous participation and Kate Hayles' idea about emerging complexity to discuss this. Or maybe I just need to read Eric von Hippel on democratizing innovation. And he has this paper on actor network theory and user innovations...

One of the most challenging things lately in these interviews is that I begin to hear contradictory things and yet haven't spoken to enough people to judge very well what is a more accurate picture. Or maybe in fact there is no one accurate picture.

Interview with William Uricchio

So as in the last trips, I am doing interviews. The first was with William Uricchio, (and here's his page at Utrecht) from Utrecht University, and also MIT. In fact I knew William in the context of superhero comics long before I knew his new media work, but the latter turns out to be the thing bringing us together. We talked for quite a while; a recurring idea was the extent to which different cstituencies of the new media scene are fragmented, not communicating or working together. For example, academics ad hackers are not so much in touch anymore, or journalists and artists, unless they are journalists specifically covering art. This can be problematic in terms of knowledge production because people in these different field repeat the same research and come up with the same ideas over and over. Not that that's bad in itself, but just a waste of time and also leading to quite boring repetition in scholarly papers. --And this last seems harder to avoid than I would have thought, but lately I have found as well that so much work is produced that it's hard to keep track publications across disciplines on any one topic, especially since different terms are used in each discipline.

Anyway, back to William. He has been a professor at Utrecht University in the Media Studies group --which seems to have two or more different sets of pages-- and also teaches at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies department, which is where we first met. We talked about how he got into this field, and it was as a media historian. He takes a really long view of media history and had some thought-provoking ideas about when the history of new media starts, especially if you actually mean the history of virtuality, or digitization, etc. For awhile he was chair of the department at UU, but now that he essentially has one and a half jobs (seems almost full-time at both though) he doesn't have to deal with that. --But now he's co-director of CMS! He still is thinking about the future of the department and mentioned several challenges facing schools in the Netherlands right now. One is that the Hogeschool system (they are sort of professional schools) and the University system are being unified so that Universities and Hogeschools in every city are being pushed together. this creates all kinds of difficulties because the systems are very different and I would guess that in any case, being told to work together doesn't please anyone. I was surprised to learn that while Hogeschools can restrict their admissions and class sizes, Universities cannot.

Further, and I'm not sure if this is related to the above plan, media studies programs all over the country are jockeying for position--so for example, UU is starting to focus on games and locative media, while the media studies program at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is trying to combine with informatics--but not clear yet whether that will suceed. This reminds me strangely of what happens in California; each branch of the UC and CSU system has to be sure they don't replicate programs at another branch and we are all supposed to be finding ways of being distinct. It that certain things at UU make it harder for them to distinguish themselves, one is that their students aren't held to high enough standards--I've heard this a from a few people now--and also, in the Dutch system, it seems that people can be tenured more quickly in the US and that once they are, their departments have no leverage if they don't keep up their work. But it's hard to tell exactly how things work because there are so many different grades of faculty, and many universities are changing their systems. I get the sense though that William is frustrated with the department at the moment.

This might also be connected with what I guess have so far been unsuccessful effort to for some kind of national-level organization of new media scholars in the Netherlands. It seems everyne agrees there should be one, but no one agrees on how it should be organized and discussion devolves into everyone just trying to claim turf. Talking about this problem, which I have also heard about from some others as well, lead of course to discussing funding. I'll save that for the next post though.

Summer Research

So I am once again traveling to the Netherlands to do some research, scraping away at these interviews, as many as I can cram into about ten days without going insane. I leave on 23 June and go directly to University of Twente where I will meet Elfi Ettinger in person (one of my IR 9.0 panelists) and possibly speak in their seminar series. I hope to also meet not only her immediate colleagues, but some people from other departments who work on new media and ICT stuff, but I only will be there for about 24 hours, so we'll see.

After that I head to Rotterdam and start interviewing; I plan to speak again to Hajo Doorn (from Worm) and Alex Adriaansens (from V2_) about the state of arts funding, and finally I will interview Brenno de Winter, who who had the flu in January when I was originally planning it. Then I go to Germany to speak at the IFIP WG 9.5 --part one of scholars on Facebook--and then back to Rotterdam and more interviews. I will speak with all of De Geuzen, with Sher Doruff, Erna Kotkamp, and Marianne van den Boomen, and Jaromil. And last but far from least, I will formally interview Florian and Mirko.

I may fit in a few more interviews, depending on how well I can schedule these so that for example, I see all the Utrecht people on one day, all the Amsterdam people on one day, etc. Otherwise the travel time will probably prevent me from adding anyone else. Plus I have to allow time to write up--I learned that in January when I didn't really have enough time to make sufficient notes here in the blog.

While all this is going on, I have to also finish a book chapter and work on my paper for IR 9.0 because the full papers are supposed to be turned in at the end of August. I think that for panels we have to get some papers in by the deadline, but maybe not all. As the organizer though, I feel I have to be one of those papers that gets in on time...

More soon, including a very protracted but increasingly useful and interesting email conversation I'm having with Aymeric Mansoux from goto10.org.

More good news

So now both of the panels I proposed to IR 9.0 have been accepted, which means that one of my book projects can really go forward--a collection of these papers and a few more I will invite from some other people I know who work on this stuff and who might be interested. Fingers crossed that I can get everything done when it need to be done!