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Because We Are Digital
crossing the boundaries
page 7 of 7THE COMPUTER AND THE CREATIVE INTERLOCUTOR A new artist, interlocutor-designer, should be a product of an enlightened engagement fostered by a new educational system which is trans-disciplinary in nature . The creative interlocutor is one who facilitates the exchange of ideas and information between one human need and another. This person is the producer, director, the organizer-navigator. More specifically, this person is the curator, editor, and collector, then the maker, weaver, welder, builder and distributor,. History reminds us easily of such as Leonardo da Vinci, Frances Bacon and Thomas Jefferson. But one must also ponder the great stretches by multidisciplinary minds such as the weavers of the Bayeux tapestry, Anna Sibylla Merian, Samuel FB Morse, the Roeblings, Booker T Washington, Laszlo Moloy-Nagy and countless others whose reach across boundaries changed civilization for the better. Creative interlocutors are: programmers, producers, inventors, researchers, teachers, scholars and volunteers. The creative interlocutor negotiates revolutionary associations, a kind of new genius. We see a budding of the creative interlocutor in the collaborative spaces of the Internet. The language of the computer is a shared language which allows participation by those who so choose. In the examples to follow, there is no longer a single creator, but rather a collective genius, a web of creative nodes which weave together previously disconnected pieces of information . As innovators, creative interlocutors use their art in a manner which facilitates others to find and define their own creative meaning in the interrelationship of ideas and forms. In 1979 the inventors of the RSA encryption scheme (the one currently used by Netscape Navigator) put forward a challenge . They encoded a message, and offered a $100 reward to anyone who could crack it. They felt that given the computing resources of the time, and even granted advances in chip speed with a factor of millions, nobody would be able to break their code in the foreseeable future. They were wrong! Instead of thinking of a single computer as a self contained and limited system, Derek Atkins, a twenty one year old engineering student at MIT realized that while one computer would take a long time to crack the code, he might harness the power of the Internet and distribute the computing load over many computers. And that's exactly what he did: in 1991 he directed his friends to use a recently discovered mathematical method to devise a program which would crack the code, and had it ready to go by mid 1993. The program was distributed over the Internet to more than 1,500 computers on six continents to create an expanded computer which churned out 5,000 mips years. The code was cracked in the Spring of 1994 by looking beyond the boundary of the individual computer, and thus consolidating the power of the network. Another example of imaginative administration to enlarge our sphere of possibilities lies in the development of a computer operating system. The operating system Linux was not so much invented as evolved through creative re-administration. It is a prime example of the networked aesthetic of the expanded public sphere of individuals working in concert. It began with Linus Torvalds. He was in school in 1990, and owned a PC which ran Minux, an operating system designed mostly as a UNIX tutorial. UNIX is a powerful operating system which, at that time, could only be run on more powerful computers. So, he imaginatively worked within his limitations, and wrote a few programs - a terminal emulator and a disk driver so that he could save files to disk. He posted these initial programs, and generously shared them as freeware - software which is distributed primarily over the Internet, and for which there is no charge. From there it took off. As a result of Torvalds' interlocution, the operating system evolved in a democratic and Darwinian manner; anyone could contribute code to the operating system, but only the most evolved would become part and parcel of the final released version. He presided over the development, but was by no means entirely in control of it. He provided the seed idea, and the guidance, but left the mechanics of its development up to the community of creative users. Today, Linux has an established base of nearly ten million users in 120 countries, and is comprised of millions of lines of code. All of this primarily because Linus didn't follow the usual notion of creating software through the confines of a defined proprietary scheme - hundreds of hackers around the world wrote it, collaborating over the Internet. These examples serve to help define the notion of the creative interlocutor, a multimedia universal designer, engineer, artist, socially responsible person whose mandate is to help negotiate the crossing of boundaries. While they reside in the field of technology itself, their parallels must be generated within the humanities and arts. --Charles H. Traub and Jonathan Lipkin, May 1999 |
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This site ©2003 Charles H. Traub and Jonathan Lipkin. Maintained by webmaster@intherealmofthecircuit.com. | |
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| Seawright, James :: Krueger, Myron :: Michelangelo :: Bilbao Guggenheim :: Farm Security Administration :: K'ang, Emperor :: Kandinsky, Wassily :: Ali, Muhammad :: Turner, Othar :: Copernicus, Nicolaus :: Stravinsky, Igor :: Copernicus, Nicolaus :: Jolson, Al :: Bain, Alexander :: Kragh-Jacobsen, Soren :: Albers, Josef :: Koran :: Adams, John :: Lang, Fritz :: Daguerre, Louis :: | ||
