Boggs

Saper explains in his article "Networked Economies: Six Degrees of Boggs" essentiall that the artist JSG Boggs creates involved social systems. I say involved because each member of the networks he creates are what Saper would refer to as collaborators. These people collaborate in a system that works off of an alternative type of currency that Boggs creates; Boggs money is similar to actual currency, and as such allows people to interact in a novel way. What most interests me is the way that Boggs is able to deflate controversy over his artwork in the way he uses impromptu, casual social interaction as a tool.

Carto City

Dennis Cosgrove's essay on the cartography of cities explains the ways in which mapping has changed throughout history. Mapping itself is an often overlooked area of interactivity. Anyone who has had to go somewhere in the past several hundred years has more than likely consulted a map. The ways in which the spaces are constructed and the ways in which they are represented affect the way we interact with them. Cosgrove writes about the ways cities are laid out, either from a central axis or on a grid. Each method of planning creates different social outcomes and has different inherent meaning.
This article bears significance to me because I think in our day we tend to ignore traditional modes of interaction. We all want talk about how we can interact with others via some wild new device. Maps are a great way to talk about interactivity because they have been around for centuries, and have developed sophisticated methods of communicating information. Many of these methods have been adopted in other disciplines. Besides, maps are also a part of the digital age; the language and implementation of cartography has continued to grow with the proliferation of GPS and online mapping services. With the introduction of the iPhone and with Android to come out later this year maps will become an even more integrated form of interaction for many people in first world countries.

Project 2

Project 2
Might want to just right click and save as... on this one.

Cabinet Fun

The Desktop

Steven Johnson's "The Desktop" spurred a bombardment of thoughts on things I have read about, seen, and used recently. His history of the desktop paradigm is pretty standard, and I think we all know the essentials of it by now. I think immediately of the emergence of 3d desktops over the past 5 or 10 years starting with Sun's Looking Glass (?). They were the first to introduce the idea of making objects on the desktop three dimensional. More recently this idea has been pursued by the Compiz project. I was also reminded of something called Bumptop which takes the 3d desktop very literally. I am a little saddened, being the person I am that he didn't talk about open source at all, but I think based on the things he was talking about, that the OSS desktop hadn't yet been realized. I really think that today the most exciting innovations in desktop interface are happening with Compiz and KDE 4. Apple seems to be pretending with its newest OSX iterations, although they do great work for their market.

Otherwise, Johnson doesn't seem to have considered that each interface has its purpose, and that is probably why there is such a profundity of text based communication services on the web. I suppose he actually does, but in a very round about manner. Text based applications have very powerful capabilities in their own right, Johnson should not have cast aspersions on the command line in the way that he did. I guess he never got to use BASH ;)

First Project

Project One Even though you can get at it from the side too ;)

As We May Think

Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think is a pretty cool read. I enjoy his ability to look at what exists around him and extrapolate tings that actually have come to pass. I was reminded of a book that came out last year (I think) that took a survey of what science fiction has and hasn't gotten right. What I really liked about the article was that the things that must have seemed most absurd to readers of the day were what Bush got right.
At first I was under the illusion that this was a contemporary article. Because even though many of the wonders that Bush foresaw have come true, we still face issues of storage and access to what we have stored.