Re: <nettime> Learning from Prada (PART 1)

[anne-marie <amschle@cadre.sjsu.edu>]

Perhaps you are right we are heading this direction(at least at meta 
level) and veering away from VR or the Web but in addition to the 
Jaron Lanieresque evangelical euphoria about virtual reality in the 
1990's, (offset by the gritty implementation of online 3-D games 
which plotted their own trajectories quite far from utopian visions 
of VR), I  also remember  a lot of hype back then about the "cyborg" 
and the "body", from writing of Donna Haraway to experiments with 
mobile augmented wearable technology coming out of MIT and lots of 
talk about ubiquitous computing and fuzzy logic house-hold 
appliances--washing machines and coffee makers.(In graduate school at 
CADRE we were experimenting with alphanumerical networked 
pagers--transforming them from drug dealer toys into something else, 
writing little games to send out on them, modifying their appearance 
to be cute and pretty, hacking their sound chips..)--this doesnt seem 
a new paradigm either--arent we already well within this paradigm 
just as long as we have been online?

Augemented space does not seem any less potentially "domesticated" or 
mundane or commercial than "virtual" space.  It depends what happens 
"there"

Searching for the new dominant trend is an interesting game though. 
Seems science fiction writers are always ahead of the game. Have been 
a big fan of Octavia Butler for a while, especially her older 
books--am less and less into VR Sci Fi like Pat Cadigan. I just want 
to read about bodies morphing and gene splicing african dieties  and 
hyper intelligent genetically modified animals and 3 gendered 
aliens.(Sherri S. Tepper is my new addiction.) Your overlaying data 
layers over physical space may be useful, although risks intitiating 
artificial barriers. look forward to seeing it developed more.

-A.M. Schleiner

>Lev Manovich (www.manovich.net)
>
>The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada
>[May 2002]
>
>
>PART 1: Augmented Space
>[posted 5/16/02]
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